On Thursday afternoon, Oscar Belgal became one of the more than 20 people shot by an immigration agent during President Donald Trump’s second term. And like most of them, Belgal was shot while he was inside a car.
The man from the Dominican Republic was with his 5-year-old son in New York City when an ICE agent fired shots at his vehicle, wounding Belgal, authorities said. Belgal’s son was unharmed. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Marcos Charles said Belgal was associated with a gang and accelerated his car towards ICE agents, according to The New York Times. Mayor Zohran Mandani, in a statement, called the shooting an “unconscionable and incredibly serious situation.”
In September, Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was pulled over in a traffic stop in Austin, Texas, while he was trying to deliver food for DoorDash. The Venezuelan man was the second person to be shot by an ICE officer in Texas since July. The shooting triggered local protests, and it was decried by activists who saw it as part of a broader pattern of excessive force used by federal agents enforcing immigration. More than 100 members of Congress signed a letter calling for “accountability and transparency” in the wake of Perez’s shooting.
The shooting of Perez, and now Belgal, which involved agents firing into vehicles, used tactics that law enforcement agencies have discouraged for decades because of the danger they present to officers and the public.
These types of shootings are increasingly familiar scenarios to immigrant rights advocates across the country. They’ve been warning community members that ICE is scouting people as they go about their daily routines and targeting them for enforcement and removal operations when they commute to and from work or deliver food.
Other shootings in similar circumstances were already under scrutiny earlier this year. Following the ICE killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was shot while driving in Maine, the Trump administration briefly paused the practice of vehicle stops altogether.
Shootings like those of Perez and Guerrero appear to conflict with the Department of Homeland Security’s use of force policy, which prohibits officers “from discharging firearms at the operator of a moving vehicle...” After Perez’s shooting, ICE issued additional guidance on traffic stops via an internal memo that reminds officers to activate lights and sirens and to turn on body cameras. It also bars officers from chasing fleeing vehicles and restricts officers from making vehicle stops unless they’ve completed specific training.
Much of what’s in the memo can be found in policies in law enforcement agencies across the country. Instead of firing on a moving car and potentially putting bystanders in danger, police officers are generally trained to get out of a vehicle’s path of travel and regroup.
The New York Police Department was one of the first to create a specific policy around the shooting of moving vehicles in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the killing of an 11-year-old boy named Rickey Bodden, who had been joyriding with friends in a stolen car in Staten Island. As one of the youngest people shot by a New York City patrolman, his shooting sparked protest and was a catalyst for regulations that prohibited police from using guns to stop a speeding car.
According to the Police Executive Research Forum, a research organization that focuses on policing, that policy change contributed to an immediate drop in shootings in the city, from nearly 1,000 a year in 1972 to 665 the following year. This fits a broader pattern police researchers have explored. In 2016, criminologists William Terrill and Eugene A. Paoline III conducted a study analyzing use-of-force incidents in three different police departments with policies of varying rigor. They found that “officers working in the agency with the least restrictive, or loosely coupled policy, were most apt to use force.”
Law enforcement agencies across the country have adopted policies on shooting moving cars like New York’s. Last year, Hawaii codified its policy into state law, barring officers in the state from firing “a weapon at, into, or from a moving vehicle.” Similar to New York City in the 1970s, the impetus for Hawaii’s restrictions was a police chase of teenagers. Although no firearms were discharged in the pursuit, the teens were severely injured after they crashed their car.
Such policies have also been embraced by the law enforcement profession out of a concern for the safety of officers. Shooting a person driving a car can turn that car into what experts describe as an “unguided missile” that can be much more dangerous to the police once the driver is incapacitated.
Amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, experts believe it’s unlikely that federal agents involved in these shooting incidents were unaware of or had never been trained on limitations on shooting at cars. Instead, they point to an array of factors that could lead to incidents like the fatal shooting of Renee Good, who was killed in her SUV during an immigration operation in a Minneapolis suburb.
Criminologist Geoffrey P. Alpert noted that policies are never ironclad. Instead, they have caveats “wide enough to drive a truck through,” he said. Even back in the 1970s, New York’s policy allowed for officers to shoot at moving vehicles if they believed the suspected person was using or threatening deadly force by means other than the vehicle itself. And the department has had notable shootings of moving vehicles since the policy was adopted, including Sean Bell, who was shot 50 times by police in 2006. The police claimed Bell hit a police minivan with his Nissan Altima before they opened fire.
Today’s policies typically allow officers to use deadly force to stop people using their cars as weapons. These caveats are often written with terror attacks in mind, especially after a driver in Manhattan plowed a truck down a bike path in 2017, killing eight people. The Department of Homeland Security in particular allows for agents to use deadly force to prevent the escape of “a fleeing subject where the [law enforcement officer] has a reasonable belief that the subject poses a significant threat of death or serious physical harm.”
