Newly released NYPD body-camera footage showing the aftermath of an immigration enforcement shooting in New York City has intensified scrutiny of federal agents who shot a man with his 5-year-old son in the car.

The footage shows officers arriving Thursday in Marble Hill to find Oscar Belgal, 28, wounded, handcuffed and seated on the ground. NYPD officers rendered aid and rushed him to a hospital. Police later located his unharmed son with a family member.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the shooting in an initial social media post, saying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had shot a New Yorker while his child was in the vehicle.

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation. I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city. I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities.

Our thoughts are with the injured New Yorker and his family tonight. We are praying for his recovery.

Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.

Abolish ICE.

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) October 8, 2026

ICE defended the operation, alleging that Belgal, a Dominican national with a criminal record, accelerated his vehicle toward federal agents who feared for their lives. The agency also accused him of gang involvement.

On October 8, at approximately 4:00 PM ET, ICE officers were conducting a targeted enforcement operation in the Bronx, New York, to arrest a criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic with a prior criminal conviction for grand larceny, and multiple prior arrests for assault, robbery, possession of drugs, and weapons possession. He has associations to the Trinitarios gang, the same gang who brutally shot a CBP officer last year.

This criminal illegal alien was arrested by the NYPD on December 7, 2023, but was released into the community a few days later by reckless Democrat sanctuary policies that put American lives at risk.

During the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon and the criminal illegal alien was injured.

ICE officers immediately rendered aid. The individual is alive and at a local hospital. The FBI and HSI are on the scene. The incident remains under investigation. More information will be shared as it becomes available.

When dangerous illegal aliens are released back onto the streets by radical sanctuary politicians, our officers are forced to make arrests at large in the community in unpredictable and dangerous environments. Our officers should not have to risk their lives, and innocent Americans should not have to face unnecessary danger, because sanctuary politicians refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement.

— U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (@ICEgov) October 9, 2026

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at least one federal agent fired seven rounds, striking Belgal in the neck. Surveillance footage shows armed, plainclothes officers approaching his vehicle but does not capture the shooting itself.

The incident sparked demonstrations across the city, including a Friday march from Foley Square to federal immigration offices in Manhattan.

Mamdani said he unsuccessfully appealed to President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to release Belgal. He subsequently called for ICE’s abolition.

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Belgal’s attorneys said he was transferred to New Jersey after the shooting before being returned to federal detention in Brooklyn. A judge has restricted his transfer and temporarily blocked his deportation while his legal challenge proceeds.

New York Attorney General Letitia James called for a “full and transparent investigation conducted without fear or favor.”

The Bronx district attorney’s office is investigating. ICE has not publicly released its own body-camera footage of the shooting.

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This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

As insurgent candidates offering critiques of the Democratic Party won primary after primary in 2025 and 2026, pundits were left wondering: were the Democrats having their own “Tea Party moment”? Back in 2010, the Tea Party was key to securing massive GOP legislative gains, even as its reactionary edge cost the GOP winnable senate seats in places like Delaware and Nevada.

Progressive triumphs in Democratic primaries during president Trump’s second administration might suggest something similar is on the way. Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo in the race for New York’s mayoralty, Abdul El-Sayed’s triumphed against establishment pick Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary, and Graham Platner easily dispatched — despite scandals of such magnitude he would ultimately have to withdraw as the party’s general election candidate — Gov. Janet Mills in the Maine Senate primary. Each candidate offered fresher rhetoric, more ambitious politics, and a critique of the Democratic Party, allowing them to edge out — or in some cases destroy — their opponents. Cue the invocations of the Tea Party and questions about whether or not “the Democratic Party might very well be about to explode.”  

But comparisons between the Democratic Party’s fresh crop of candidates and the Tea Party do not really stand up to scrutiny. Tea Partiers were motivated by an anti-systemic energy that had deeper roots than the current ire of Democratic voters, and the demographics of the GOP meant the party ultimately embraced a “burn it down” approach to governance. The insurgent left within the Democratic coalition remains focused on conventional liberal issues like human rights, affordability, and taxing the wealthy. New, animating issues for voters — such as ending military funding for Israel and harsher regulation of data centers — still do not see voters anywhere close to the Tea Party’s reactionary fervor to remake, or remove, much of the U.S. government. Democratic voters — and the candidates they elect — may find that current leadership is not fit for their objectives, but replacing a few key stakeholders is a different dynamic from the Tea Party’s anathema towards any Republican interested in “normal” governance.

