Elite-Backed Street Activists Harass ICE in New York Court Buildings

ICE officers faced chaotic scuffles on June 6 from elite-backed activists in New York City’s major courthouse as they picked up migrants for deportation.

The opposition to law enforcement is just one part of the elite-backed massive resistance to President Donald Trump’s popular policy of enforcing Congress’s immigration laws. The opposition seeks to minimize deportations by harassing ICE officials and by portraying peaceful, orderly arrests as frightful “chaos.”

There was no chaos when the left-wing activists were absent, allowing ICE deputies to calmly escort illegal migrants out of the building:

ICE officials are increasingly arresting migrants at their scheduled court hearings, partly because it minimizes manpower and coordination demands, and also maximizes safety amid the risk of violence from street protests or dangerous migrants.

Trump’s enforcement policy is already paying big dividends to the many ordinary Americans who are seeing their wages rise, their housing prices decline, and their local crime rates drop.

But the activist groups are so influential in the Democratic Party that top party leaders are joining their courthouse resistance. MSN.com reported on June 5 that the pro-migration City Comptroller, Brad Lander, joined the actions:

“The last few weeks have been terrifying for New York City’s immigrant communities, for the city itself, this place that has been the greatest immigrant city the world has ever known with an immigrant tradition going back 400 years, and really for the rule of law itself,” Lander said on June 5.

Lander, who is running for mayor [against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams] attended hearings Thursday morning as part of the “Friend of the Court” program—an initiative by immigration coalition Immigrant ARC that designates individuals who can observe proceedings and assist respondents in navigating their immigration processes.

He encouraged other New Yorkers to participate in hearings as Friends of the Court in “solidarity” with immigrants undergoing proceedings. “I’ve felt more useful for the last hour than I have felt almost any time since Donald Trump was elected,” Lander said.

Immigrant ARC is an elite-led pro-migration group in New York City. For example, the group’s treasurer is Omar Beer, a Harvard graduate and a top manager at Goldman Sachs.

Another ARC board member is Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition. That group got one-third of its 2023 budget from foundations or corporations, and its board includes Eddie Taveras, who works for FWD.us, a lobbying group for wealthy West Coast investors in the consumer economy.

The FWD.us lobby group’s members gain wealth on the stock market when the government extracts more renters, consumers, and workers from poor countries.

Other progressive groups are organizing chaotic resistance to deportations in Nashville, Chicago, and Boston, mimicking some of the elite-backed Black Lives Matter movement that wrecked many communities in 2020.