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.