Picture this: jackbooted ICE officers patrolling subway stations during your morning commute. Officers yanking families out of shelters and handcuffing them on the sidewalk. Enforcement operations sweeping in at pick-up time outside your kid’s school, barging into local businesses or even into your church, synagogue, or mosque.
Donald Trump has taken office again having promised a campaign of mass deportation of non-citizens. Most people probably associate deportation with border states like Texas, where many state officials have expressed support for such policies, or with agricultural areas like Bakersfield, Calif., where immigration raids in the past week have detained dozens of farm workers.
While no one knows for sure what mass deportation will look like, New Yorkers should be prepared for the possibility that it will all begin right here in the Big Apple. As a group of neighbors who have been working in our community to welcome new arrivals, we fear for the safety not only of our newest neighbors, but also for the long-time immigrant New Yorkers who are likely to be caught up in the dragnet.
We know some New Yorkers feel our city has gone too far with its sanctuary policies, including tax-payer funded shelter and other goods and services for migrants. That is a debate we can and should have, yet we do not believe that most New Yorkers would be comfortable with a campaign of mass deportation playing out on our streets.
There are several reasons why, politically, New York would make a logical point of departure for Trump’s deportation machine. For one, deportation is a form of political theater, and Trump loves political theater. Detaining non-citizens in a highly visible way in a blue-state “sanctuary” city — Trump’s hometown no less — has clear shock value. Unleashing ICE on New York would stick it to the liberals and throw red meat to a base hungry for action.
Several circumstances would facilitate such a scenario. New York is the city with the highest number of new arrivals in the country. There are more people with final orders of removal in New York than anywhere else in the country. A “final order of removal” does not mean an individual has had their day in immigration court and lost; these orders are often arbitrarily issued to individuals who, thanks to shelter displacements, may have simply missed a notice to appear.
Until now, ICE officers have avoided enforcement actions in “sensitive locations” like houses of worship, schools, and hospitals, but Trump has promised to rescind this policy.
Of course, city shelters, which house significant concentrations of recent immigrants, including immigrant families, present an especially tempting target. Newcomers are vulnerable because they don’t have the community networks that more established immigrants have; removing them may also be less economically disruptive than large workplace raids.
What’s more, this population has already been relentlessly attacked and dehumanized — including by our own mayor, who adopted a right-wing talking point last year when he claimed that newcomers were destroying New York.
The fact that many immigrant families handed themselves in to immigration officers at the border, have Temporary Protected Status (TPS, which is as the name suggests, a temporary legal status), or are pursuing asylum cases for which they have assiduously followed rules, filed papers, and met deadlines, may not matter much. Such legal niceties are likely to be lost in the political theater Trump has billed “the largest deportation operation in American history.”
But there are things we New Yorkers can do. We can support local organizations like Make the Road New York and Immigrant Defense Project, which work tirelessly to defend the rights of non-citizens.
Those of us who enjoy the privilege and protection of citizenship can educate ourselves in deportation defense and other civil disobedience strategies to peacefully disrupt the violent removal of our community members. We can remain vigilant in the weeks and months ahead and turn out for our neighbors when they are threatened by enforcement theater.
We can speak to family members, friends, and neighbors, pushing back against the tide of misinformation that has demonized our new neighbors. In doing so, we will communicate to federal officials, to local officials, and to all of our fellow New Yorkers: don’t mess with New York. We will stand up for all New Yorkers, regardless of their citizenship status.
The authors are neighbors and volunteers welcoming new arrivals in Harlem and Morningside Heights.
