ICE Shoots a Man in Front of His Child

ICE is still the agency that murdered Renée Good

Yesterday evening in New York City, ICE officers surrounded and fired shots into a car. One of their shots hit the driver, Oscal Belgal, in the neck. As I write this, he is in stable condition and it appears as though he will survive.

His five-year-old son was in the backseat of the car that masked agents of the state surrounded and fired their guns into.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned ICE as “rotten to its core” and he said the agency, which has been criticized for tactics and immigration crackdowns under the Trump administration, has been acting with impunity.

“There is no explanation for these tactics. There is no explanation for federal officers firing this many rounds into a car that has a 5-year-old in the car,” Mamdani said. “There is no explanation.”

I am angry tonight. Because tonight ICE shot a New Yorker. They shot a New Yorker while his five year old child was in the car. ICE makes this city less safe. We want them out. Now.
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@mayor.nyc.gov) 2026-10-09T03:55:07.690Z

Mamdani went on:

And the pretext of ICE is, in their words, to keep this country safe. How is it keeping anyone safe to have, as you just heard from the police commissioner, individuals wearing construction vests and masks with long guns? Residents have no idea if these are law enforcement agents or if they are simply attacking someone on the street, and when it comes to ICE it begs the question: what’s the difference?

DHS spouted some nonsense in their explanation, but what I want to focus on is their unwillingness to acknowledge the basic humanity of their victim. Belgal, in their statement, is simply a “criminal illegal alien,” a phrase they use repeatedly.

This situation developed after Tuesday’s order from ICE to increase agents’ daily quota of immigration arrests by 1,000. The very idea of having a daily quota, never mind an absurdly large one, already tells the whole story: these people do not care who they hurt, how many actual “criminal illegal aliens” make up their long list of victims, so long as that list of the abused, tortured, and murdered is as long as physically possible. Getting the pile of bodies packed into detention centers and airplanes and graves up to the millions is the only goal that matters to childish bigot Stephen Miller and DHS.

ICE has also launched another one of their infamous “operations,” this time back in California. The Sacramento Bee describes it as “launching waves of ICE immigration operations across California over the next 45 days.”

Dubbed internally as “Operation Safe California,” the Examiner reported, the enforcement began several days ago in the San Diego area, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials ordering its field agents to arrest all immigrants they meet, criminal history or not.

Governor Gavin Newsom publicly criticized this initiative on X (for some reason). He also recently signed several anti-ICE bills into law.

One high-profile bill that’s now law, Senate Bill 1004, prohibits all law enforcement officers in the state against wearing masks, with some exceptions. Another—Senate Bill 747, called the No Kings Act—enables state residents to sue federal officials for constitutional violations.

State Senator Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat and vocal opponent of President Donald Trump, wrote both bills. …

Wiener’s bills are two out of several signed by Newsom. Others impose restrictions on shock gloves and flash-bang grenades, and levy a 25% tax on private detention facilities.

Speaking of detention facilities, locals and NPR found evidence that a supposedly abandoned ICE warehouse in New Jersey has been quietly put to use. The warehouse plan, which the federal government spent over $1 billion on, was largely defeated through a combination of local resistance and practical infeasibility. But it seems that in at least one case, ICE is trying to recoup some of those losses by making use of the facilities on the sly.

The warehouse plan never made sense to begin with—thankfully. Along those lines, Trump is apparently considering making use of ships to take on more deportations beyond what they’re able to manage with planes alone. As with everything that they devise in the mass deportation campaign, this is both impractical and cruel.

One small victory to end the ICE section today:

A federal judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to return Ahmed Soliman to the United States, five months after he was expelled to Equatorial Guinea, a country where he has no ties, in a decision that could have far-reaching implications for thousands of others subjected to the Trump administration’s third-country removal scheme. …

In Equatorial Guinea, Soliman was imprisoned in a government-owned hotel with dozens of other third-country nationals and pressured to return to Egypt. Armed guards have subjected them to threats and beatings, have withheld food, toothpaste, and toilet paper, and even turned the water off for days at a time, he said. The abuse got worse after Soliman began speaking with journalists in July.

I won’t call this a happy ending, and indeed it is no ending at all as this case will continue to wind its way through the courts. But welcome back, Ahmed Soliman. May your return be a permanent one.

The performance of bloodlust

If you’ll forgive me for linking to a propaganda video, I have been unimpressed with reporters’ characterization of what Pete Hegseth has said about his plan to execute Nidal Hasan, the mass shooter who killed 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009. Here is what he said to fascist influencer Jack Posobiec yesterday, while aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, which returned after 265 consecutive days at sea under atrocious conditions.

Execution by firing squad. Army major betrays his country, radical Islamist kills a bunch of Americans at Fort Hood. Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood, and do it on a Thursday, we’re going to do it at 1 o’clock which is when he did it, and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad. It hasn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that. Well, I kinda like the mentality we had in World War II, which was ‘win,’ which was, understand when the enemy attacks you, you stand your ground. It was a radical Islamic terrorist attack.

Remember what, remember what Obama called it? ‘Workplace violence?’ That’s what we’re up against. That’s the worldview we’re up against, is ‘workplace violence.’ We know what it is, it was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks. And so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be. As we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public. Because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things.

In the video you can tell that Hegseth is absolutely giddy at the idea of bringing back firing squads and cannot wait to get it scheduled as a live event like any other. Hegseth does not care about deterrence or justice, what he cares about is winning a culture war battle against “the worldview that we’re up against.” And he wants to win it by producing the best content:

In that essay Sam Nagahisa was focused primarily on Hegseth’s campaign of murdering civilians on the open sea, but it extends to his performance of bloodlust in general—and the administration’s as a whole, including in its approach to mass deportation.

Here’s one report on the Nidal Hasan execution story if you want to read more.

Yesterday I mentioned that the Republican Party is the party of rape. I would be remiss if, the day after Hegseth’s statement, I did not mention that they are also the party of death.

On September 30th, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority cleared the way for the execution of Christa Pike. Shortly thereafter, the execution was attempted and utterly botched. Pike still lives, and is seriously injured but recovering.

Rape, death, and torture. The Republican Party in the Trump years has truly established a stellar record for itself.

The Iran War cycle continues

Perhaps I should add another item to that record: military defeat. From David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt at the New York Times:

To hear President Trump and his aides describe it, the rush to withdraw 12 B-1 bombers from an air base in Britain over the weekend was a prudent precaution, in response to a threat they refused to describe.

It was no big deal, Mr. Trump insisted, and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, tried to wave it away by noting that the Pentagon is ‘constantly reallocating resources where they need to be.’

But to anyone watching the deployment of American power around the globe in the seven months since Mr. Trump decided to attack Iran, it was another glaring example of how, time after time, Mr. Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have been forced into retreat, pulling back military forces that had been deployed to the Middle East and Britain as a deterrent.

Meanwhile, the people that the Trump administration sometimes pretended this war was meant to protect have seen their circumstances worsen, a considerable achievement given how bad things were for them before the war began. As Reuters reports:

In January, tens of thousands of Iranians protested against an economic collapse they blamed on the government. Nine months later, the country is witnessing its fiercest repression in decades, according to interviews with more than 75 human rights experts, lawyers and ordinary Iranians.

The United States and Israel have claimed they struck at least 17 police stations, military bases and intelligence offices responsible for crushing the January protests. Yet Iran’s security apparatus appears entrenched and stronger than ever.

And now for something a bit more gratifying

"You hired half the Third Reich to staff your office ... If John Lewis were marching today, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club" -- here's a supercut of Jon Ossoff SMASHING Mike Collins during tonight's debate
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-09T00:25:49.383Z