On Thursday afternoon, New Yorkers were testifying about the terror wrought by Immigration and Customs Enforcement when shots rang out in the city in the nation’s latest ICE shooting.

The shooting of Oscar Belgal during an ICE operation in the Bronx — while his 5-year-old son was in the car — has sparked protests and heavy criticism. In a disturbing coincidence, it occurred as I and others attended the latest iteration of the People’s Hearing, a daylong gathering that the Hispanic Federation has been hosting across the country to share statistics and hear from residents about Donald Trump’s deadly and racist anti-immigrant crusade.

The activist group’s meetups have become a way for communities to practice solidarity and document activities by ICE, which has garnered comparisons to the Ku Klux Klan from historians, legal experts and at least one Reagan-appointed federal judge. Previous stops have included Minnesota, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and North Carolina.

And Belgal’s shooting just underscored why these events are so necessary.

Just as Trump and his allies have intended with their brutal tactics and pushes for “remigration” and self-deportation, fear and sorrow were in the air as immigrants and their allies — friends, family members and fellow New Yorkers — discussed the crackdown.

Immigrants, some of whom were so fearful of reprisal they testified from behind a curtain, described being taken by ICE agents and then left to seemingly languish in squalid detention centers, such as New Jersey’s Delaney Hall. They also spoke of separation from relatives who have been deported to unfamiliar lands.

Lawyers testified about the Trump administration’s efforts to hasten deportations of immigrant children, as well as the trauma of having to explain this plight to toddlers too young to form a sentence. An advocate for immigrant vendors — one of several to talk about the devastating economic impact of ICE’s crackdown on New York — said vendors have faced xenophobic attacks from disgruntled customers who have vowed to report them to ICE, regardless of their immigration status.

The overall message was clear: ICE is a menace to society. And that’s a view that seems to be widespread, with recent polling showing that many Americans — including MAGA supporters — disapprove of ICE’s enforcement tactics.

The Hispanic Federation works with academics to compile reports from each hearing, and it intends to relay them to federal lawmakers. The group’s president, Frankie Miranda, told me the hearings have been “cathartic” in that they have allowed communities to grieve and strategize together. He said the prospect of power changing hands in Washington in next month’s midterm elections opens the possibility that his organization’s reports could lead to reparation and lasting change.

“We will have an opportunity to ask for accountability for everything that is happening, curbing some of the funding, putting up some guardrails and maybe getting some sort of justice for some of the people and families that have been put through so much, so much pain,” he said.

Miranda said the gatherings are an important tool to ensure that ICE’s brutal policing “doesn’t become normal” in the eyes of the public.

“We know that the biggest lesson that happened, for example, in World War II with Nazis is that people were doing voluntary compliance,” he said, adding: “They’d say, ‘Oh, this is the new reality, so I’m just going to follow.’ But when we talk at the kitchen table with friends and others and say this is not normal — these forums are part of that conversation. They allow people to say: ‘This is what I’ve been feeling; I’m not alone.’ So talking about it is very, very powerful.”

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