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A democratic socialist congressional candidate claimed it “doesn’t even matter” that the illegal immigrant wounded by ICE agents has a violent criminal history — and accused the NYPD of villainizing him.
DSA darling Darializa Avila-Chevalier told lefty blogger Hasan Piker that accused gangbanger Oscar Belgal was just being a good dad when he tried to flee the feds with his 5-year-old son in the car in the Bronx on Thursday — and was somehow a victim of his own rap sheet being revealed.
“I was just so angry,” Avila-Chevalier, the Democratic candidate for the 13th Congressional District, said of hearing the illegal immigrant’s history as a reputed member of the Trinitarios street gang being used against him
“To me, it doesn’t even matter,” she told Piker, who agreed.
“Police Commissioner [Jessica] Tisch came out, and I understand it’s her role to provide more information,” she said. “But rather than condemn ICE, rather than condemn the shooting or the events that are taking place, she started to villainize Oscar.
“Put yourself in Oscar’s shoes,” she added. “You have your child in the back seat, you’re picking him up from school and all of a sudden you see masked men coming towards your car, banging on it, pull out guns. You’re running. I’m sorry, you’re protecting your child,” she said.
“He needs to be released,” she said of Belgal, repeating a call by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who suggested the menace was a regular “New Yorker.”
Asked for parting words, Avila-Chevalier told Piker, “F–k ICE and abolish it.”
Belgal, 28, a reputed member of the Trinitarios street gang, picked up his son in the Marble Hill neighborhood shortly after 4 p.m. Thursday when plainclothes ICE agents stormed his SUV and fired into the vehicle when he tried to pull away, wounding him in the neck.
Authorities said Bengal entered the US illegally in 2022, and had amassed a scary rap sheet, including a 2023 armed robbery conviction and a 2025 bust for allegedly selling fentanyl, cocaine and heroin.
Tenants at Belgal’s previous Washington Heights apartment building told The Post he also terrorized neighbors with a machete, with one local calling him “a menace to society.”
However, Thursday’s shooting rattled the Bronx neighborhood and sparked massive protests in the borough calling for federal immigration agents to leave the Big Apple.
Tisch and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member, denounced the federal operation and said the NYPD was not involved or notified of the ICE raid in advance.
But Avila-Chevalier told Piker that Belgal, who is in a federal lockup in Brooklyn, should be released while she doubled down on her earlier call for Tisch to step down.
Stu Smith, an investigative analyst with the Manhattan Institute, disagreed.
“This is a fascinating glimpse into DSA-style co-governance in action, revealing both the growing tensions over the [Mayor Zohran] Mamdani administration and the movement’s commitment to abolitionism,” he wrote on X.
