An ICE officer fires seven rounds at a man in a car with a five-year-old in Marble Hill

A federal officer fired seven rounds on Thursday afternoon in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx, hitting a man in a car in which a five-year-old child was a passenger. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the man, identified as Oscar Belgal, 28, a Dominican national with a criminal conviction, was pulling into a parking space at about 4 p.m. when a plain-clothes federal officer approached with a gun drawn. A second federal officer, also out of uniform, was with him. Belgal started to pull the car forward. At least one officer fired seven rounds. One struck Belgal below the left ear. He remained conscious and was treated at a nearby hospital. Tisch said the child, who was in the car with a relative, was physically unhurt.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said officers were on a targeted enforcement operation to arrest Belgal, that an officer discharged his weapon, and that the man was injured. DHS called him a criminal who was in the country unlawfully. The incident is under investigation. DHS has not, in the account published on Friday, said why the officers were in plain clothes, or why seven rounds were fired at a car that had a child in it.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani called the shooting unconscionable. He said early reports showed agents firing at a car with a child inside. He telephoned President Donald Trump and demanded an end to ICE enforcement in the city. He said he would not stand by while agents terrorised communities, that ICE operates with impunity, and that the agency must be abolished. Governor Kathy Hochul spoke to Trump and to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, asked them to halt ICE operations in New York, and asked for any body-camera footage. City Council member Carmen De La Rosa said the neighbourhood was heartbroken and enraged.

Protesters marched on Thursday evening from the scene to the hospital. Some scuffles with police were reported. The march is the local answer. The footage Hochul asked for is the evidentiary one. Tisch has given a sequence: parking space, plain clothes, gun drawn, car moves forward, seven rounds, wound below the left ear, child unhurt. A body camera, if one was worn by an officer in plain clothes, would show whether the car moved toward the officer or away, and whether the child was visible through the glass before the first shot.

Marble Hill is a geographic oddity, a Bronx neighbourhood on the Manhattan side of the Harlem River, which is why early reports split on the borough. The enforcement question does not turn on that line. New York City has limited cooperation with ICE. A targeted arrest in a residential parking space, by officers out of uniform, is the pattern city officials have said they cannot see in advance and cannot stop at the kerb. Mamdani's call for abolition and Hochul's call for a pause are different demands. Trump has not, in the reports used here, answered either in public.

Belgal's conviction is the fact DHS is using to justify the stop. The charge, the sentence and the immigration history were not in the Friday accounts. A conviction can make a person a priority for removal. It does not, by itself, explain seven rounds at a moving car with a child in the back. That explanation has to come from the shooting inquiry, which DHS says is open.

The child is the fact that will travel further than the warrant. Five years old, in the car, unhurt, with a relative. The officer fired seven times. One round hit the driver below the ear. Until the footage is released, those are the numbers the city has.