Scott MechkowskiI taught use of force. I know the difference between a use-of-force review and a press conference. Too many people with microphones have forgotten, and some never knew, the difference.
Austin showed how this works. On September 20, an ICE officer shot a Venezuelan man, Wilber Garcés Pérez, in North Austin. Within the hour, an Austin council member was telling reporters that an ICE vehicle had rammed his car and that the agent had fired at least five times through the back windshield. Austin’s own police chief contradicted that account on the spot. By then a crowd had formed. The mayor, Kirk Watson, was at the podium within hours, saying he wasn’t surprised, because ICE was rogue and fomenting chaos. Nobody in that room had seen the footage.
The next day, Garcés Pérez’s attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, held a press conference and went on national television with a specific story. A black truck had sideswiped his car; there were no lights, and he had no idea who was behind him. Members of Congress stood beside her and demanded answers. On X, she wrote that “we all know” the force wasn’t necessary, before anyone had seen a frame of footage.
Then the video surfaced. It showed a traffic stop before the shooting. Garcés Pérez was already stopped, two agents were at his driver’s window, and at least one unmarked SUV had its lights on. Asked by a local paper to walk through what happened, the attorney said she couldn’t confidently tell the chain of events. She had already told the country, with total confidence, that the sideswipe was how it began. Federal prosecutors allege he struck an officer with his side mirror and later tried to hit an officer with his car. He says he was looking for a safe place to pull over, and a court will decide that. The first version had a head start on every correction, and nobody has made her unsay it.
New York ran the same play on Thursday. In Marble Hill, an ICE officer fired seven rounds and hit the driver, Oscar Belgal, in the neck. His 5-year-old son was in the back seat and was not hurt. DHS says Belgal is a Dominican national here illegally, with a grand larceny conviction and a string of arrests, and alleges gang ties.
Here is what the crowd demanding abolition skipped. In a use-of-force review, nobody asks about the car. You ask about the man driving it. A vehicle driven at an officer is a deadly weapon, and I taught officers to treat it that way. The NYPD commissioner said that after plainclothes officers approached Belgal’s car, it started to move, and that the ICE sedan was left with its front panel damaged and hanging. DHS hasn’t yet said what that officer saw in that moment. That question decides this case: was the man behind the wheel using his car as a weapon against an officer? The footage will answer it.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani didn’t wait. That night he stood in front of cameras and called ICE rotten to its core and said the agency must be abolished, before anyone had seen a second of video. He also spent two hours on the phone with the president of the United States and the secretary of Homeland Security trying to get Belgal released. The mayor of the biggest city in America used his standing to try to spring a man DHS says has that record, with no footage, no investigation, and no idea what that officer was looking at. Councilmember Tiffany Cabán also called for abolishing ICE. Governor Kathy Hochul urged the White House to halt enforcement operations in New York. Not one of them had the facts. They all had the conclusion. The only official who gave the public real facts that night was the police commissioner, who laid out what the cameras showed and what they didn’t. That is more than the mayor did.
Nobody following his career should be surprised. In 2020, Mamdani wrote that the NYPD was racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety. He said it was an institution too wicked and corrupt to negotiate with, and he called for defunding it. He ran for mayor promising to abolish the department’s Strategic Response Group, and he still says he will. When the old posts resurfaced the week an NYPD officer was killed in a Midtown shooting, he said he wasn’t running to defund the police. The apology arrived when it started costing him votes. An apology on that schedule doesn’t erase what he said. It tells you what he believed the day before. Thursday told you what he believes now. When police work and his politics point in different directions, he knows which one he stands with, and it isn’t the one wearing the badge.
Look at who stood between the crowd and a federal officer that night. According to the Daily News, a group pinned a masked agent against the police tape until NYPD officers pulled him out. Police arrested four people at the hospital for obstructing the government. Those are the officers of the same department whose crowd-control unit the mayor promised to disband. He wants a police force he can use when it suits him and a villain to point at when it doesn’t.
Six days before Marble Hill, off-duty NYPD Detective Jose Mercedes was clearing out his trunk in the Bronx when two men on an e-bike went for the gold chain around his neck. He was stabbed or slashed seven times in the torso, neck, and leg. The blade missed his vital organs. He chased the men on foot for two blocks before he collapsed.
Police named the suspects as D’Angelo Caraballo and Sneider Mejia Bautista, both Dominican nationals. DHS says they crossed the Arizona border in 2022 and 2023 and were released. DHS also says ICE tried to lodge a detainer on Mejia Bautista after an earlier arrest, and the NYPD declined to honor it. The U.S. Marshals and NYPD detectives found both men hiding in a basement in Lynn, Massachusetts. They are presumed innocent, but the detainer question is one the city should have to answer.
Mamdani visited the detective in the hospital, and I’ll give him that. I haven’t heard him ask why the city wouldn’t honor a detainer on a man with prior arrests. I haven’t heard him call for any change. He had a conclusion ready for the shooting. The detective had a hospital visit. I can guess why. An officer bleeding on a sidewalk doesn’t advance the argument he came into office making.
The coverage followed the same pattern. The story of who these men were was told mostly by independent journalists, while the shooting in Marble Hill got wall-to-wall attention.
After 24 years, I don’t believe such a consistent pattern is an accident. In Austin, the claims were out, and the protesters were in the street within hours. In New York, “Abolish ICE” was out the same night. Both times the conclusion arrived before the footage. I can’t tell you whether anyone sat in a room and planned it, and a pattern like this doesn’t need a planning meeting. Officials who treat the first hour of a shooting like a campaign event want people acting on emotion, because a person acting on emotion never asks what the video shows. Officers don’t get to work like that, and the people who govern them shouldn’t either.
Abolishing ICE doesn’t make the people ICE is looking for disappear. They are still out there. Detective Mercedes got up out of a wheelchair and walked out of that hospital on his own two feet in front of hundreds of cops. The least this city owes him is the same insistence on facts it demands for everyone else.
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Scott Mechkowski served more than 24 years in federal immigration enforcement, retiring as deputy field office director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City. He is a visiting fellow for deportation studies at the Oversight Project.
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