Off-duty border patrol agent shot in apparent random robbery in NYC park, police say

A customs agent and border patrol on leave was shot in the New York riverside park on Saturday evening in an alleged flight that did not seem to aim for him because of his work, police announced.

Miguel Mora, 21, is the subject of an investigation as a person of interest in the attempted theft and the shooting, said New York police commissioner Jessica Tisch, at a press conference on Sunday. He was hospitalized with ball injury investigators, believe that he suffered during the incident, but should be arrested later on Sunday, said Tisch.

Two sources of application of the law told NBC News that the meeting seemed random and that it was an attempted theft.

Tisch said the CBP agent was sitting on the rocks along the water in Manhattan park when two men went up to him on a scooter and one descended, approaching him from behind.

One of the men released a firearm, how stolen the agent he was stolen and released his own firearm in defense, Tisch said. The shooter shot the agent, who turned fire, she said.

The CBP agent was hit in the face and the forearm, said Tisch. Mayor Eric Adams said he visited the agent at the hospital as he recovers with the family. His condition was unknown.

The shooter was also injured, said Tisch. He and his accomplice fled.

The incident was captured on video surveillance, allowing detectives to match Mora with the person shown by pulling the CBP agent, said Tisch. Mora went to the Bronx Care Hospital after midnight with the groin shoes and a leg consistent with those supported by the person who shot the agent, said Tisch, quoting the security video.

Trump highlights the shooter’s immigration status

Adams said Mora is known by the police and had repeated and violent past meetings with civil servants.

Tisch said Mora was also in the United States illegally after participating in Arizona in 2023.

He had two previous arrests for domestic violence in New York and an active mandate after he did not appear in court in one of these cases, said Tisch. Mora was also wanted by New York police as part of an alleged flight in December and an alleged stab in January, she said.

Mora was in police custody at Lincoln Hospital, where he suffered an operation, said Tisch.

Adams said about Mora at the press conference on Sunday: “In less than a year, he inflicted violence in our city. And once he will be charged with last night’s crimes, we can add a tempting murder to his rap sheet.”

President Donald Trump described the person of “illegal extraterrestrial monster” on Truth Social on Sunday and said the Democrats “flooded our criminal invading nation”. Internal security secretary Kristi Noem said that Mora was from the Dominican Republic.

Trump has long highlighted the crimes committed by undocumented migrants as reasons of severe immigration repression, despite proofs showing that the undocumented population commits less crimes than American citizens born natural.

Expert analysis and data available in police services in major cities examined by NBC News last year, despite certain high-level incidents, there was no evidence of a wave of crime focused on migrants in the United States.

In December 2020, researchers studying statistics on Texas’ crime revealed that “unlike the public perception, we considerably observe arrest rates for lower crime among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and American citizens born in the country and to find no evidence that undocumented crime has increased in recent years.”

During the first months of his second term, Trump and his administration repressed arrests of undocumented immigrants, with promises to deport violent criminals. However, most people in immigration detention do not have a criminal record, according to data.

In June, after six months of aggressive immigration application, only a small fraction of undeniable undisped immigrants by immigration agents and customs application as having been condemned for sexual and homicide assault had been arrested, data on the internal ice -ice obtained by NBC News.

From October 1 to May 31, 185,042 people were arrested and reserved in ice facilities. From this group, 65,041 had been found guilty of crimes, the data showed.

Other ice data have shown that almost half of people in police custody had not been sentenced or accused of any crime.