A press conference held on Friday gave Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin an opportunity to address questions about the conduct of ICE agents, with the gathering connected to the fatal shooting of a Dominican man in the Bronx and an ongoing dispute between federal immigration enforcement authorities and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani over how immigration policy should be applied.
Mullin described Oscar Bergal, 28, who was shot and wounded by ICE agents in the Bronx on Thursday, as someone with a lengthy record of prior offences who had been attempting to flee from custody. The Homeland Security secretary noted that Bergal had entered the country through legal channels some years earlier before accumulating a series of criminal convictions.
A neck laceration left Bergal requiring hospital treatment, though the injury was described as not penetrating deeply into tissue. A five-year-old boy who was seated inside the vehicle throughout the incident escaped without any physical injury. According to Mullin, the ICE officers who discharged their weapons had no awareness that a child was present in the vehicle at the time.
Marcos Charles, a senior ICE official, told reporters gathered at the press conference that Bergal had not complied with lawful directives to exit his vehicle, had then accelerated into two agency vehicles, and had subsequently steered toward additional officers. Charles said that sequence of actions led those officers, drawing on their training and a judgment that their own lives and the lives of colleagues and bystanders faced immediate risk, to open fire.
Mamdani, running as a Democrat, publicly opposed the shooting and announced plans to petition the Trump administration to suspend ICE enforcement activity in New York. He separately posted on X a call for the agency's abolition. Mullin countered by questioning what mechanism would exist to remove from city streets those he characterised as violent offenders, thieves, and gang members should ICE cease to exist.
Mullin described Mamdani's remarks as inciting hostility. Several hundred people gathered at the shooting location on Thursday evening in a peaceful protest against the administration's immigration enforcement policies.
Relations between the two men shifted noticeably after Trump, who belongs to the Republican Party, voiced objections to Mamdani ahead of his January assumption of office. New York is among several US cities that have adopted policies preventing local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement operations.
Two US citizens were among those fatally shot during ICE operations in Minneapolis in 2025, an event that drew public protests, as part of a broader pattern of shooting incidents involving the agency that year.
