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, ‘ICE out of New York.’ And we’ve got to find ways to.”
It’s clear to everyone what is likely coming. Mayor-to-be Zohran Mamdani told me weeks ago that he considers the National Guard being deployed to NYC to be an inevitability. For Mamdani and his allies, the question is: What meaningful forms of bureaucratic warfare can be waged against the feds? When I interviewed Lander earlier this month, he mentioned the possibility of things like sending in city building inspector’s to ICE’s headquarters at 26 Federal Plaza, where they are holding detainees in what is almost certainly a violation of their building permit. Stuff like that should begin the day that Mamdani is sworn in. In the same way that the federal government has been weaponized against immigrants, the New York City government should be weaponized against the federal government’s presence in the city.
Building inspectors, yes. And safety inspectors. Is the water in the ICE office clean? Cut it off, to test it. Fire drills. Tickets on their parked cars. Brake light violations. Health inspections. Sidewalk construction. Street closures. More fire drills. More fire drills! You can never have too much fire safety.
ICE agents, who are some of America’s most pitiful cowards, keep their faces covered. Should the new mayor publish photos of ICE agents’ faces, for the sake of public safety? Yes he should. Should the city print up as many of these photos as possible and print them in a pamphlet and distribute this pamphlet to hospitals and public libraries and city offices? Sure. We have reached the point when the city government, under assault from real live fascist secret police, must look down into its inadequate toolbox and get creative. Within the bounds of the law, nothing should be off the table.
The federal government’s militarization has laid bare in blue cities across America the importance of maintaining the loyalty of the police force. (The idea that the police should carry out the wishes of the elected leaders they serve should be an unremarkable one. But in reality, getting the cops to do what the politicians say is a constant negotiation.) Marshaling the NYPD to serve as a barrier to ICE and other federal agents is a critical task. There are laws that keep the NYPD from actively cooperating with most ICE raids, which is good, but not sufficient. I don’t expect city police to get into armed confrontations with federal agents or the military. But it is reasonable to expect city police to uphold the laws of their cities, and to carry out the policies of city leadership, even if that means, for example, preventing armed, masked, unidentified men from jumping out of unmarked vehicles and snatching city residents off of the streets and kidnapping them based on racial profiling. America’s cities will need their police forces to maintain some level of independence from the fascist federal government, or life for all of us will get measurably more difficult.
Yesterday, Zohran Mamdani announced that he would retain current police commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is a wealthy and relatively conservative favorite of the establishment. Mamdani clearly sees this action as an olive branch to centrists, a gesture to the establishment and to the NYPD itself that he is not a wild-eyed abolitionist. I hope very much that Mamdani also extracted some promises from Tisch as part of this deal—primarily, the promise that she will see to it that the NYPD remains loyal to City Hall and not to the White House, if and when Trump truly puts that loyalty to the test.
While the bureaucrats tussle over control, the real action of opposing ICE will be in the streets. We in New York can learn a lot from the activists of LA and Chicago. Watching regular-degular suburbanites chase ICE vehicles with horns and whistles is heartening. Watching residents of every neighborhood form rapid response units to record the feds and protect their immigrant neighbors is inspiring. Watching teachers look out for their immigrant students and unions look out for immigrant workers is reassuring. Everywhere the secret police have gone, the people have done their best to stand in their path. That will now happen in NYC, with an intensity that, I think, will exceed anything that has come before.
As dark as these times are, we can all take a tiny bit of comfort in the knowledge that ICE agents are going to have a terrible fucking time in New York City. They cannot walk the streets without immediately drawing a crowd of people cursing them. They must travel in packs with guns and jump in and out of their convoys and rush away, like terrified suburban tourists frantically waving for a cab to drive them away from a scary homeless person. They will not be able to order food in a restaurant without having it spit in. Who do you think works in New York City’s kitchens, fuckos? Don’t miss the spit bagels, spit hot dogs, and spit pastrami sandwiches of our fine city. You sad little clowns.
ICE agents will not get any dates in New York City. ICE agents will not make any new friends in New York City. ICE agents will hide their faces and huddle in a knot behind locked doors with their fellow quasi-unemployable outcasts and do evil things all day and then go home and masturbate quietly and, I hope, cry. Cry, you villains! Nobody in New York City likes you. Nobody in New York City respects you. Nobody in New York City is going to give you accurate subway directions, tell you the best hidden neighborhood spots, or go see a show with you. You will never enjoy the fabulous art, music, and culture of this metropolis. You will be despised for every moment that you exist here. You might as well have stayed in Long Island, or Kansas, because you will never be able to soak in the wonders of this fine city without a dozen people cursing you and posting your picture online and telling you to get a real job.
You’re coming to persecute immigrants—in New York City! Where do you think you are? Who do you think built this place? Who do you think lives here? Better stay in Murray Hill, bozos! Don’t go to Washington Heights or Inwood or East Harlem or Bed-Stuy or Flatbush or Brighton Beach or East New York or Bushwick or Canarsie or Astoria or Jackson Heights or Jamaica or Flushing or Ridgewood or… just avoid all of Queens, now that I think of it. You won’t be welcome there. You don’t get to hang out there. The doors of this fine city are closed to you.
You can’t go to Coney Island. You can never ride the Cyclone in peace. People will stand at the entrance and yell at you. You get nothing. No fun for you. No Nathan’s for you. Go home and order Papa Johns, you fucks. I hope that your delivery driver coughs on your bad pizza on purpose.
Many real New Yorkers are in real danger from ICE’s presence here. The struggle against what is happening will be brutal. But if that struggle gets us down, we can allow ourselves a moment of satisfaction just by reflecting on the fact that these guys will never conquer New York City. We know they suck. And we will let them know. Loud.
Welcome to hell, ICE scum. I would call you rats, but we actually kind of respect the rats here.
More
Related reading: You’re a Bunch of Cowards!; Building the American Brownshirts; Welcome to the Age of Disappearance; New York Socialist City.
Talking Points Memo is publishing a package of essays celebrating the 25-year history of digital media, and I wrote a piece for them about the underrated news judgment skills of bloggers, which you might enjoy if you are old enough to remember the Gawker era. If you’re more interested in the labor movement, I am talking about my book and labor and politics at Georgetown University next Monday, October 27, at 5:30 pm. It’s free and open to the public. Event details here.
It is very nice to have a job where I can write “fuck ICE.” I am able to do this thanks to the support of readers just like you, who pay to subscribe to How Things Work because they want to help it survive and thrive. For obvious reasons, independent media is as important today as it has ever been. If you like reading this site, I would love for you to take a quick second to become a paid subscriber right now. It’s not too expensive and, in an odd way, it helps to make America a better place, at least a little bit. If you can’t afford to pay, just keep coming back. Thank you all for being here.
In terms of increased building inspections, Trump tower should be top of the list, along with any other properties Trump owns here.
And they’re taking on San Francisco simultaneously.
San Francisco, where the gay community burned two cop cars the night Dan White got off with a wrist-slap after assassinating Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Won’t just be the gay community pissed this time. It’ll be everybody.