new york city Mayor Zohran Mamdani faces a fierce debate over how his administration handles policing and responds to federal immigration raids after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot 28-year-old Manhattan father Oscar Belgal in front of his 5-year-old child on Thursday.
Angry New Yorkers took to the streets Thursday night, quickly clashing with the New York City Police Department, exacerbating long-standing tensions with the city’s socialist mayor. Mamdani has been criticized by those on the left for neglecting to make aggressive reforms to the NYPD, while distrusted by those on the right for vowing to take control of the department. Now, Mamdani is tasked with protecting his city from ICE and reining in local police as residents recover from a spate of violence in President Donald Trump’s war on immigration.
“We know ICE is completely rotten,” Mamdani said Thursday night, alongside New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Tisch, a holdover from the Adams administration, is known for pushing to expand the department’s sweeping surveillance apparatus. While Mamdani has made his disdain for ICE clear, his critics believe the mayor must do more than issue harsh words.
Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Alliance, said Mamdani’s remarks marked a “great first step.” “But what else is the city going to do beyond making that happen? What are some viable ideas that they’re planning? That’s the part that we need to push for more after we hear it because we’re going to continue to be in the same situation.”
Legally, Mamdani cannot prevent federal immigration agents from entering the city. Although he has taken steps to limit their access to city property or prevent the federal government from illegally accessing New Yorkers’ private data, Trump and the federal agencies that dispatch ICE to New York are the only ones who can truly stop their arrival.
But immigration advocates believe the Mamdani administration could make it more difficult for ICE to operate in New York by exerting more control over the NYPD. The unit later showed up at Thursday night’s protests, and rapid response activists at the scene claimed that its officers were speaking with Homeland Security Investigations agents, which they believed was evidence of coordination.
Pete Giesas, director of the White House National Security Council and acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New York, was on the scene and in direct liaison with NYPD personnel, according to two rapid response personnel who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from law enforcement agencies.
A rapid response officer said Gizas spent several hours there “speaking directly to the NYPD and federal agents. He had Homeland Security Investigations officers go door-to-door in his neighborhood, entering apartment complexes.” Another witness confirmed they saw Gizas interacting with police.
“Why should a crime scene, a shooting scene be hosted by Homeland Security Investigations?”
“If the NYPD is actually an agency controlled by the mayor of New York and the people of New York, then why are crime scenes, shooting scenes hosted by Homeland Security Investigations?” said the first rapid responder, who added that they saw members of the ICE investigative team entering and exiting the NYPD’s local jurisdiction.
The NYPD does not have a formal partnership with ICE, and the sanctuary city law and a state law passed in August would prohibit such cooperation. But the department has been informed of ICE activities in the city and has shared information such as fingerprints with federal agencies, which in turn has shared that information with ICE.
Awad said even if police aren’t helping ICE detain people, they are still helping them move freely around the city and conduct operations.
“They won’t cooperate with ICE on immigration enforcement, but when they do crowd control, it ends up being collusion because then you’re still helping them do something you shouldn’t be doing,” he said.
ICE referred questions about Gizas’ presence at the scene to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “The NYPD does not conduct civil immigration enforcement,” an NYPD spokesperson said in a statement.
Mamdani has already faced a flurry of criticism for abandoning many of the police reform promises he made during the campaign. Supporters want him to get rid of Tish, who was associated with former Mayor Eric Adams’ “tough on crime” tenure, and dismantle a controversial unit often deployed at protests, the Strategic Response Team. (Mamdani said he still hopes to disband the force but offered no plan or timeline for doing so. Spokespeople for his office and the NYPD told The Intercept the force was not deployed Thursday.)
NYPD officers pushed and shoved demonstrators, including knocking down Democratic congressional candidate Daria Lisa Avila Chevalier, according to witness accounts and videos of the protest shared on social media. But no mass arrests appear to have occurred. In a statement to The Intercept, an NYPD spokesperson said the agency arrested five people at the protests and issued them tickets to appear in precincts.
“We’ve seen both the shock of ICE violence and the brutal treatment of protesters and the response to those who have spoken out,” said Yasmine Farhang, executive director of the Immigrant Defense Project.
In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Mamdani’s office called the ICE shooting “outrageous” and said it “highlights the dangers ICE operations pose to our communities.”
“The mayor and the NYPD will review all events that occurred over the past 24 hours, including the ICE shooting; the department’s response to the incident and subsequent protests; ICE operations in private parking lots; and all actions the city can take to protect New Yorkers from ICE terror,” the spokesperson said.
socialist stance
Mamdani’s strongest political support base directed their anger at Tisch, not the mayor. The New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose organizing campaign helped elect one of its members as mayor, called for Tisch’s firing and condemned the NYPD in a statement without mentioning Mamdani by name.
Asked why Mamdani didn’t directly instruct the NYPD not to respond to the protests, NYC-DSA co-president Gustavo Gordillo said the group had not yet contacted City Hall, but that the police response fell to Tish, who read Belgar’s criminal record during a court appearance with Mamdani on Thursday night. Gordillo also said it was time for the mayor to follow through on campaign promises, such as disbanding the strategic response team, although the group did not participate in Thursday’s protest.
“The mayor and we all agree that ICE does not make New Yorkers safer. If we want to abolish ICE, democratic socialists have to defeat Trump,” Gordillo said, referring to the seven DSA members who may be headed to Congress in the next Congress, including Avila Chevalier. “The mayor helped us elect a couple of these people. That was really a top priority. Because the tools we had in New York City were very limited before the change in the federal government.”
In an interview earlier this month about Mamdani’s policing policy, Gordillo’s co-chair Grace Mauser said the group was being careful about how to push Mamdani to do more on police reform while balancing the political risks. Gordillo said there may be an opportunity to apply pressure in light of the shooting.
“There’s an open window now for the public, which means we can use public outrage and public support to get the NYPD to make changes for the better in ways that might have felt more difficult just a few weeks ago,” Gordillo said.
Farhang said she welcomed Mamdani’s pledge to ask Trump to end all ICE enforcement operations in New York City, but there are other, less obvious ways to end local cooperation with ICE.
“People are rightly concerned about the NYPD’s role at the protest scene, and these are important conversations to have,” Farhang said. “But every day, we know that the Department of Corrections, the Department of Probation, and the NYPD continue to communicate and cooperate with ICE.”
City Council officials recently reintroduced two bills that would limit such collaborations. Farhang said they had been sitting there for “many years.” She added that now that so many people are “making it clear that ICE is an agency whose mission is to terrorize communities and that there are no limits to their violence, we’re asking people to take the next step and saying, if that’s the case, there’s simply no reason to cooperate.”
ICE has surged operations in cities across the country, targeting blue cities in particular with so-called sanctuary city laws that strengthen protections for immigrants.
“This surge that’s happening in New York City is happening across the country. In California, in Illinois, in anti-sanctuary states,” said Nureen Shah, director of immigration policy and advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union. “So it’s really critical for any community that is preparing for or is experiencing a surge in law enforcement that police departments do not provide formal or informal cooperation for street arrests.”
Shah added that cities and states can’t stop ICE from conducting federal enforcement. But, she said, “they can hold officers accountable for the abuses they committed.”