While these caveats can seem sensible, criminologist Samantha Jones Simon said that they can become a script for officers looking to legitimize a shooting. She saw officers being trained on how to frame their use-of-force around these caveats in reports while she attended local police academy trainings as she researched and wrote her book, “Before the Badge: How Academy Training Shapes Police Violence.” “When they teach traffic stops, they know what kind of legal language they need to use around justifying force, with terms like ‘I feared for my life,’ ‘I feared for my safety,’” she explained.
The Trump administration has used similar justifications after ICE shootings, well before actual investigations had gotten underway. For example, within hours of the shooting of Guerrero, Homeland Security initially said that he had ‘weaponized’ his vehicle against federal agents. But no video has been released that has substantiated that characterization. ICE later said that Guerrero was shot because he was attempting to flee and posed a threat to public safety.
But even if training focuses on the most generous aim of these policies, there is no guarantee that the training will stick with officers on the street.
In 2001, crime and justice researcher Michael D. White conducted a study on the impact of administrative policy on use of force by focusing on the Philadelphia police department between 1970 and 1992, a time period when they vacillated between having a highly restrictive use of force policy and a very lax and open-ended policy. According to White, the rate of elective shootings remained consistent. And he concluded that, “Officers had been engaged in a pervasive pattern of unnecessary, excessive use of force in the years before the policy change. Essentially, findings suggest that few noticed when the department formally removed the policy because they were not adhering to it anyway.” White did find that later on, when a policy change was coupled with a shift in culture and administrative directives and focus, it did have an impact on behavior, but he noted that changing the handbook alone did little to shift the outcomes.
Criminologist Seth Stoughton said this phenomenon played out very clearly in special units in local law enforcement, like the Los Angeles Police Department’s antigang street-crime unit known as Crash, which was disbanded in 2000 after it was revealed to be plagued by pervasive brutality and coercing false testimony.
More recently, Stoughton pointed to the Memphis Police Department’s Scorpion unit, which patrolled high crime hotspots and, like Crash, had long faced criticism for excessive force. Scorpion was disbanded in 2023, after officers from the unit killed 29-year-old Tyre Nichols following a traffic stop. Stoughton noted that the officers in these disbanded units were subject to the same policy and received the same training as the rest of their police department, but they developed their own unique culture and tactics inside their unit.
“They start to normalize bad tactics that are actually contrary to training,” he said. “Historically, when we see this problem come up, it’s because the agency gets focused on numbers and they seek a quantity of crime-fighting statistics without sufficient attention to the quality of what the unit is doing or how they are doing it.”
Like the civic leaders who supported those controversial units, Trump has clearly placed a high priority on statistics in his immigration enforcement. He and officials in his administration have publicly called for the arrest of 3,000 people a day. Although ICE officials have denied the implementation of quotas in court, when they were sued by states raising alarms over the immigration sweeps, the number of immigration arrests to help hit those deportation numbers have climbed to record highs, with more than 50,000 in August. Both Stoughton and Alpert believe this emphasis on statistics can cause officers to prioritize their numbers over other concerns, like community safety or constitutional rights.
Not everybody agrees that imperatives from executives like Trump have any real bearing on officers in the field. Lewis “Von” Kliem, a former police officer who has taught at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and now works as the president of Force Science, a research and consulting firm that supports the law enforcement industry, believes that whatever the president is saying has no bearing on how officers comport themselves in interactions with motorists.
Instead, Kliem thinks the spirit that draws officers to policing is their guiding light. “I would never assume for purposes of evaluation that any officer is being driven by statistics,” he said. “Most police are getting into the job thinking they're wearing the white hat, that they're going to go out there and destroy evil.”
For Kliem, the biggest factor in whether an officer fires at a car is the specific scenario of the incident. He sees these department policies that limit the use of force as the police profession regulating itself beyond what is actually permissible by the Constitution in an effort to mitigate risk and kowtow to political whims. At the end of the day, he notes that becoming a police officer doesn’t relinquish an officer’s right to defend themselves from bodily harm, even if a department policy encourages them to “get out the way.”
“There's always benefits to shooting at motor vehicles to the degree they pose a threat of serious bodily injury or death,” he told me. “Officers often have to make decisions and choices only among bad options.”
When these shootings are investigated internally and when they come into courtrooms, he believes that while they are not always viewed as reasonable, they will often be deemed legal.
For Alpert and Stoughton, the likelihood that a shooting involving a moving vehicle will be deemed legal and reasonable is one of the factors that they believe can precipitate more unnecessary shootings.
“Accountability is the worst problem,” Alpert said. He pointed to the fact that before the government even began to engage in investigations into some of its shootings, Trump and officials like former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and former Commander-at-large for the Border Patrol Greg Bovino would attest to the legality and reasonableness of an agent’s actions.
“It doesn't matter what the training is and it doesn't matter what the policy is, if you don't have someone enforcing those standards, then the standards exist purely on paper,” said Stoughton. “Now, the message Trump officials send when they make statements before an investigation is that the agency does not care about investigating these incidents.”