An ICE agent fired into an SUV in New York City’s Marble Hill neighborhood on October 8 with a 5-year-old boy in the back seat, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a preliminary briefing that night. Federal officers had approached the driver to take him into immigration custody.
The driver, 28-year-old Oscar Bergal, was shot in the neck below his left ear and reached the hospital in stable condition. Police initially identified him as Oscar Belgal; the federal court order addressing his detention uses Bergal.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said school had just let out and families and children crowded the street. He called the shooting an outrage and said his efforts to negotiate Bergal’s release with President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had failed.
By Friday, October 9, the federal response had become a defense of the officers’ actions. In its account of a DHS briefing, NBC News reported that Mullin said the officers had not known a child was in the car.
At the Curb
Tisch’s reconstruction began with NYPD surveillance cameras capturing Bergal backing a gray Honda CR-V into a parking spot in front of a fire hydrant. One plainclothes federal officer approached the driver’s window with a gun drawn, while another approached near the driver’s side headlight.
The SUV began moving forward and passed out of camera view. Those cameras did not capture the gunfire. Tisch based her account of seven rounds fired by at least one ICE agent on evidence collected at the scene.
At 4:04 p.m., two 911 calls reported a person shot and gunfire near Marble Hill Avenue. A federal agent also called for the Fire Department, then requested the NYPD. Officers from the 50th Precinct, nearby on an unrelated call, responded and found Bergal handcuffed on the ground.
They put him into an NYPD vehicle, rendered aid, and drove him to New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital. Their response was recorded on body cameras; the NYPD had neither participated in the immigration operation nor been present when the shooting happened.
The scene contained at least seven shell casings, ballistic damage to the Honda’s windshield, and a shattered rear window. The SUV sat perpendicular to the road. A gray ICE sedan had damage to its left front panel, with its lower panel fully disconnected.
Police later located the boy safe with a family member. Tisch described him as believed to be Bergal’s son.
Across the Table
The timeline presented at Friday’s federal briefing described officers using two vehicles to block Bergal’s car. In that account, he refused orders to get out, accelerated, and smashed into the ICE vehicles.
Marcos Charles, ICE’s executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations, said Bergal drove toward other officers, who fired because they believed their lives and the lives of others were in danger. That explanation remains the federal account of what prompted the shooting; the surveillance sequence described by Tisch ends before the shots.
Mullin placed responsibility for the child’s exposure to danger on Bergal. “We weren’t aware the child was in the car. I can tell you that, but you know who was? Oscar,” he said.
Mamdani’s response went beyond criticism of the shooting. In Thursday night’s briefing, he called ICE “rotten to its core” and demanded that the agency be abolished. He also urged an end to its enforcement operations in New York City.
Friday’s Hearing
The arrest also reached federal court. Bergal’s attorneys challenged his detention in a habeas petition and disputed Mullin’s assertion that ICE had been serving a lawful warrant. That disagreement, described in the same NBC report, had not been adjudicated in Cronan’s scheduling order.
An earlier judge’s order temporarily barred Bergal’s removal from the United States and transfer outside the Southern District of New York, Eastern District of New York, or District of New Jersey, pending assignment of the case. On October 9, Judge John P. Cronan scheduled an afternoon hearing to address Bergal’s current location, his whereabouts when the petition was filed, and the grounds for the requested temporary restraining order. That scheduling order did not direct his release or decide whether the shooting was justified.
Tisch identified two prior New York City arrests: a 2023 robbery case that ended in a guilty plea to fourth-degree grand larceny and five years’ probation, and a 2025 charge of criminal sale of a controlled substance that remained pending.
At Friday’s hearing, Bergal’s lawyer Paige Austin said he still had a bullet in his body and had not been able to speak with his family, according to the outlet’s hearing coverage. It reported that he had been booked into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
All parties are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.