ELI STEELE: NYC ICE shooting exposes how White guilt erases personal responsibility

School had just let out in Marble Hill, a small enclave of Manhattan bordering the Bronx. It was a little after 4 p.m. on Oct. 8 when Oscar Belgal, 28, picked up his five-year-old son and began backing his Honda CR-V into a parking spot on a crowded street.

A police camera caught what happened next. Two men dressed in plain clothes approached Belgal’s SUV with their guns drawn – one to the driver’s side, the other to the front. They were ICE officers. More agents were part of the operation, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani later noted that officers surrounding the vehicle wore construction vests and masks.

Belgal responded by pulling the SUV forward out of the space. As he did, one officer punched and broke the driver’s window, but Belgal managed to drive off and out of the camera’s view.

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The ICE officers caught up with Belgal about a block away. According to ICE officials, Belgal refused orders to exit the vehicle, turned his SUV into a weapon, and rammed two government cars. Belgal’s defense attorney disputes this account, maintaining that Belgal fled out of panic to protect his child from unidentified, armed men. Initial NYPD street camera footage did not capture the moment of the shooting, but investigators later determined that a bullet went through Belgal’s windshield. At least one officer fired seven rounds, striking Belgal in the neck below his left ear. His son, sitting in the back seat, was not physically hurt.

The FBI, Homeland Security investigators, and the Bronx District Attorney’s office have all launched inquiries into the shooting.

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But there is a second story here, one that reveals where we are as a nation.

Within hours of the shooting, Oscar Belgal was no longer a man, an individual. He became a symbol. And the people who made him into a symbol did so by taking away the very thing that makes a man a man: responsibility for what he does.

First, Belgal was not a stranger to the justice system. In 2023, according to a criminal complaint, he was driving with two passengers in his back seat when he turned, pointed a gun at them, and demanded their jewelry. They complied. Belgal pled guilty and received five years of probation. In December 2025, he was indicted on ten counts related to narcotics distribution; he pled not guilty and was released on supervised conditions. Federal officials state that he is in the country illegally and allege that he has ties to the Trinitarios gang. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has stated that when ICE previously attempted to arrest him in September, Belgal fled.

When New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch laid out that record, the reaction from the left was not to weigh it. Instead, its leading figures declared all of Belgal’s criminal history irrelevant. 

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Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Democratic Socialists of America candidate for Congress in New York’s 13th District, went on Hasan Piker’s stream to talk about the shooting. When Piker asked about Belgal’s criminal history, she said, “To me, it doesn’t even matter.” She then turned her wrath on Tisch and accused her trying to “villainize Oscar.” She demanded her resignation. Then she asked the audience to “put yourself in Oscar’s shoes.” Masked men were coming at his car and “You’re running,” she said. “I’m sorry, you’re protecting your child.” She ended with “F— ICE and abolish it.”

What struck me was her moral outrage. She was outraged that stating a man’s record in a matter of fact way was now the equivalent of “villainizing” him. All that mattered to Chevalier was that he was a immigrant, a Dominican like her, a member of an oppressed group, and that he was being chased by men with guns who were ICE.

In my new film, “White Guilt,” my father, Shelby Steele, the author, columnist and Hoover Institution Fellow, shows how the left created a world where responsibility can never be demanded of the oppressed. He describes going to a Black Power rally on the South Side of Chicago to hear the comedian and activist Dick Gregory:

“Gregory argued that a racist America had given us responsibility, but had denied us the freedom to do much with it,” my father says in the film. “Gregory held a Marxian vision of racism as a systemic force that made responsibility irrelevant in the struggle against oppression. Thus, it was bad manners to ask a black to lift themselves up.”

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Then Lyndon Johnson stood up at Howard University and said, you do not take a man hobbled by chains, bring him to the starting line and tell him he is free to compete. “By implication, Johnson agreed with Gregory,” my father says. “Suddenly, if you were black living in this new age of white guilt, you could not be expected to carry the same responsibilities as others.”

The belief Gregory preached and Johnson blessed, that oppression made responsibility irrelevant, became one of the core tenets of the white guilt racial order we live under today. White guilt is not the guilt a person feels for something he did. It is not personal, which is why I tire of hearing people declare, “I have no white guilt.” 

White guilt is the collective guilt that the left assigns to all Whites for America’s past racial sins. What it produces is not remorse but terror, the terror of being called a racist and losing your moral authority. To escape that terror, the “oppressor” buys back his innocence by asking nothing of the “oppressed,” and the “oppressed” are handed power so long as they remain victims. That is how responsibility became “bad manners,” in the words of my father, and demanding accountability became racism.

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Today the “oppressor system” is America itself, and ICE is its face. And what the formula needs most is a symbol.

Activists like Avila Chevalier dehumanize the oppressed by stripping away their responsibility and accountability, then wield what is left as a cudgel against the oppressor system. Once Belgal’s record was erased, all that remained was an immigrant father shot by ICE with his little boy in the car. Between them, Avila Chevalier and Mayor Zohran Mamdani demanded that ICE be abolished, the police commissioner resign, Belgal be released and immigration enforcement halt across the city. They did not demand anything of Oscar Belgal.

The DSA often calls itself the party of the people, but listen to how it talks about the people it claims to defend. Its words for them are almost always the oppressed, the victims, and the impoverished. Their value to the movement is not their individual humanity but what they collectively symbolize. If the DSA draws its power from these symbols of oppression to milk White guilt, why would it ever surrender this power?

There is one innocent in all of this: the five-year-old boy in the back seat. His mother says he has nightmares and won’t speak despite his talkative nature. 

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The young boy will grow up with two stories of that fateful afternoon. In one version, his father will be seen as a victim, nothing more, and the world owes him. In the other story, his father is an individual who made choices, some of them bad, and yet has the chance to improve his life somehow. It is the second story that gives the young boy a real chance at life.

An image from filmmaker Eli Steele’s new documentary essay, ‘White Guilt,’ featuring his father, author, columnist and Hoover Institution Fellow Shelby Steele. The film was released on Oct. 6, 2026.

Belgal’s lawyer said the first thing that his client asked was whether his son was OK. This detail reveals to us that Oscar Belgal is a man with a conscience, and a man with a conscience can bear responsibility for his choices.

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The same lawyer said that “regardless of whether or not someone has a criminal history, it is not lawful and it’s not okay to shoot a father.” The investigations will decide whether the shooting was lawful. And due process which protects all individuals within this country, including those who are not citizens.

So let the courts judge the officer who fired, and let them judge Oscar Belgal too. Avila Chevalier would cry that this is villainizing him. Those who believe in American principles would call it treating him like a man who is responsible for his own life.

The activists will never allow it. Their power in White guilt America depends on keeping Oscar Belgal a permanent symbol of oppression.

But what good has ever come out of dehumanization?

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