This op-ed is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Last week, New York City announced a groundbreaking $131.5 million settlement with DoorDash. The largest such resolution in city history, the case involved over 260,000 workers who were paid late and in some cases not paid at all. 

It also raises the question: If these underpayments happened in New York City, where DoorDash knew it was under scrutiny, what’s happening to gig workers everywhere else when no one is watching?

“Saturday Night Live” kicked off its 52nd season with a familiar Donald Trump impression, an increasingly familiar presidential friendship and a brand-new character: White House aide Natalie Harp.

The season premiere opened Saturday with Ramy Youssef reprising his role as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, delivering an update on the nor’easter battering the East Coast before James Austin Johnson’s Trump arrived unexpectedly.

“For some reason that no one can figure out, I really, really like you,” Johnson’s Trump told Mamdani, poking fun at the unlikely rapport between the president and the democratic socialist mayor.

But it was cast member Ashley Padilla’s debut as Harp that quickly stole the sketch.

A rain-soaked Harp burst into the room after supposedly running all the way from Washington, D.C., “Weapons-style,” a reference to the 2025 horror film. Johnson’s Trump then compared his devoted aide to a character from another horror movie.

“She’s like the girl from ‘Obsession’ but blond,” he said.

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” Padilla’s Harp responded. “I’m totally normal.”

She then pulled Mamdani close and issued a warning about Trump: “If you hurt him, I will end you.”

Harp, a longtime Trump aide sometimes nicknamed the “human printer” for providing the president with a steady stream of printed news articles and social media posts, has drawn renewed attention over her unusually close relationship with Trump. Reports this summer revealed intensely personal letters Harp sent Trump in 2023, including one telling him, “You are all that matters to me.”

SNL isn’t the only late-night show to turn Harp into a character.

Just two nights earlier, Jimmy Kimmel introduced his own clingy “assistant Natalie,” played by his wife and the show’s executive producer, Molly McNearney. The character hovered beside Kimmel during his Thursday monologue and offered to handle everything from his social media posts to his personal needs.

The back-to-back parodies mark a sudden pop-culture turn for a White House aide who has largely operated outside the spotlight.

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SNL, meanwhile, returned just weeks ahead of the midterm elections with politics firmly back in its repertoire. The premiere also took shots at the Trump administration’s fight with the press, the president’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his use of artificial intelligence during its “Weekend Update” segment.

The episode was hosted by New York Knicks captain Jalen Brunson, with KATSEYE as musical guest.

The post “Saturday Night Live” returns with “Natalie Harp”: “If you hurt him, I will end you” appeared first on Salon.com.

Fifteen years ago, during President Barack Obama’s first term, we co-founded RootsAction as an online progressive group challenging not only Republicans but also the corporatism and militarism of the Democratic Party. RootsAction supported Bernie Sanders for president in 2016 and 2020. Two years before the 2024 election disaster that returned Donald Trump to the White House, the organization launched the “Don’t Run Joe” campaign, with the warning that the renomination of President Joe Biden by Democrats “would be a tragic mistake.”

Despite polls showing as early as 2022 that strong majorities of Democrats wanted a nominee other than Biden in 2024, the “Don’t Run Joe” message went unheeded — until Biden’s debate debacle in June 2024. By then, it was too late for the open primary process needed to produce a ticket that could inspire activists and defeat the fascistic faux-populism of Trump.

Like the 2024 victory of the twice-impeached, repeatedly indicted Trump, his 2016 win was avoidable. One lesson we’ve learned over the last 16 years since the 2010 midterms is that it’s a big mistake for activists to sit back and expect the Democratic Party establishment to serve up candidates who can mobilize voters and win elections. That establishment failed us in winnable presidential elections in 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2024. Tad Devine, who served as a top strategist for mainstream Democrats for decades before joining Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid, knows the mechanisms inside and out. The dollar-dominated process of primary campaigns, he writes in his book “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie,” is often rigged against outsider “candidates who connect with voters, who understand voter anxieties” — and these genuinely populist candidates “are more likely to succeed in general elections than those who rely primarily on insider muscle.”

