The White House on Saturday slammed New York City’s sanctuary policies after ICE agents shot a criminal migrant in the Bronx during an arrest attempt.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis, 28, fired off a blistering statement tying the city’s immigrant protections to violent crime and what she called preventable deaths. “Radical Democrat politicians must stop releasing criminal illegal aliens from jails into our communities,” she wrote. “These reckless policies have consequences and far too often they are the death of innocent Americans. Extreme Democrats must stop putting criminal illegal aliens above American citizens.”
The administration is vigorously defending the ICE agents who opened fire on Oscar Belgal, 28, a Dominican migrant with a lengthy criminal record who had remained on the streets under New York’s bail and sanctuary policies. Belgal is believed to have entered the US illegally around 2022, robbed someone at gunpoint in Fordham Heights a year later, and was convicted in 2025. Within months, he was allegedly caught selling drugs, and sources say he is tied to a violent street gang.
White House border czar Tom Homan took to Fox News Saturday to defend the agents who shot at Belgal’s vehicle while his 5-year-old son sat in the back seat. “They performed exactly as they were trained,” Homan told the network. “This man tried to run an officer over. He feared for his life, so he took action,” Homan added that “many of these instances could be avoided if they’d simply give us access to the bad guy in the safety and security of the jail rather than release him into the community.”
The Belgal case is one of several the administration has highlighted to argue that local authorities’ refusal to cooperate with immigration enforcement leaves dangerous suspects at large.
D’Angelo Caraballo and Sneider Mejia Bautista, the migrants accused in the stabbing of off-duty NYPD Det. Jose Mercedes last week, had been previously arrested on separate charges and released. Authorities say they pulled up to Mercedes on an e-bike and tried to snatch his gold chain; when he fought back, he was stabbed seven times.
Cristian Aybar-Berroa, 22, and Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez, 21, the suspects who shot an off-duty Customs and Border Protection agent during a July moped robbery in Fort Washington Park in Manhattan, had also been arrested by the NYPD and released. Aybar-Berroa, who entered the country illegally in 2022 during a crush of migration under the Biden administration, was cuffed eight times by the NYPD after a federal immigration judge ordered he be deported in 2023 — getting released each time. Mora Nunez had multiple arrests in New York, including a pair in August 2024 after allegedly assaulting a pregnant woman, and was wanted on weapons and kidnapping charges in Massachusetts.
Richard Williams, an 83-year-old Air Force veteran, died from a brain bleed after being shoved onto the F/Q subway tracks in Manhattan in March by Honduran migrant Bairon Posada-Hernandez, who had been deported four times. Police called Posada-Hernandez a “serial criminal” with at least 15 charges including simple assault, domestic violence, and obstruction of justice.
José Antonio Ibarra, a Tren de Aragua member who murdered nursing student Laken Riley, 22, while she was jogging at the University of Georgia in 2024, had been arrested and released by the NYPD the year before for driving a scooter with his 2-year-old, who wasn’t wearing a helmet, on the back. He was also wanted on an arrest warrant in Georgia.
Retired NYPD detective Michael Alcazar, now an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, warned that sanctuary policies carry risks beyond the courtroom. “Several states have challenged federal immigration enforcement in ways that, in my view, create unnecessary risks for civilians,” Alcazar said. “By prohibing local police from assisting ICE during operations, they limit the ability to maintain a safe and controlled environment.”
The cases have become central ammunition in the wider fight over sanctuary-city policies, with federal officials pressing local authorities to hand over suspects to immigration enforcement before releasing them.