NEW YORK CITY — The boy was 5. He sat in the back seat. His father, Oscar Belgal, 28, was backing a Honda CR-V into a parking space near Marble Hill Avenue and West 225th Street a little after 4 o’clock Thursday afternoon. Two men in plain clothes came at the car. One walked to the driver’s window. He already had his gun out. That is what the city’s cameras showed, according to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
Then the car moved, the camera lost it, and somebody fired seven times.
One round caught Belgal in the neck, just below his left ear. He lived. The boy was not hit. The windshield took bullets. The rear window came apart. NYPD officers working an unrelated detail heard the shots and drove Belgal to the hospital themselves. They didn’t wait for an ambulance.
When it was over, a man in a bright yellow construction vest stood on the block holding a short, AR-style rifle. WIRED identified him as Brenden Cuni. He is a supervisory deportation officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A law-enforcement source told WIRED that Cuni identified himself to NYPD officers as an ICE agent.
Nobody in authority has said who pulled the trigger. Not DHS. Not the FBI. Not the NYPD. That silence is its own story.
But here is the story that is already on paper. On Monday, a federal judge found that Cuni had signed a warrant the judge called fraudulent. ICE sent him back out anyway.
The Warrant
The case is Almonte v. Genalo. Judge Gary R. Brown of the Eastern District of New York decided it Oct. 5. Brown was appointed by President Donald Trump.
On May 6, an ICE team in the Bronx went looking for two men. It came back with two others. One was Angel Jesus Almonte. The other was Jeury Concepcion, a U.S. citizen. Almonte is five inches taller than the man ICE wanted and 80 pounds heavier. The team leader admitted the photos made the difference easy to see.
Cuni came in after Almonte was already in custody. By his own sworn declaration, he searched five federal databases. All five came back empty. He then signed an administrative arrest warrant, an I-200. On it he checked boxes saying that fingerprint matches and database records had confirmed Almonte could be deported.
There were no such records. Not until ICE put Almonte into its own systems. Then Cuni searched again, and this time he found him.
Brown called the warrant fraudulent. He found that ICE agents gave false or misleading testimony and falsified official records to cover up an unlawful arrest. He gave the agency 21 days to propose fixes, discipline included.
A Pattern in the Paperwork
Almonte was not the first time.
On May 2, Cuni signed an arrest warrant for Chidozie Wilson Okeke at 7:15 p.m. during a Brooklyn surveillance operation that was aimed at someone else. Minutes later agents stopped Okeke’s car. They broke windows. They pointed a Taser. They traded punches and pulled him out. The paperwork that legally starts deportation proceedings came nearly 11 hours after the warrant. Judge Pamela K. Chen ruled the warrant legally ineffective and the detention unlawful, and ordered Okeke freed.
In a third case, Chaglla v. Maldonado, a neighbor’s doorbell camera surfaced after Cuni filed a sworn declaration. Judge Brown later wrote that the video “largely contradicts” what Cuni had sworn to.
THE CITY reviewed more than 1,200 immigration lawsuits and found Cuni named in several habeas cases alleging beatings and Taser use. One man said officers left him bleeding and unable to stand, and that Cuni used an anti-Mexican slur. ICE said the man was combative and that the force was justified. Activists, and later WIRED, also tied Cuni to a December 2025 incident in Minneapolis in which a woman described as pregnant was forced to the ground. DHS questioned whether she was pregnant.
These are allegations, not verdicts. But the paperwork findings are not allegations. Judges made them.
The Men Who Keep Him Working
DHS says Belgal is a Dominican national living in the country unlawfully. It says he has a grand larceny conviction and alleges gang ties. Tisch said he pleaded guilty to grand larceny after a 2023 robbery arrest and got probation. She said a later drug case is still open, and the court record shows he pleaded not guilty.
None of that explains seven rounds fired into a car with a child in the back seat.
DHS called the operation a “targeted enforcement operation.” Federal sources told reporters that Belgal rammed, or tried to ram, agents or their vehicles. The city’s footage, as Tisch described it, does not show that. Homeland Security Investigations, which sits in the same department as ICE, has taken over the investigation with FBI help. The department is investigating itself.
It isn’t only New York. The Associated Press counts more than a dozen shootings by ICE agents at vehicle stops since 2025, with at least four people killed.
So think about the priorities here. An agency arrests the wrong men, one of them a U.S. citizen. It writes the paperwork afterward. It loses in front of a Trump-appointed judge. Then it hands the man who signed that warrant a rifle and sends him into Upper Manhattan. That is not the work of a law-enforcement agency. It is the work of a production line that measures output in bodies. It loses in court, it burns public trust, and taxpayers pay for all of it, including the lawyers.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani demanded an end to ICE operations in the city. Gov. Kathy Hochul and local officials want the body-camera footage released and an independent state investigation.
ICE has until Oct. 26 to tell Judge Brown what it plans to do about the people behind that warrant. It had three days before Thursday. It used them to send Brenden Cuni back to work.
A federal judge caught this man’s paperwork lying. ICE gave him a rifle anyway. Migrant Insider reads the court dockets the agency is betting nobody opens, and paid subscribers are the reason we can keep reading them. Shout out to Kevin Rojas for compiling the photographs I used of Cuni in this post.
This is beyond disgusting and it must end. I can't imagine being chased down and shot at by the US government. It's not even government anymore, it's a free for all. Stephen Miller will pay the price somewhere down the line. I'm so angry about all of this and sometimes I struggle to keep my sanity. God help us all.
Hard to believe this is happening in United States of America 🇺🇸
The Trump administration has unleashed a power of darkness
However, we must turn our outrage into constructive action‼️