It was four o’clock in the afternoon. There was a five-year-old in the car. The agents were well hidden in construction vests and masks. The story of the latest unnecessary detention-and-deportation related shooting has sparked protests in the Manhattan neighborhood of Marble Hill, where Oscar Belgal was fired upon and struck by one agent seven times Thursday afternoon.

Yes, Belgal has a criminal conviction record for grand larceny and charges for drug dealing in a case that is still open. Federal agents say they tried to arrest him in September, but he ran. That might be an argument for getting sneaky when attempting to detain him. After all, law enforcement is legally allowed to deceive. But shooting someone unarmed, who is coming from a school and has a young child with him in a vehicle, screams excessive, overanxious, and questionably trained.

Agents say he tried to ram them. Witnesses say he tried to flee the scene – away from them.

Agents say they did not know a child was in the car. Why not? How did they not have an idea of where he was coming from, since this was clearly a planned apprehension?

When the Democrats take over Congress, the first order of business should be the unmasking of agents of unidentified agencies and holding them accountable for full-faced actions in the field. Forget impeaching Pete Hegseth or Donald Trump for the umpteenth time. At least wait on that expected behavior until the masks come off tens of thousands of new hires on deportation duty.

The Democrat who makes it a priority to pass a law that unequivocally subjects the conduct of deportation related agents in the field to legal scrutiny and possible prosecution — to say nothing of codifying minimum standards of qualification to be a new ICE agent in the first place — should be the new head of the party. He or she may not be the face of the party everyone starts talking about for a presidential run before all midterm ballots are tallied; but if that person can whip enough Republican Senate votes to override what would certainly be a veto, Democrats would be leaderless no more.

Meanwhile, these unaccountable actors with guns and a government paycheck, who keep shooting people in the streets in the name of cleaning up those same streets, are compelled by quotas to ramp things up. Something has to change about mass deportation and detention tactics.

Lawmakers need to get on it from the moment of swearing in. Actually, they need to get on it now. Whatever they think they have to lose is likely gone already. If not, for all the inaction, for all the quiet acceptance of bills stalled in committee, it should be.