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A federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fired at least seven shots on a crowded Marble Hill street Thursday afternoon, sending passersby ducking for cover. In the chaotic aftermath, a man slumped outside his dented car, bleeding from his neck and fading in and out of consciousness, eyewitnesses said. Nearby, an agent held the man’s 5-year-old child, who had been in the back seat of the vehicle, according to video and eyewitnesses.
The shooting Thursday is one of at least 32 incidents where immigration enforcement agents have shot people since President Donald Trump took office last year, according to the nonprofit newsroom The Trace.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not named the agent responsible for Thursday’s shooting, and it is not clear which agent fired the shots as authorities continue to investigate what happened.
Only one agent so far has been captured by multiple eyewitness videos and photos — including NYPD body-camera footage taken moments after the shooting and released Friday — brandishing what appears to be a modified assault rifle at the center of the commotion. In the videos, he is seen wearing a construction vest and plain clothes, with an ICE badge dangling from his neck.
That agent is Supervisory Detention and Deportation Officer Brenden Cuni, a familiar face to those closely following the Trump administration’s ICE crackdown in New York City. Cuni has been spotted wielding an assault-style rifle at various immigration enforcement actions over the past year and a half, including on Canal Street and in Bushwick.
Citing a law enforcement source, Wired reported Cuni identified himself to NYPD officers at Thursday’s scene. He didn’t return requests for comment from The City Reporter over phone and text message Friday morning.
Asked about Cuni’s arrest history and presence at the Marble Hill shooting Thursday, DHS said it would “never confirm or deny attempts to dox our law enforcement officers” because “publicizing their identities puts their lives and the lives of their families at serious risk.”
“Our law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles and rapists,” the agency said. “Now, thanks to the malicious rhetoric of sanctuary politicians, they are under constant threat from violent agitators.”
The City Reporter previously documented a pattern of violent arrests allegedly involving Cuni, where immigrants described being beat up and tased. In one case, a 21-year-old man in The Bronx alleged Cuni tased him a half-dozen times while he lay on the ground and later called him a “maldito Mexicano” or “fucking Mexican” in Spanish, according to federal court records.
An additional review by The City Reporter of federal court records filed in the intervening months show Cuni participated in a number of warrantless arrests around New York City that federal judges later deemed illegal. In one of those cases, a judge ruled Cuni lied in sworn documents submitted in court.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office announced an initiative earlier this year to ensure ICE agents were acting lawfully in New York, declined to comment on Cuni’s presence at the scene, pointing to a statement calling for a “full investigation” of the shooting. In a handful of rare cases, state prosecutors have brought criminal charges against immigration agents for use of force, though such agents generally have broad protections in their official capacity.
ICE Scales Up
Cuni has been a supervisory officer at ICE since December 2024 and an ICE agent since 2020. He worked for two years for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in San Diego before that, according to his testimony submitted in sworn federal court records that The City Reporter reviewed.
Cuni has been named in multiple habeas corpus lawsuits filed by immigrants seeking release from immigration detention. In those cases, immigrants who were not the initial target of enforcement operations described violent arrests.
A month after the arrest where Cuni allegedly used a racial slur, he was named in another habeas corpus lawsuit filed by a man in Corona, Queens, who said he was repeatedly hit with a stun gun wielded by Cuni.
In both of those incidents, ICE confirmed its agents used force, and said the targeted men had resisted arrest.
Cuni’s name has continued to surface in the months since, as ICE ramped up street and car stops across the five boroughs.
In May, he was at the scene of the violent arrest of Chidozie Wilson Okeke, a Nigerian man in Bushwick, where a masked agent appeared to tase him while other agents broke his car windows and dragged him out of the vehicle.
After his arrest, Okeke was taken to nearby Wyckoff Hospital, where protesters gathered outside in a confrontation with ICE agents and NYPD officers later that night.
ICE’s account of the arrest, which was submitted in federal court and obtained by The City Reporter, identified Cuni as the supervisory agent at that scene as well. He was also the agent who signed Okeke’s arrest warrant.
Agents initially stopped Okeke’s car because they claimed he resembled another person for whom they had an arrest warrant. They followed Okeke — running his out-of-state plates and comparing driver records with immigration records to determine he had overstayed a visa — and then blocked his path to arrest him. Judge Pamela Chen found that arrest violated Okeke’s Fifth Amendment rights, and ordered his release in July.
In another case, federal Judge Brian Cogan found Cuni had lied in sworn court statements related to the arrest of an Ecuadorian immigrant on June 23.
The man, who had lived in New York City for 25 years and had no criminal record, was picked up near the Brooklyn-Queens border while waiting to start a construction job, his attorneys said in a habeas petition in August.
Cogan described discrepancies in Cuni’s testimony, including the fact that a warrant was created after the arrest occurred. The judge also slammed ICE’s street arrest policy.
“When ICE arrests first and pencil-whips the [administrative warrant] later, courts have uniformly found the arrests unlawful,” Cogan wrote. “The court does the same here. It is a very rare exception that an arresting officer may issue his own arrest warrant.”
In a scathing decision this past week, Judge Gary Brown found Cuni issued a “fraudulent arrest warrant” for a man ICE agents came across during another operation in The Bronx on the same day they mistakenly arrested and beat up a U.S. citizen in May.
“Agents allegedly arrested petitioner based on a physical description and photograph of one target. Yet the description disproves the match: The target was five inches shorter and 80 pounds lighter than the petitioner,” Brown wrote.
He described Cuni’s testimony about the arrest as inconsistent with the facts.
“After issuing a fraudulent arrest warrant stating that petitioner’s information was part of the system when it was not and indicating that he could be biometrically identified even though they had not collected the information to make a positive match,” Brown wrote.
“Cuni attempted to reconcile these falsehoods by subsequently collecting the information, adding it to those systems and, after issuing the warrant, searching the databases again to ‘find’ him,” he continued. “Some things simply strain the imagination.”
Brown also found the arrest was illegal.
Previous Arrest
Details are still emerging about the ICE shooting and arrest Thursday afternoon of 28-year-old Oscar Belgal, who was identified by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch during a press briefing that night.
In its statement on the shooting, DHS said Belgal was from the Dominican Republic and was the target of their arrest operation. The agency said he’d
been targeted after a 2023 arrest and had ties to the Trinitarios gang. Court records showed he had a 2023 conviction for grand larceny in the fourth degree.
“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 wrote on X. “Our officers should not have to risk their lives, and innocent Americans should not have to face unnecessary danger, because sanctuary politicians refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement.”
