Thursday Afternoon in Marble Hill
A masked man with a gun and no badge looks exactly like a carjacker, and our government is dressing him that way on purpose.
On Thursday afternoon in the Marble Hill neighborhood of New York, a 28 year old man named Oscar Belgal was pulling into a parking spot on a crowded street, minutes after the local schools let out, with his five year old son in the back seat. According to the New York City Police Commissioner, a plainclothes officer walked up with his gun already drawn, followed by a second officer who also wore no uniform, and at least one of the agents carried a long gun. Belgal pulled forward. One or more agents fired at least seven rounds and hit him in the neck, right under his left ear, with his little boy a few feet away.
The Mayor of New York said it in plain words. The men who surrounded that car wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces, and there was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents.
Put yourself in that driver’s seat for a second. Strangers in masks and work vests try to trap your car on a busy street. One of them walks at you with a gun in his hand. Your son is sitting behind you. Every instinct you have as a parent tells you to get your kid out of there, and that instinct nearly cost Oscar Belgal his life.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul answered that her state has over 500 police agencies making hundreds of thousands of arrests a year, and they do not fire into vehicles without knowing who is inside. Belgal’s own lawyer put it in courtroom terms. A man’s criminal history gives no agent license to shoot a father on a crowded afternoon street with his son behind him.
He lived. His lawyers say a bullet is still in his body. Federal immigration agents have opened fire in at least thirty shootings since Trump returned to office. They have killed at least nine people, four of them American citizens, and wounded at least thirteen more.
Every Honest Cop Knows the Difference
I have tried cases since 1986. I have represented good cops, and I have sued bad ones and won. I have family and friends who wear a badge for a living, and I know from years of listening to their stories and years of cross examining officers in courtrooms that the work carries real danger and real responsibility. I mean that. I have also gone through ICE rules and local police protocols line by line, and what you and I are watching on television matches nothing in them that looks like America.
So let me tell you what every honest cop already knows. A raid on a fortified drug compound calls for force, and you go in hard because the men inside shoot back. Rolling up in masks on people like Oscar Belgal in a city neighborhood or day laborers in a Home Depot parking lot belongs in a different category entirely, and dressing like a robbery crew to do it is pathetic. These are people living their everyday lives or possibly even waiting for a day of work, standing out in the open, in broad daylight. Nobody on that street or in that parking lot is El Chapo. Give me a break.
Masks make sense in a narrow set of cases. An agent working undercover inside a violent cartel investigation needs to protect his identity. Agents facing credible, documented threats after a major takedown deserve protection too. I said exactly this back in the spring of 2025 when I first asked why ICE agents hide their faces, and I stand by it today. Nobody wants an officer hurt or their family put at risk for doing a legitimate job.
But here’s the deal. Police officers across this country deal with gang members and dangerous armed suspects every single day, and they rarely cover their faces. They understand their job is to serve and protect the public, and a visible face is part of that promise. The mask, in American policing, has stayed the rare exception for as long as I have practiced law. That rule is one of the things that has always set this country apart from regimes that govern by fear.
Kandahar in a Grocery Store Parking Lot
Turn on the news and you see agents in black military gear with their faces covered, swarming working people at construction sites and grocery stores, kicking in doors like they are clearing a compound in Kandahar when the person they want washes dishes for a living. We have watched fathers tackled and punched in Home Depot parking lots. In Los Angeles, agents rammed the car of an American carpenter named Christian Cerna and pointed assault rifles at it with his infant and toddler inside, and a federal judge later called the operation a vindictive effort to punish him outside the law.
In Chicago, agents followed a preschool teacher into her daycare at morning drop off and forced her out with her arms pinned behind her back, in front of parents holding their kids. Homeland Security insists that arrest happened in the entryway. Families showed up voluntarily for their scheduled immigration hearings, did exactly what the government asked of them, sat in those hallways waiting for their names to be called, and walked out in handcuffs or watched someone they love get led away for good, until a federal judge in Manhattan barred most of those courthouse arrests this past spring. Think about that. Our own government is treating these human beings like enemy combatants.
You’ve probably seen this unrelated video clip. A woman sits in her car while ICE agents pull one vehicle in front of her and another behind her and box her in, and then a federal agent turns his weapon on her.
Rolling up on a vehicle like this, and blocking its path of travel or, approaching a parked car with guns drawn, and then opening fire, isn’t OK. It happens in authoritarian countries, not America. Or at least that used to be the case.
