If ICE or other immigration agents go out of bounds, the place to fight them is the courts, not the streets —and New York pols from Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani on down are courting chaos if they play the issue otherwise.
Consider City Councilman Shaun Abreu’s smear Wednesday, posting an inflammatory video that he claimed showed Homeland Security officers pulling a migrant out of an SUV in Washington Heights without due process.
Abreu blasted the arrest as “deeply disturbing” and part of a “despicable pattern of intimidation,” huffing that agencies “carrying out [President Donald] Trump’s agenda of detaining people without due process have no place in our city.”
In reality, the arrestee was Alpha Amadou Diallo, who hopped the border in 2021 and received full due process before a Biden-era immigration judge ordered his removal last year.
“Abreu should stop fearmongering and smearing our brave law-enforcement, who are facing 1000% increase in assaults against them and a nearly 8000% increase in death threats,” warned Homeland Security Investigations Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
Another incident Wednesday raised other fears: When NYPD cops saw men chasing someone, they raced to investigate and intervene if necessary — only to quickly recognize fellow law-enforcers (cops usually know cops, even in plainclothes) and help stop the runner.
Though painted in some initial accounts as feds-vs.-police, the incident actually highlighted the importance of cooperation between cops and ICE — something New York perversely prohibits.
Yet Mamdani has promised to resist removals of even of violent-criminal illegal immigrants; he calls ICE a “rogue” agency and vows to stop it from enforcing the law with deportations, using use his power as mayor “to reject Donald Trump’s fascism.”
“If you want to pursue your promise to create the single largest deportation force in American history,” blusters the mayor-elect, “you will have to get through me to do that here in New York City.”
So Mamdani is eager to ignore US law to carry out the International Criminal Court’s warrant for the arrest of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and also vows to forcibly block federal immigration law-enforcers: Does he think Washington will simply shrug?
We expect city cops would refuse to obey illegal orders, but Mamdani’s resistance talk sets up confrontation between federal agents and fired-up radicals — the kind of face-off that led to the murder of innocents at a Texas ICE facility not long ago, as well as to violence in Chicago, Portland and Los Angeles this year.
The feds have so far refrained from using the force at their disposal to come down hard on these radical rioters, but they’ll certainly look for answers to radical pols like Mamdani, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and others who pour more gasoline on the fire.
We don’t think Trump should withhold major funds from the city until Mamdani actually does something, but encouraging mass resistance to federal agents would be begging for the federal spigot to shut off.
