The NYPD received 9,645 ICE detainers in the year ending June 30 and honored exactly zero of them, according to the department's own annual report. That number sits behind last Thursday's ICE shooting in Marble Hill, where federal officers tried to arrest a Dominican national on the street instead of at a police precinct. Read the city law line by line and it shows something the coverage missed: the man's 2023 plea deal moved him off the short list of offenders New York City will ever cooperate on.

What Happened on West 225th Street

At about 4 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 8, ICE officers moved in on a car near West 225th Street and Marble Hill Avenue, a sliver of Manhattan attached to the Bronx. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said city cameras show a plainclothes federal officer walking up to the driver's window with his gun drawn as a second officer approached the front of the car. The car then moved forward, and one ICE officer fired seven rounds, hitting the 28-year-old driver in the neck, CBS New York reported.

The man, identified by authorities as Oscar Bergal (first reported as Belgal), survived with non-life-threatening injuries. His 5-year-old son was in the back seat and was not hurt. At a Friday news conference, DHS officials said Bergal refused orders to get out of the car and that the officer did not know a child was inside, according to CBS. The FBI and Homeland Security Investigations are handling the investigation, and no findings on the use of force have been released.

DHS Says Sanctuary Policy Put Him Back on the Street

DHS described Bergal as a "criminal illegal alien" with "a prior criminal conviction for grand larceny, and multiple prior arrests for assault, robbery, possession of drugs, and weapons possession," and said he has associations with the Trinitarios gang. The agency's statement said the NYPD arrested him on Dec. 7, 2023, "but was released into the community a few days later by reckless Democrat sanctuary policies."

"When dangerous illegal aliens are released back onto the streets by radical sanctuary politicians, our officers are forced to make arrests at large in the community in unpredictable and dangerous environments," DHS said, as The National News Desk reported. On Friday, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin called Bergal "the worst of the worst" and said, "When you have sanctuary cities and sanctuary politicians, you endanger the safety of the public," according to 6sqft's account of the briefing, which cites the New York Times.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani answered in the opposite direction. In an official statement he called the shooting "unconscionable" and closed with "Abolish ICE." He said he spent two hours on the phone with President Trump and Secretary Mullin trying to get Bergal released. He did not succeed.

The NYPD's Own Numbers: 9,645 Detainers, Zero Honored

City law requires the NYPD to publish a yearly count of ICE detainers, the requests ICE sends asking a jail or police department to hold someone up to 48 hours past release so federal officers can pick them up. The report for July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026 is one page long. It lists 9,645 detainers received. People held past release: 0. People transferred to ICE: 0. Detainers not honored under city law: 9,645.

It goes further than holds. The report also counts responses to ICE requests for basic information such as release dates and court dates. Every line is zero, including the line for people with at least one conviction for a violent or serious crime, which is the one category city law carves out for cooperation.

Four Years, 13,583 Detainers, Not One Honored

The earlier reports tell the same story at a smaller scale. The NYPD received 167 detainers in the year ending June 2023 and 99 in the year ending June 2024, the period that covers Bergal's December 2023 arrest. Then the second Trump administration took over. The count jumped to 3,672 in the year ending June 2025 and to 9,645 this year. That is nearly 100 times the 2024 figure.

Add the four years together and ICE sent the NYPD 13,583 detainers. Every report lists zero people held and zero people transferred. The House Judiciary Committee raised the city's Department of Correction record in a May 27 letter, saying the jails honored "less than four percent" of detainers from mid-2022 to mid-2025. The NYPD's figure is lower still. It is zero.

The Plea Deal That Took Him Off the List

Here is the part no one has spelled out. Under NYC Administrative Code 14-154, the NYPD may honor a detainer, or even tell ICE when someone is being released, only if two things are both true. ICE must present a judicial warrant signed by a federal judge or magistrate. And a records check must show the person was convicted of a "violent or serious crime" or is a possible terrorist watch list match.

"Violent or serious crime" is not a general phrase. It is a list of specific New York Penal Law sections. Robbery in the first, second and third degree (sections 160.15, 160.10 and 160.05) are on it. Grand larceny in the fourth degree, Penal Law 155.30, is not. Neither is any other grand larceny section.

Now line that up with Bergal's record. Tisch said he was arrested on a robbery charge in 2023 and later pleaded guilty to fourth-degree larceny, and the Associated Press reported he was sentenced to probation. The only fourth-degree larceny in New York law is grand larceny in the fourth degree, a class E felony. That squares with DHS's "grand larceny" description, so the city and the feds agree on the conviction itself.

What that means is simple. Had the robbery charge stuck, he would have a listed conviction, and the NYPD could have cooperated if ICE brought a judge's warrant. Pleaded down to grand larceny, he does not. Under the city's own rule, no warrant ICE could get would have let the NYPD hold him or even pick up the phone. When he was arrested in December 2023, he had not been convicted of anything at all.

What We Don't Know Yet

Some honesty is owed here. Neither DHS nor the NYPD has said publicly whether ICE actually lodged a detainer on Bergal in December 2023 or after his August 2025 arrest, which CBS says involved the alleged sale of cocaine and fentanyl in Manhattan. That drug case is pending, he has pleaded not guilty, and he is presumed innocent of it. The Trinitarios link is DHS's allegation. And whether the officer's seven shots were justified is for the investigators, not for us.

The 9,645 figure is also the NYPD's alone. DHS has cited a larger total, nearly 15,000 unhonored detainers in New York, but we could not locate the release or the data behind it, so we have not relied on it. The city's list of serious crimes was compiled in 2018. A 2019 Department of Correction rule proposal covered newly enacted crimes, not the long-standing larceny statute.

Where the Case Goes Now

Bergal's lawyers say he was arrested without a valid warrant and filed a habeas corpus petition. On Friday, U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken barred his removal from the country and blocked ICE from moving him outside the Southern or Eastern Districts of New York or New Jersey without court approval, CBS reported. He was moved from a New Jersey facility to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

The politics will run hot through the Nov. 3 midterms. But the paperwork answers the question at the center of it. New York City got almost ten thousand chances last year to hand someone over at a police station, where nobody has a car and nobody has a child in the back seat. It took none of them. Until that changes, every ICE arrest in the city is going to look like Marble Hill: on the street, in plain clothes, with city police showing up only after the shots.

Top photo: One Police Plaza, headquarters of the New York City Police Department, in Lower Manhattan, May 2026. (Ajay Suresh, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)