ICE Agent at NYC Shooting Has History of Alleged Violence and Illegal Arrests

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on the scene of a shooting in upper Manhattan on Thursday has repeatedly been accused in federal court of unlawful arrests and using force during arrests in New York and Minneapolis, a WIRED investigation finds.

On Thursday afternoon, ICE agents shot a man, identified by city authorities as Oscar Belgal, in Manhattan’s Marble Hill neighborhood, near the Bronx. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said agents surrounded the man’s car, in which a 5-year-old child was sitting, before firing multiple rounds—as many as seven, witnesses told local media. Belgal, the New York Police Department said, was hospitalized after reportedly being shot in the neck. The child appeared unharmed.

Footage from the scene shows a man in a high-visibility yellow construction vest brandishing a modified AR-15-style rifle with a pistol grip, sling, and holographic sights. That man, according to court documents, social media posts, and publicly available personal information reviewed by WIRED, is Brenden Cuni—an ICE supervisor with the agency’s National Fugitive Operations team who has been involved in several arrests in the New York City region and Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge last winter.

Cuni identified himself as an ICE agent to NYPD officers, a law enforcement source tells WIRED, and was the only federal agent captured on video brandishing a weapon on scene. In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security claims that ICE agents were attempting to apprehend an undocumented immigrant from the Dominican Republic with a prior conviction for grand larceny.

A WIRED review of federal court cases, social media, and other public records suggests that Cuni has repeatedly been at the center of illegal ICE street arrests in New York and beyond. Court filings accuse him of using a Taser on a handcuffed man, while activists have alleged he is one of the agents seen forcing a pregnant woman to the ground during a Minneapolis operation. In recent months, federal judges have repeatedly found arrests involving Cuni unlawful. One judge called an arrest warrant he signed “fraudulent,” while another said that video evidence contradicts his sworn account of an arrest; in a third case, the government withdrew his sworn statements as inaccurate.

Cuni has been a DHS agent for nearly a decade. According to court declarations he signed, Cuni began his federal law enforcement career with Customs and Border Protection as a Border Patrol agent in San Diego in 2018 before becoming a deportation officer in 2020. In December 2024, he was promoted to a supervisory detention and deportation officer, and in May 2025, he joined the National Fugitive Operations team.

Cuni’s work history before his time with DHS remains unclear. Felician University, a private Catholic university in New Jersey, listed him as a member of its 2018 baseball roster. On that site, Cuni lists his home town as New Rochelle—a suburb just north of the Bronx.

Cuni has been named in multiple lawsuits alleging violent arrests. Lawyers for a 21-year-old Bronx man claim that during his arrest in October last year, Cuni tripped him hard enough to break a tooth, then shocked him with a Taser about six times while he was handcuffed on the ground, and later called him a “maldito Mexicano”—damned Mexican. A medical record noted injuries “from taser by ICE agents.”

The following month, another man alleged that ICE agents tackled and shocked him with a Taser three times during an arrest in Queens. According to the man’s petition, ICE’s arrest report lists Cuni among the arresting officers and acknowledges agents used a Taser. The filings do not say who fired it.

Court records also place Cuni in Minneapolis last December, leading a three-person ICE team at a scene where 60 to 70 people had gathered. Agents were trying to arrest a woman who had spray-painted an ICE vehicle; she escaped. Federal prosecutors charged a protester at the scene with assaulting Cuni, alleging that the man had helped tackle him after Cuni pepper-sprayed him. A judge later dismissed that charge with prejudice, writing that the evidence was “weak” and that none of the federal officers who reviewed videos of the encounter “saw a ‘tackle’ or other kind of assault.” Activists later alleged that Cuni was one of the agents seen in video of the encounter forcing to the ground a woman they say was pregnant. WIRED could not independently confirm that identification.

In at least three federal cases this year, judges or the government have found problems with Cuni’s statements or arrest paperwork. In one case, Judge Gary Brown of the Eastern District of New York found that Cuni searched five databases for a Bronx man and found nothing, then signed a warrant saying the searches had confirmed he was undocumented. ICE later added the man to those databases and searched again, creating the record Cuni had already said existed. Brown ruled the arrest and detention illegal, saying that Cuni had tried to “reconcile these falsehoods” after the fact.

In August, US District Judge Brian Cogan, also of New York’s Eastern District, said doorbell footage “largely contradicts” Cuni’s account of Fernando Fabian Chaglla’s arrest. Video reviewed by WIRED shows Chaglla being handcuffed less than three minutes into the encounter. Cuni later said he had typed Chaglla’s name and birth date into Mobile Fortify, an ICE face-recognition app; the search showed no record of lawful entry, but it did show a federal work permit. Cuni said he took the lack of records documenting his entry into the US as evidence that Chaglla was undocumented and acknowledged that he handcuffed him before filling out the warrant by hand. Cogan ruled that the arrest was unlawful.

A little over a week later, Cuni testified that he didn’t recall himself or the agents under his command ever making a warrantless arrest. “In all of the cases that I am aware of, I issued an I-200 prior to the arrest,” he assured the attorneys deposing him. “Now, if you’re questioning my credibility, I don’t know, but again, I’m—can only tell you what I’m aware of.”

In a third case, in June, government lawyers withdrew what a federal judge described as “inaccurate, sworn representations” by Cuni and other officials, including a claim that a detained man had skipped his ICE check-ins.

Cuni did not immediately respond to WIRED’s multiple requests for comment.

An Instagram account apparently associated with Cuni, previously using the handle “shooter.cuni”—now “shooter.914,” seemingly reflecting the Westchester County, New York area code—contains scores of photographs and videos of Cuni with firearms at shooting ranges across the Northeast. Among the items depicted on the account are a mug that appears to be from ICE’s New York City Fugitive Operations team, a silver and black Rolex watch that closely matches one Cuni appears to be wearing in videos from the Marble Hill shooting, and an AR-15-style rifle with a pistol grip, short barrel, holoscopic sights, and olive-colored sling that appears to match the one he wielded at the shooting scene.

Another photo on the Cuni-linked Instagram account, posted on September 4, depicts a G.A. Precision Templar VII rifle bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight mounted on a bipod stand at a gun range. “Cuni” is emblazoned on a suede cushion on the rifle’s stock, and a blue “shooter Cuni” lanyard is visible on a separate cloth ammunition sling. The post’s caption reads, “the finest form of relaxation.”