Two Hours on the Phone With Trump, and Mamdani Gets No Deal

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood near a crowd of protesters in the Bronx late Thursday night and told reporters he had spent the previous two hours on the phone with President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, trying to get a wounded man out of federal custody. He did not get what he wanted.

The man is a 28-year-old Dominican national whom the NYPD identified as the person shot in the neck by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer around 4 p.m. Thursday in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx. Police believe a 5-year-old child in the car was his son. The child was not hurt.

The shooting set off the sharpest clash yet between City Hall and federal immigration authorities operating in New York. Mamdani called ICE "rotten to its core" and demanded that the administration halt all immigration enforcement in the city. The administration's answer, delivered by Mullin at a Friday press conference, was that federal officers are enforcing the law.

What the cameras caught, and what they didn't

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch laid out the department's account Friday, based on city camera footage. The man was in the driver's seat of a gray Honda CR-V, backing into a parking spot. A plainclothes ICE agent approached the driver's side window with his gun drawn. A second plainclothes agent moved toward the driver's side headlight as the vehicle rolled forward and out of the camera's frame. At least one agent fired seven rounds. One struck the driver in the neck, just below his left ear.

The shooting itself was not captured on the city's cameras, Tisch said, which leaves the central question — what the agents saw in the instant before they fired — resting on the accounts of the people involved. The National News Desk's report linked to a separate account in which Mullin said officers feared for their lives; that characterization has not been independently confirmed. The Associated Press reported that the Department of Homeland Security described a "targeted enforcement operation" and said an ICE officer discharged his weapon during the incident. Patriot Daily Wire has not reviewed the DHS statement directly.

Responding NYPD officers arrived to find men in construction-style vests and face masks, at least one carrying a long gun. As Tisch described it, "officers also encountered the injured individual handcuffed and seated on the ground." She was emphatic on one point: the NYPD had no involvement in the federal operation before the shooting. City officers rendered aid and took the wounded man to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, where he arrived in stable condition.

The negotiation nobody can corroborate

By late evening, according to Mamdani, unmarked ICE vehicles had removed the man from the hospital. The mayor then went before cameras near the protest, where demonstrators chanted "complicit."

"For the past two hours, I've been on the phone with President Trump and [Homeland Security] Secretary Mullin negotiating the release of the man ICE agents shot. Those negotiations were unsuccessful."

Mamdani added that there is "no explanation for federal officers firing this many rounds into a car that has a 5-year-old in the car."

Mullin told it differently on Friday, saying Trump had offered to hand the man over to the NYPD and that Mamdani responded he would not be detained. That account rests on Mullin alone and has not been confirmed by City Hall. The secretary's broader message was blunter: "The men and women at ICE each day are enforcing the laws that he refuses to enforce."

No transcript of the calls has been released, and the only two descriptions of them come from the officials on opposite ends of the line.

The record and the allegation

DHS says ICE was attempting to arrest the man and that he has ties to the Trinitarios, the Dominican street gang founded on Rikers Island in the early 1990s. No charging document supporting that claim has surfaced, and at this writing it remains an agency assertion.

The criminal history is more concrete. The NYPD told the New York Post that the man was arrested for robbery in 2023 and pleaded guilty to fourth-degree grand larceny, drawing five years' probation. A separate arrest last year for criminal sale of a controlled substance is still pending.

His current condition, where he is being held, whether he faces new charges and whether he has been placed in removal proceedings are all unconfirmed. The Hill reported that Sen. Chuck Schumer called the incident "deeply disturbing," an account this outlet has not independently verified. Gov. Kathy Hochul was reported to have joined the calls for ICE operations to stop, also unverified.

Fox News and The National News Desk both covered the standoff, with the Sinclair syndicate running Natalia Mittelstadt's account of the dueling Mamdani and Mullin press conferences through Friday midday.

What comes next will be decided mostly outside City Hall: whether federal prosecutors bring charges, what ICE's internal use-of-force review concludes, and whether the DHS inspector general or the Bronx district attorney opens an inquiry. New York's civilian review board has no jurisdiction over federal officers.