ICE vs. NYC

This week, ICE broke the seal on New York City. Prodded, idiotically, by a conservative influencer who was shocked to find knockoff goods being sold by non-white people on Canal Street, ICE agents staged a military-style daytime raid, arresting several vendors and prompting a spontaneous street protest against their presence. Though ICE has been snatching immigrants out of court hallways for months, this was their first out-and-out public raid like this in our city. As in Los Angeles and Chicago, the federal government has declared war on the immigrants who make New York City great.

People are pissed. On Tuesday night, just hours after the raid, several hundred people flooded a Broadway intersection downtown, just above City Hall, to yell and wave signs and chant “ICE, Gestapo, out of New York!” By the time I got there just after 7 pm, dozens of NYPD officers had deployed in the street, in riot helmets, to keep traffic flowing. The protesters solved for this by deploying a nifty crosswalk strategy: Each time the cross lights came on, a huge knot of them would cross the street, legally, waving their signs. Then they would stand on the next corner and cross perpendicularly when the next crossing sign changed, still chanting. In this way they were able to constantly circle the entire intersection without breaking the law. The cops were satisfied with this, and nobody got arrested. Not even the young guy who zoomed through the intersection on a Citibike and screamed “FUCK COPSSSSSSS” as he passed one foot away from the police, who stood fingering their billy clubs.

New Yorkers have known that this is coming. They’ve been waiting. Protesters were out with gas masks and umbrellas, the entire 2020 BLM protest kits pulled out of the closet and dusted off. Brad Lander, the NYC Comptroller, was out on the scene, as he often is at anti-ICE protests. He told me that he hasn’t gotten any official communication from the feds, but he expects the ICE raids to continue.

“Today, they brought their own press agents, like Fox and News Nation were there. That seemed totally designed to show us what’s coming. And there’s every reason to believe they’re gonna keep doing it,” he said. “What Trump wants is to strike fear into people and then make it seem like chaos. And New Yorkers want to say,