NEW YORK — A bullet is still lodged in Oscar Belgal’s neck, his lawyers said in a court filing Wednesday, six days after the ICE shooting in New York that hit him as his 5-year-old son sat in the back seat.
On Thursday, a federal judge in Brooklyn threw out the Trump administration’s lawsuit against New York City’s sanctuary laws, the rules that limit how city agencies cooperate with federal immigration authorities. U.S. District Judge Ramón E. Reyes Jr. found that the government lacked standing and that its claims would fail anyway.
The order never mentions Belgal. The Department of Homeland Security, though, has cited his case against the policies the ruling leaves standing, and the question Reyes answered is whether Washington can make a city help with deportations.
DHS said in an October 9 statement that the NYPD arrested Belgal on Dec. 7, 2023, and that he was “RELEASED into the community a few days later by reckless Democrat sanctuary policies.” The statement alleges gang ties. Belgal denies them, and his lawyers say ICE has produced no evidence of any.
Justice Department lawyers argued that the city’s rules force officers into “difficult and dangerous efforts to re-arrest aliens who were previously in local custody.” Reyes wrote in his 25-page order that New York law does not authorize city officers to make civil immigration arrests, so striking down the rules would not give the government the relief it sought. Even with standing, he wrote, “its preemption claims fail.”
Reyes also said that if states cannot “control their agencies and employees to resist federal immigration enforcement,” the Tenth Amendment’s anticommandeering doctrine “means nothing.” He declined to follow a 1999 Second Circuit precedent, calling its continued viability “questionable,” and noted that nearly a dozen similar federal challenges elsewhere had all been rejected.
The government’s case outside court leans on numbers it counted itself. A DHS release on Monday said New York State declined 16,070 detainers, requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement that a jail hold someone for up to 48 hours, between Jan. 20, 2025, and Oct. 8, 2026. It cited “ICE data” and described no method. The count covers the state, not the city whose laws Reyes reviewed, and the order notes that compliance with a detainer is “not mandatory.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani called the ruling “a victory for New Yorkers and a rebuke to ICE’s deportation agenda,” saying in a statement that “Today, they lost.” No Justice Department response was available in the reporting The Eastern Herald reviewed. Neither the order nor DHS says what the NYPD charged Belgal with in 2023, or what became of that case.
