National and local politics collided on Tuesday in New York City, as Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was detained by ICE agents at a federal immigration court in downtown Manhattan. Lander was at the federal building for the third time in as many weeks, offering support to immigrants as they showed up for hearings and appointments with immigration officials, accompanying them as they left the building in the hopes of avoiding immediate detention from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — a new tactic that has become commonplace across the country in recent weeks.
“Before today, I had walked four families out, all of whom were afraid that they were going to be detained by ICE agents, and yet were able to walk out of the building,” he told reporters at a press conference after his release some hours later. “Even though they had had their cases dismissed and were subject to expedited removal, [they] were nonetheless able to get out of that building, and at least get back to their kids, get back to their families, try to figure out what’s next.”
That was not the case with Edgardo, the man for whom Lander was advocating on Tuesday, as masked ICE agents sought to detain him the moment he left the courtroom after the judge dismissed his case, thereby taking away Edgardo’s legal status for the duration of his proceedings. “All I tried to do was hold Edgardo’s arm and ask ICE agents ‘do you have a warrant?’” Lander said. The agents forcibly separated Lander from Edgardo and cuffed the city official as well, with DHS issuing a statement on twitter claiming he was taken for “assaulting law enforcement,” even as video evidence from multiple sources shows no such thing.
The comptroller’s detainment follows a statement from Donald Trump on social media on Sunday that called for even more aggressive enforcement in “America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.” This prompted questions towards Eric Adams in his weekly press conference this morning, which was likely occurring at the same as Lander’s run-in with ICE. Adams told reporters that Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kaz Daughtry was “speaking with our federal partners to get an understanding of if there’s any new changes, and we will adjust based on those changes.”
The mayor also emphasized that “the federal government is in charge” when it comes to immigration policy, and repeated his message to migrants, which has become something of a refrain even as Trump’s mass deportation policy intensifies: “let your children go to school, call the police if you need help, get medical care if you need it, make sure that you go to your houses of worship if you desire.”
Trump’s hometown of New York City, as Lander pointed out on Tuesday afternoon, has an immigrant population of 40%, and 50% of New Yorkers live in mixed status households. A million of them are children. Lander also noted that even the agents who detained him were immigrants — one from Pakistan and the other from Guyana.
In a statement to La Voce, the mayor’s press secretary Kayla Mamelak Altus said that “today should not be about Brad Lander,” and noted that the city government has rolled out a Know Your Rights campaign for migrants, and has signed an amicus brief in the case of Dylan Contreras, a Venezuelan immigrant who was also detained by ICE two weeks ago. Despite these efforts from the mayor’s office, a climate of fear has taken hold in the city, as reports indicate that undocumented children are avoiding city schools out of fear of ICE arrests — with good reason, as agents have attempted to enter schools in other cities with high immigrant populations, like Los Angeles.
Lander ended with a call to resist the hard-line shift in policy from the federal government. “We are normalizing family separation,” he told reporters. “We are normalizing due process violations, we are normalizing the destruction of constitutional democracy, and we’re not going to stand by and let it happen.”
