Political Whisperer
By Robert Hornak
Get ready, the anti-ICE agitators and paid protesters are preparing to bring the same chaos we are seeing in Minneapolis and Seattle to NYC.
While NYC has not had ongoing ICE activity that cities like Minneapolis have seen, there have been a few operations in recent months, like in Chinatown in late November that caused great controversy.
And the Trump administration is signaling that NYC will be among the next cities to receive ICE’s attention. A new ICE detention center to hold 1,500 detainees is being prepared in the Hudson Valley. Last year a center that holds 1,000 detainees was reopened in Newark. ICE is preparing for a lot of business in the Metro area.
After the Chinatown confrontation, where a number of agitators were arrested for blocking ICE and then had physical altercations with the NYPD who were sent to control the crowd, the NY Immigration Coalition put out a statement where they said. “Hundreds of New Yorkers gathered today to stop ICE from attacking our neighbors. Instead of protecting the residents of our city, the NYPD violently confronted and arrested protesters.”
This comment should illustrate the insanity of this operation. ICE was not “attacking” anyone’s “neighbors” and the protestors were the ones initiating violence trying to force their will on the country, which is which is why they were arrested.
The NYIC continued, “The violence that occurred today could have been avoided had ICE agents not escalated tensions.” In other words, by not submitting to the unruly mobs demands, ICE was creating “escalated tensions.” They then condemned the NYPD for doing their job, demanded they stop “collaborating” with ICE, and demanded that everyone arrested for attacking NYPD officers be released.
Now, Democratic Socialists are recruiting 4,000 people to form a rapid response operation in NYC and are being trained to obstruct ICE operations, and not in a friendly way. The DSA holds monthly meetings of their Immigrant Justice Working Group, where these trainings, reportedly attended mostly by privileged, white, Gen Z socialists, are conducted. They are also recruiting people to staff their ICE hotline 24 hours a day.
The agenda of these activists is apparent. This is nothing more than an extension of their failed “Defund the Police” movement that they started pushing in 2020. Only now they believe they can shift a short-lived apprehension over police tactics following the death of George Floyd to a condemnation of ICE tactics, spurred by their direct physical confrontation with ICE officers, to achieve a defunding of ICE and an end to their enforcement of immigration laws.
It’s clear that it’s mainly chaos the socialists are after. They want to tear down systems most Americans feel safety in. This was their tactic in 2020, confront the police with protests that often got physical and violent, then use the video of the police reacting to the violence of the protestors as the call to defund the police. This is exactly the same playbook they are using now, and what got Renee Good killed.
What’s more baffling is why are so many mainstream Democrats also attacking ICE and opposing efforts to remove illegal aliens, when stopping illegal immigration used to be a standard Democrat position as recently as the Obama presidency, who was often referred to as the deporter-in-chief for his aggressive approach to following immigration law.
So what changed? Well, Democrats in blue states have been losing population in recent decades, which equals fewer congressional seats. Democrats fought to include illegal aliens in the census starting in 1980, but the decline in population has not been offset enough with immigrants, legal and illegal. And therefore congressional seats have been moving from blue to red states.
And this is the real endgame. Democrats are trying to stymie enforcement long enough to get the many millions of illegals the Biden administration allowed to flow into the country, with directions for them to head to places like NYC. If they can destroy ICE and keep those millions of illegals here until 2030, they will alter the census and the balance of power between red and blue states for the next decade.
Robert Hornak is a veteran political consultant who has previously served as the Deputy Director of the Republican Assembly Leader’s NYC office and as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail.com and @roberthornak on X.
