ICE, State Violence, and the Shooting of Oscar Belgal

The Machine Working as Designed: ICE, State Violence, and the Shooting of Oscar Belgal

Seven bullets shattered a quiet street on an autumn afternoon in the Bronx.

A five-year-old child watched his father take a bullet below the ear. A hospital room became a temporary prison before an officer signed a transfer order, moving a man with a bullet in his body across state lines behind prison walls his family could not reach.

This is not an isolated incident or an administrative accident. This is the machine working exactly as designed.

When federal plainclothes officers opened fire on Oscar Belgal in Marble Hill, the government hid behind the sterile language of bureaucracy: "targeted enforcement operation," risk assessments, and administrative holds. But no policy jargon can sanitize the terror of a child watching his father get shot. No administrative word can disguise the horror of a human being snatched from our neighborhood, locked away, and rendered invisible.

This shooting lays bare the deadly pipeline of crimmigration—the brutal convergence of mass incarceration and immigration enforcement. It exposes a system that criminalizes Black people first, then uses that criminalization as a pretext to hunt, detain, and deport us.

A school dismissal. A plainclothes officer pulling a trigger. A child’s scream. A cell in Brooklyn. A transfer to a detention center in New Jersey. 

The institutions change their acronyms, but the story remains the same. The federal agents who fired seven rounds into a vehicle are executing a blueprint drafted in 1850.

When plainclothes ICE officers patrol sanctuary cities, hide their identities, and seize people from their cars, they act as the ideological descendants of slave catchers enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. Then, as now, administrative warrants and summary detentions turn public streets into zones of terror, asserting that Black human beings have no rights the state is bound to respect. For Black migrants, this lineage is not theoretical—it is a crushing daily reality.

We reject the lie that safety comes from state violence. Safety is not unmarked cars, open fire on residential streets, or children traumatized in back seats. Safety is not found in detention cells, razor wire, or deportations.

Safety lives in our communities—in housing, healthcare, protection, and care. It lives in our refusal to let our neighbors be stolen from us in broad daylight.

Oscar Belgal should be home with his son. The officers who shot him must be held accountable, and the state machinery that sanctioned those bullets must be dismantled.

The fight against ICE is a direct continuation of the abolitionist struggle. Just as our ancestors resisted the Fugitive Slave Act, we reject the legitimacy of a federal enforcement state that hunts our people. We will not be quiet. We will organize, resist, and fight as a Black diaspora until ICE is abolished, every cage is emptied, and our people are free.