RootsAction recently teamed up with Progressive Democrats of America to announce that we will jointly launch, just after the November midterm elections, a campaign urging California Rep. Ro Khanna and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. “The voices of Khanna and/or AOC are needed in the presidential campaign to ensure that voters hear serious solutions,” the campaign’s petition says. “Without a progressive populist advocate atop the ticket, the Democratic response would be woefully underwhelming — enabling right-wing demagoguery to push voter unrest in dangerous and divisive directions.” 

The petition statement adds that the presence of Khanna and/or AOC in the presidential race “is crucial to foster debate on healthcare, jobs, AI, militarism and the U.S. relationship with Israel, along with many other issues important to a wide range of voters.”

Khanna — whose name recognition has grown recently because of his legislative battles to release the Epstein files and to end the Iran War, and his detention in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers — represents our country’s wealthiest district and much of Silicon Valley. Still, he wants to increase taxes on the rich. He calls himself “a progressive capitalist.”

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(Alex Wong/Getty Images) Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif., speaks alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., during a news conference on the Green New Deal on April 20, 2023.

Ocasio-Cortez entered the House with great fanfare after a surprise 2018 Democratic primary victory over one of the party’s top leaders on Capitol Hill — Joe Crowley, who is now a corporate lobbyist — representing a working-class, Latino-majority district in New York City. Since then she has led the effort to bring the jobs-creating Green New Deal proposal to Congress, and she is helping lead the charge against the construction of artificial intelligence data centers. She identifies as “a democratic socialist.” 

While there is a difference in how these two politicians label themselves, most voters will be much more interested in whether each will address the needs of the working class and fight the greed of the billionaires. Both are direct political descendants of Sanders. AOC was active in his 2016 campaign, which inspired her to run for Congress, and she regularly joined him last year at “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. Khanna was a surrogate and national co-chair in Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.

RootsAction’s coalition partner in this initiative, Progressive Democrats of America, has a history of major success in candidate recruitment. In late 2013, PDA launched the “Run, Bernie, Run” movement, which drafted Sanders to seek the Democratic nomination in 2016 — a campaign that elevated the national conversation and helped spark today’s progressive upsurge.

The RunRoRunAOC.org petition argues that either Khanna or Ocasio-Cortez — or both of them — need to enter the presidential race. If both were to declare their candidacies, the organizations behind this recruitment initiative are not worried that the two will somehow “split the progressive vote.” As shown by the historic wave of insurgent victories in this year’s Democratic primaries, the party’s electoral base is largely and increasingly progressive. It’s not a small sliver of voters. And a progressive bloc of delegates at the party’s national convention in August 2028 would be all to the good, pushing for popular policies such as taxing the rich, resisting Big Tech’s AI data centers, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), green jobs initiatives, enhanced Medicare for All, cutting the military budget and stopping the weapons flow to Israel.

During last year’s New York City mayoral campaign — which, thankfully, employed ranked-choice voting — two progressive candidates actually ran as a duo in the Democratic primary: Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander. Mamdani became mayor thanks significantly to Lander, and now Lander is heading to Congress thanks in part to Mamdani’s endorsement and support. In other races, progressives have run in tandem in crowded fields, maintaining a non-aggression strategy while bolstering each other’s positions.

Democrats should also remember that in the early months of the 2019-2020 Democratic presidential primary, before a fraught personal split between Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sanders, the presence of the two previously friendly candidates raising similar issues of inequality and corporate greed had actually moved the whole Democratic debate in a notably more progressive direction. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez could wield similar influence in 2028.

The ground for progressive candidates is ripe. Despite millions of dollars flooding into the campaign coffers of corporatist Democratic candidates from special interests representing AI, crypto and Israel, and despite assists to those candidates from corporate media, this year’s Democratic primaries produced an unprecedented wave of victories by underfunded progressive candidates, including Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan. These insurgent successes have occurred at local and statewide levels.

After the November midterms, it will be time for progressives to focus on the national level.

Leaving the 2028 presidential nominating process to the money-drenched party elites — with their record of electoral defeats, governance failures and betrayals — would be a recipe for disaster. Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could make all the difference.

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