The shooting of Dominican national Oscar Belgal by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer has set off the usual cycle: street protests before the facts are settled, and demands from sanctuary-city politicians — including Mayor Mamdani — that ICE be abolished outright.
The Department of Homeland Security says Belgal is an illegal alien with ties to the Trinitarios gang. The NYPD has confirmed he has prior arrests for robbery and larceny, plus drug charges that are still pending.
If those facts hold up, federal law required ICE to take him into custody — both under general immigration statutes and under the Laken Riley Act, the bipartisan law passed in January 2025 and named after a young student killed by an illegal migrant in broad daylight.
Sanctuary cities like New York make that job harder. DHS says that after Belgal was arrested in December 2023, he “was released into the community a few days later” — exactly the kind of release sanctuary policies are designed to produce.
Mayor Mamdani says he’s “angry” over the shooting and is using it to renew his call for the president to “end all ICE actions” in New York.
DHS contends that after Belgal was arrested in December 2023, he “was released into the community a few days later.”
That demand rings hollow given that the city itself forces ICE’s hand. The only reason immigration officers are making arrests on the street is that sanctuary officials won’t let ICE operate inside city jails and detention facilities, where the agency would rather take custody of criminal aliens in the first place.
In-custody arrests are safer for everyone. Anyone entering a secure facility has already been screened for weapons, making transfers from local to federal custody far less dangerous than a street confrontation. Street arrests put ICE officers, the alien in question, and bystanders at risk — and a fleeing suspect’s car becomes a 2,000-pound hazard to anyone nearby.
People can reasonably disagree about whether ICE should pursue otherwise law-abiding immigrants. But there’s no serious case for policies that block routine law enforcement, send criminal aliens back onto the street, and push ICE officers into the riskier at-large arrests that sanctuary rules make necessary.
This analysis, written by Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, argues that sanctuary officials respond to incidents their own policies help cause not with workable solutions but with outrage — and with demands, like abolishing ICE, that most Americans reject. The alternative he lays out is simple: let ICE into the jails to arrest dangerous criminal aliens there, rather than forcing confrontations on the street.
