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.

The post NYPD footage fuels scrutiny of ICE shooting appeared first on Salon.com.

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

With just weeks until the midterm elections, the Trump administration is, unsurprisingly, still hard at work seeking evidence of widespread non-citizen voting. And it is still not finding it. 

We got new details this week about exactly what the administration has been up to thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Over the past year, ICE has reviewed millions of records and investigated hundreds of nonprofits suspected of helping noncitizens register to vote, according to internal records that were obtained by the nonprofit Democracy Forward. “The information revealed in the documents should concern all Americans and is further evidence of an alarming attempt by the executive branch to undermine our elections,” Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.

The records note that these investigations were, in part, meant “to identify specific organizations that may be predatory in nature, particularly those suspected of illegal registration and voter encouragement.”

For years now, the Trump administration has been pushing the false narrative that non-citizens are voting en masse for Democrats. There is no evidence of any kind to suggest this is the case. The lack of evidence, however, has not stopped President Trump from pushing forward this lie on a near-daily basis and using the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to investigate the conspiracy theory. It functions as another way to drum up fear and distrust in our election system just in time for the midterm elections. 

The newly released records reveal that “48.4 million records were obtained by [DHS deputy assistant secretary for election integrity] Heather Honey through independent sources of information”  as part of what is described as a “strategic line of effort” to investigate instances of supposed non-citizen voting. DHS Investigators also looked at 50.6 million records from the DOJ, the documents say; those records, CNN reported, could include unredacted voter data from some states. 

The records also indicate that Homeland Security Investigation (HSI), an investigative unit within ICE, watched recent primary elections “to identify emerging trends, vulnerabilities, or indicators that may impact election integrity.”

“DHS has been incredibly transparent about the acquisition and the analysis of publicly available voter files conducted by the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate of USCIS,” the Department told CNN. “DHS and DOJ are laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of US citizens.”

The documents also reveal that HSI considered deploying undercover agents to investigate certain non-profits that the administration suspected of having helped register non-citizens to vote, and named New Jersey and Pennsylvania as specific “areas of focus.”

The records indicate that HSI specifically investigated a branch of CAIR, The Council on American-Islamic Relations in Pennsylvania as well as the clothing company Zumiez, which were both, per the documents, “flagged for further investigation.”

As always, we have a lot more to unpack this week, so let’s dig in. 

Reminder: There are Hundreds of Election Deniers Running for Office

There are by one tally a staggering 197 election deniers on the midterm ballots next month, according to newly released research from States United Action.

We have previously highlighted some of the most prominent election deniers hoping to win elections this fall. For example, Jim Marchant is a big time election conspiracy theorist and is currently running as the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Nevada. Marchant, who has consistently repeated lies about the 2020 election for years now, also won the GOP nomination for secretary of state back in 2022, and was the founding member of America First Secretary of State Coalition. The coalition was a group of election deniers all running for secretary of state positions on 2020 election conspiracy theory platforms, intent on somehow overturning the results of that election. Marchant lost to Democrat Cisco Aguilar in 2022, and, at the time, told NBC News that if he was secretary of state he would not have certified the 2020 election results in favor of Joe Biden. 

Marchant, however, is just one of many election deniers on the ballot. More specifically, and most concerning, there are, per States United Action, at least 33 election deniers in 21 states on the ballot running for positions that would play a role in overseeing elections, including 17 election deniers running for governor, 7 election deniers running for secretary of state, and nine election deniers running for attorney general. 

“Our 2026 research shows how deeply embedded the election denial movement is, even as fewer Election Deniers are running for office than we saw in 2022,” Kelly Rader, Research Director at States United Action, said in a press release this week. “The election denial movement is showing up across every facet of our democracy — from the ballot box to the White House.” 

Todd Blanche is Doubling Down on DOJ’s Decision to Send 1,000 Election Monitors to the Polls

Attorney General Todd Blanche is defending the DOJ’s decision to send 1,000 election monitors to various polling locations throughout the country for the midterm elections. 

To jog your memory, we noted back in August that Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon confirmed to Bloomberg News that the DOJ planned to dispatch close to 1,000 election monitors next month as a way to, as the DOJ claimed, secure the midterm elections. 

State and local election administrators have a different concern: that this onslaught of federal election monitors will be intimidating for voters. 

Dhillon has sought to play it down as business-as-usual. “The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has sent monitors to election hot spots, polling places to increase voter confidence to troubleshoot problems and we are doing that now. We just did it in the primary,” Dhillon said at the time. “We’re going to do it to the tune of approximately a thousand election monitors in the November election, and this is just something that DOJ does.”

More recently, on Sunday, Blanche told Fox News’s Shannon Bream that the administration’s decision to send federal election monitors to polling sites is simply to make sure “that federal law is being enforced appropriately.”

“They’re not going to Republican states, they’re not going to Democrat states,” Blanche said.”They are going to every state to make sure our elections are carried out legally, fairly and appropriately.” 

Blanche also shut down speculation that armed federal agents would be deployed at polling stations, calling the claim “completely false.”

Relatedly, the NAACP filed a federal lawsuit against Dhillon only days before Blanche’s comments, demanding records about the DOJ’s plan to deploy 1,000 election monitors for the midterm elections.

“This unprecedented deployment of federal officials stands to jeopardize the election and interfere with the right of voters to participate in the election free from intimidation,” the lawsuit reads. “Courts have recognized that unnecessary law enforcement and government presence at polling sites can cause fear, create confusion, impose burdens on election officials, and have a chilling or coercive effect on the electorate.”

In Other Election News

CNN: Inside Democrats’ efforts to secure Election Day and respond to fears of Trump interference

ABC News:Trump sows doubt about mail-in voting while encouraging it, as midterms approach 

Colorado Newsline: Tina Peters met with Trump to discuss election plans, former Trump administration attorney says

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan delivered a no-holds-barred defense of Trump’s mass deportation regime at the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Victory Dinner in Duluth, Georgia, last week in an event that appeared designed to bolster the campaigns of two major Republican candidates running for U.S. Senate and governor in the state. 

Homan’s speech signaled that an unabashed defense of the administration’s immigration brutality is a key part of its midterm strategy to mobilize right-wing evangelical and Catholic voters to back Republicans. In a surprisingly profanity-laced speech that castigated critics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including Democrats and federal judges, Homan became another administration official to inject himself into midterms campaigning this cycle, this time to lend a Christian imprimatur to Trump’s racist and violent assault on immigrants.

Agents Instructed To ‘Misrepresent Themselves’

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

Democrats released another damning whistleblower disclosure this week. This one alleges some disturbing, and potentially illegal, activity from the Department of Homeland Security’s ongoing effort to access state voter rolls as part of the Trump administration’s relentless campaign to unearth proof of President Trump’s conspiracy theories about noncitizens voters.