Sanctuary policies led to the NYC ICE shooting — if Mamdani cared he’d cooperate with immigration enforcement

The shooting of Dominican national Oscar Belgal by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer has triggered what are now predictable responses: street protests before the facts are known; demands by sanctuary politicos — including Mayor Mamdani — that the agency be “abolished.” 

But if he and others of his ilk truly cared about community safety, he’d be cooperating with immigration enforcement, not trying to gut it. 

The Department of Homeland Security claims that Belgal is an illegal alien with ties to the violent Trinitarios gang, and the NYPD has confirmed he has prior arrests for robbery and larceny, and drug charges that are still pending. 

Poster boy 

Assuming those facts are true, ICE is required under both the immigration laws and the Laken Riley Act – — the latter named after a young student killed by an illegal migrant in broad daylight and passed on a bipartisan basis in January 2025 — to take him into custody. 

And yet sanctuary cities like New York actively hobble ICE officers’ ability to fulfill that federal duty. 

Belgal appears to be a poster boy for New York’s sanctuary diktats: DHS contends that after he was arrested in December 2023, he “was released into the community a few days later.” 

Mamdani claims he’s “angry” over the incident and has used it to renew his demands that the president “end all ICE actions” in New York. 

Such tub-thumping is rich given that the only reason immigration officers are forced to make “street arrests” is because sanctuary honchos like the mayor won’t let ICE into the city’s jails and detention facilities. 

Those places are where the agency would prefer to take custody of criminal aliens, for a variety of logical reasons. 

“In custody” arrests are the easiest for ICE officers to make.

No one enters such a secure place without being thoroughly screened for weapons, and thus in-custody transfers from state and local to federal officials are safer for both ICE and alien suspects. 

Street arrests put everybody — ICE officers, aliens and bystanders — at risk. Many, if not most, suspects comply with officers’ orders, but when they don’t, things can quickly turn to chaos — and cars driven by fleeing fugitives become 2,000-pound unguided missiles. 

Reasonable people can disagree over whether ICE should arrest “otherwise law-abiding” aliens. 

No sensible argument can be made, however, for policies that impede legitimate law enforcement and hustle criminal aliens back onto the streets to prey on their neighbors and communities, and that force ICE officers to make often risky “at-large” arrests. 

That’s why sanctuary officials don’t make sensible arguments — they demagogue and feign indignity when incidents like this, that their own policies have triggered, happen — and then make demands the majority of Americans will never accept. 

“Abolish ICE”? No, Mr. Mayor: “cooperate with ICE,” let immigration officers into jails to arrest dangerous criminal aliens, and protect the citizens you have sworn to keep safe. 

Andrew Arthur is the resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.