This week, a relative stalemate that had held between New York City and an incredibly emboldened and aggressively militarized federal immigration enforcement apparatus seemed to crumble as dozens of federal agents swarmed around Canal Street in downtown Manhattan on Tuesday, and spent a couple of hours trawling around, sporadically detaining people and arresting few, and sparring with local residents.
Up until recently, most federal immigration arrests in the city had been taking place at the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza — still a wrenching experience, no doubt, but one whose impact was relatively confined. Then last week there was a raid outside a migrant shelter and finally this much bigger raid on Canal Street. It pulled in personnel from multiple federal agencies, part of a trend of federal agents being diverted away from functions like investigating gun crimes, drugs, child sexual abuse material and other missions in favor of the all-encompassing nativist obsession of Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff who is seen as the main architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
I had gotten word that the raid was happening before it started and headed down, cursing myself for having left the apartment earlier with my phone on low battery and no portable charger on hand. I wrote a mostly play-by-play account of the raid over at Hell Gate, though I also think it’s important to emphasize a few higher-level bits and pieces about this whole chain of events.
It’s worth emphasizing that the raid happened just two days after a right-wing influencer posted a video precisely about sellers on Canal Street, whom she called “African illegal immigrants.” I’m not going to go into detail, but in addition to being offensive, it is almost certainly an oversimplification, if not just wrong – it’s likely that many are in active asylum processes, which means that by definition they’re following the law and therefore have a legal status.
I can’t say for certain that this post had a specific impact on this raid taking place, but it’s wild that it’s not out of the question. I can say, based on my own sources, that a huge chunk of the agent workforce involved was alerted to the raid at a big meeting around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, just an hour and a half before it started. The whole thing seems to have been pretty shoddily arranged – it’s my understanding that even a lot of the federal personnel there were unhappy about it. The Homeland Security Investigations branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brought along a Strategic Response Team with a military-green armored vehicle that I saw mostly just sitting on the curb.
My sense, and that of people I talked to in and out of the federal agencies involved, is that this was all for show. I know that at least one government photographer was present, probably intended to capture both the arrests and the response to those arrests. That the groups of agents, on foot, were heckled, harassed and surrounded by locals and protesters is something I think the department both expected and wanted. We’ve seen videos of quite a few ICE operations that have been chopped up into bizarre propaganda clips for public consumption. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is often present herself, sporting a bulletproof vest and visibly assuming command for operations that a cabinet secretary would not normally be directly involved in. (A video of her blaming Democrats for the government shutdown is also now playing in airports around the country).
All of this seems geared towards generating public fear and a steady stream of propaganda for the administration, mainly along two fronts — look at how we’re fulfilling our promises to go after all of these dangerous immigrants (trust us, they’re gang members for sure), and look at how all of these liberals and violent protesters are sowing disorder and threatening our brave agents. The latter in particular is necessary fuel for the administration’s efforts to ramp up operations and justify the deployment of National Guard troops to cities, a policy that three U.S. district court judges have ruled illegal but that will soon be heard by the Supreme Court. The videos also seem designed to build a case for Trump’s reported desire to invoke the Insurrection Act.
This week’s operation was likely engineered to achieve both aims. It produced pictures of armed federal agents detaining Black men (scary) as well as showing those agents — who were directed to slowly stroll through a downtown Manhattan thoroughfare on foot — surrounded by angry locals screaming at them. Both of those images can be fed to their audiences to advance the administration’s message that dangerous liberal cities need to be tamped down.
I also want to talk a little bit about the reaction of New Yorkers and how that can inform how we contend with what seems to be an escalation from the federal government. Before the operation was even underway, while there was a small group of us reporters waiting around uneasily to see if the tips that we had all apparently separately gotten would pan out, a man started yelling out from the street that a car idling by the curb was ICE. I’m not sure how he figured that out, though I’m guessing that he simply peeked inside and saw agents wearing bulletproof vests.
I don’t know how many people took him seriously right off the bat, but in any case, by the time the agents actually emerged en masse from their cars and started making their way down the street, word had spread that they were there and were coming, either via word of mouth or through what I’m sure are robust WhatsApp groups and text chains among the many street vendors on Canal Street.
This was no lightning raid like we’ve seen in other cities, where agents sweep into a business and are in and out in 10 minutes with people in cuffs. Part of that is the terrain; downtown Manhattan, unlike most of the other places agents are operating, simply does not have the expanse necessary for a group of unwieldy SUVs to quickly drive up, disgorge their agents, and then drive off. Agents would be more liable to get stuck in traffic, plus there’d be basically no way for them to approach quietly. That means that for most potential such operations in NYC, there will be some warning.
While they clearly had target lists in hand, the agents seemed to have trouble locating the people they were ostensibly looking for and mostly seemed to resort to grabbing random people off the street, which made the surrounding crowds even angrier. That also forced them to let go of multiple people who produced IDs after they’d been detained. These seemed to be what are now called “Kavanaugh stops” — relatively indiscriminate stops based primarily on the race, language, apparent ethnicity, profession or whereabouts of a potential detainee, which Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh defended in a majority opinion after a district court judge had barred them for much of southern California.
The throngs of people who eventually surrounded agents seemed to have made it difficult for them to move around. That prompted the arrest of some protesters but prevented the agents from really being able to detain many of the immigrants. The rapid gathering underscored how the density of an urban downtown means that rapid-response groups of activists and regular residents can mobilize in time to at the very least monitor what federal agents are doing and ensure that people are aware of their rights. I wrote a few weeks ago about relative quiet from city leadership as to how it was preparing for any aggressive federal deployments; part of the takeaway was that a lot more of the nuts-and-bolts organizing was happening at the community level.
Now, I think, that model will be tested – and that the federal government and its agents will find that it’s a much different world here than in the other cities where they’ve deployed. Not only is nearly 40% of the city foreign-born, it is one with a heavy history of activism and deep-seated, organized pro-immigrant groups and nonprofits dating back to settlement houses a century ago. Our transit system makes it very easy for hundreds of people to congregate quickly in one location, and especially in the denser parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, there isn’t a lot of easy mobility for small fleets of government cars. The saying goes New Yorkers can be kind if not nice, and a certain “hands off our city” ethos will, I think, clash with any attempted raids.
