The shooting of a Dominican immigrant by federal immigration officers in Manhattan has become the center of a national argument about criminal history, personal responsibility, and the way political movements treat people they cast as victims. Oscar Belgal, 28, was shot in the neck below his left ear on Oct. 8 after plainclothes ICE officers approached his Honda CR-V while he was backing into a parking spot in Marble Hill, a small enclave bordering the Bronx. School had just let out, and Belgal's five-year-old son was in the back seat.
Police camera footage shows two men with guns drawn approaching the SUV, one at the driver's side and one at the front. Mayor Zohran Mamdani later noted that officers surrounding the vehicle wore construction vests and masks. Belgal pulled forward out of the space, and an officer punched and broke his driver's window as he drove off. Officers caught up with him about a block away. According to ICE officials, Belgal refused orders to exit the vehicle, turned the SUV into a weapon, and rammed two government cars. His defense attorney disputes that account, saying Belgal fled in panic to protect his child from unidentified armed men.
Initial NYPD street camera footage did not capture the shooting itself, but investigators later determined a bullet went through Belgal's windshield. At least one officer fired seven rounds. His son was not physically hurt. The FBI, Homeland Security investigators, and the Bronx District Attorney's office have all opened inquiries.
Within hours, Belgal stopped being an individual and became a symbol. That transformation, critics argue, required stripping away the one thing that makes a man responsible for his actions. Belgal was not a stranger to the justice system. In 2023, according to a criminal complaint, he was driving with two passengers in his back seat when he turned, pointed a gun at them, and demanded their jewelry. They complied. He pleaded guilty and received five years of probation. In December 2025, he was indicted on ten counts related to narcotics distribution. He pleaded not guilty and was released on supervised conditions. Federal officials say he is in the country illegally and allege ties to the Trinitarios gang. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said that when ICE previously tried to arrest him in September, Belgal fled.
When New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch laid out that record, leading figures on the left did not weigh it. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Democratic Socialists of America candidate for Congress in New York's 13th District, went on Hasan Piker's stream and said of Belgal's criminal history, «To me, it doesn't even matter.» She accused Tisch of trying to «villainize Oscar» and demanded her resignation. She asked the audience to «put yourself in Oscar's shoes,» describing masked men coming at his car and saying, «You're running. I'm sorry, you're protecting your child.» She ended with «F--- ICE and abolish it.»
The reaction illustrates a broader pattern, one explored in the new film «White Guilt,» in which author and Hoover Institution fellow Shelby Steele describes how the left created a world where responsibility can never be demanded of the oppressed. He recounts going to a Black Power rally on the South Side of Chicago to hear comedian and activist Dick Gregory. «Gregory argued that a racist America had given us responsibility, but had denied us the freedom to do much with it,» Steele says in the film. «Gregory held a Marxian vision of racism as a systemic force that made responsibility irrelevant in the struggle against oppression. Thus, it was bad manners to ask a black to lift themselves up.»
Then Lyndon Johnson stood up at Howard University and said you do not take a man hobbled by chains, bring him to the starting line, and tell him he is free to compete. «By implication, Johnson agreed with Gregory,» Steele says. «Suddenly, if you were black living in this new age of white guilt, you could not be expected to carry the same responsibilities as others.» That belief, Steele argues, became a core tenet of the racial order we live under today. White guilt, in his telling, is not personal remorse but collective guilt assigned to all Whites for America's past racial sins. What it produces is not remorse but terror — the terror of being called a racist and losing moral authority. To escape that terror, the «oppressor» buys back innocence by asking nothing of the «oppressed.»