I did a deep dive on many of the related constitutional issues in these two posts about the tragic deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.1
When it comes to filming federal officers, including masked ICE agents, nearly every federal appeals court has ruled that the First Amendment protects your right to record officers doing their jobs in public. Pointing a gun at someone for using that right attacks the Constitution that agent swore to uphold.2
The Mask Sends a Message
Nobody puts on a black balaclava and hangs off the side of a truck to blend in. Dressing up like a special operations unit makes no agent better at arresting a busboy. It makes him scarier, and scary is the whole point.
The message lands loud and clear on every block they hit. Be afraid and be silent. Don’t film us and don’t talk back. Step out of line and we will slam you to the ground and drag you away from your kids in front of the whole block, and nobody will know where you went or what happened to you until it is far too late to help.
Picture a child watching a dozen masked men drag the neighbor away in handcuffs. That image, a kid carries it for years. The damage reaches far past the person in cuffs and eats away at the trust every one of us places in our system of justice.
Who Answers for This
Follow the logic. Federal rules already require immigration agents to identify themselves as soon as it is practical and safe, and an agent who refuses to show his face during a routine arrest of an unarmed worker is telling you, loud and clear, that he expects to do something on that sidewalk he would rather not answer for in a courtroom or a newspaper later on. He is worried about excessive force claims and unlawful detentions coming back to him by name. Our democracy runs on transparency, and every masked arrest wears it down a little more.
If you need a mask to arrest a man sitting in a car, standing in a parking lot looking for work or clearing tables at a diner, the only thing you are protecting is your own cowardice.
We Have Seen This Movie Before
This is Donald Trump’s America, run straight off the Project 2025 playbook, and the goal behind these masked raids is plain to anyone paying attention, because it is the same goal authoritarian governments have chased for a century in country after country. We have seen this before. Terrorize immigrants and silence dissent. Dehumanize anyone who looks different or dares to challenge authority, and turn the nation’s fear into a political weapon.
Authoritarian leaders always dress up cruelty as protection. There is nothing protective about storming a the front lawn of a family with brown or black skin, with assault rifles and ski masks. There isn’t anything patriotic about bullying a landscaper at gunpoint in front of his coworkers. Agents doing this are using the color of authority to frighten people who lack the power to fight back.
I am a lawyer. I believe in order and public safety, and I have worked alongside law enforcement professionals who are brave and principled. What I see on our streets today has nothing to do with protecting the public or enforcing the law. It is weakness dressed up as dominance, and it is what a government looks like when it turns on its own people.
The longer we allow it, the more normal it becomes, and fewer people talk about it every month. We are drifting toward a country where uniforms carry no names and badges stay hidden, a country where citizens get treated as threats for simply existing.
A free country has no need for masked men with guns to arrest a mother or father dropping their kids off at school.
Masks Off
Here is the fix, and it fits on an index card. If the arrest is routine, the agent’s face stays visible. His full name and badge number go on his chest where you and I see them, the standard uniformed police across this country already follow. Period. Sending a dozen men in tactical gear to grab one mother on a suburban sidewalk would end the day this rule took hold.
New York tried to fix this on its own. The state passed a law banning masks and requiring visible identification for federal agents, and in August a federal judge put both rules on hold while the case plays out. States have limited power over federal agents, so the real fix has to come from Congress, which writes the rules those agents follow.
Last year I warned that the next time someone pulled that trigger, it would end up as a headline and a funeral, and the person paying the price would be a worker, a parent, a neighbor, maybe a citizen, maybe your neighbor. On Thursday in Marble Hill it came within inches of exactly that, with a five year old watching from the back seat, and at least nine people across this country have already died from these shootings. This madness stops when we flip Congress next month and through the power of oversight and subpoena, and the power of the purse, we take back some control in this matter. We put people in charge who believe in the law and in your rights, because right now the people running this show believe in neither.
Print this out for the next argument at your dinner table, and vote in November like the next father sitting in that driver’s seat with his kid in the back is counting on you, because he is.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
P.S. In May 2025, I asked my community how they felt about masked ICE agents. Their answer was loud and clear. See it below.
Let’s keep fighting until we can’t fight any longer. Your support by subscribing, sharing, commenting and upgrading to paid means the world to me. I’m going to keep at it until we fix these problems once and for all.
I can only hope that these victims start filing the biggest lawsuits in US History. Going after the agency, and the ICE officers personally. Go after their pensions, and personal assets.
This can not be done in our name. Vote early, encourage your neighbors. No more official terrorists paid by US taxpayers.