People of Red Hook: How do you feel about ICE?

All of New York has been buzzing about an ICE agent’s recent shooting in Upper Manhattan of a 28-year-old Dominican man while he was driving with his five-year-old son. It seemed like a good time to ask the people of Red Hook how they felt about ICE.

Davis Rowe: I think the whole thing is terrible, to be honest with you. It’s pretty devastating to watch people being ripped from their homes and taken away from their families, and they’re not sure what’s going to happen to them, and it certainly doesn’t seem like the ICE agents care what’s going to happen to them. I know there’s a lot of debate about it, but whatever your political affiliation is, Democrat or Republican, I don’t understand how you can watch videos of people being ripped from their cars and assaulted in the streets and think that that’s helping our country. I just don’t understand how anybody could think that. I get that maybe putting some more restrictions on the immigration policies might make sense, but the way they’re going about this is complete overkill. How can you be detained by someone that’s just in plain clothes, that’s not even wearing a uniform, when you haven’t even committed a crime? Okay, this last guy, they said he had a criminal record. We don’t know what his circumstances were aside from that.

The statistics show that the vast majority of people who have been arrested by ICE have no criminal records at all. And of course sometimes they’ve been deported. And some of them have been deported to countries they haven’t even been to since they were young children.

They’re pulling kids out of elementary schools. They’re taking people out of hospitals! They’re basically a militia with no legitimacy. They don’t have badges or ID numbers. Like, if this is so legal and justified, why are you covering your faces? What are you trying to hide? It doesn’t really check out to me. This is not a good look for us.

Cynthia Cruz:
You don’t just feel that ICE should stay out of New York. You don’t think they should exist at all.

Yes. Just to be able to arrest people because they look different? So what makes you think I wasn’t born here? Just because I look like this? What makes you think because somebody’s from another country, that they’re violent, all of a sudden? And not only are they arresting people, but God knows what’s happening to them. We don’t even know half of it. We need to give that money we’re giving to ICE back to the public. Put it back into the schools! Put it back into childcare!

Lyasia Thompson: ICE gives me the impression of being a bully. I don’t think this is the right way to go about the removal or temporary removal of people. With this man who just got shot, that was really too much. With a little boy in the car! There should be a way to detain people where you’re not traumatizing their children. And the onlookers! Because with this latest shooting, everyone who witnessed it was traumatized, I’m sure. Okay, they have a job to do that was given to them by the highest office. But it could be done in a different way. I think about how some people describe people that come from [public housing]. They call them animals! That’s how I would describe ICE. The way they act—like animals! They act like they want to scare you, to intimidate you. Look at their appearance. I’ve just seen videos of them, but I’m sure I could spot them from a mile away. They stand out in the crowd. They wear those masks—some of them look like gas masks.

A lot of them are just in plain clothes.

And that’s dangerous, because anybody could buy a little dupe of those uniforms and call themselves ICE and start doing whatever they want. And you know what? I’m so glad that you stopped me, and asked me about this. Because I always just think about these things when I’m on the internet, and I don’t comment or anything. But I have thoughts, and I just feel like there are other ways that we could go about dealing with these situations.

So you think, okay, maybe there are some people that should not necessarily be here. But we don’t have any system to legitimately deal with them. We just have this system that’s out of control.

How about using smaller infrastructures to deal with these issues? How about letting the community take care of its own immigration issues? These ICE agents are not part of our community. We don’t even know where they come from. There has to be a safer, healthier way to go about it for all parties involved.

Esther Morales and Brown Sugar:

Esther: I can’t stand ICE! They don’t give people a chance to say, listen, I have my papers. I’m good. No, they just handcuff them, take them into the system, and then deport them! But some of them are not supposed to be deported! This nation was built by immigrants! It’s so sad. People in my family have been deported! Some of them were here for more than 30 years! And they sent them away. They sent them to Santo Domingo. And they’re not coming back!

Really? You’ve had people in your family that were deported?

Yes! My niece’s husband, his sister, his niece, and their aunt.

So what happened?

The agents showed up and they should not have opened the door! The agents lied to them! They told them, don’t worry, we’re just going to go to court. They made it sound like there was nothing to worry about. So they went to court, and they were deported!

So this is very personal to you.

Yes! How can you start over after having a life here for twenty-five, thirty years? They were all working, paying taxes. But why didn’t they have their papers? That’s what I said to my niece! Why did they let their visas expire?

But they must have had some record of being here after 30 years. What kind of work were they doing?

One of them worked in SoHo, in a pizza place. One of them worked in a bakery. One of them worked on 53rd and Fifth Avenue, serving food.

So they were just given these summonses to go to court, and they probably had no idea what was going to happen, and they just sent them away. That’s terrible.

Brown Sugar, walking by and joining the conversation: Tell me something. How do these ICE agents think they’re legitimate? Excuse me, but why do you not have a uniform? Why are you not showing your faces? Why are you not wearing a body cam so we can see that what you’re doing is legitimate? We’re not claiming we’re geniuses, but some of us did go to school. We know that one and one makes two, and two and two makes four. And you [Trump] want to be remembered. That’s why you want your name everywhere. And you will be remembered! You will be remembered as the worst president America has ever had! You will be remembered that you were a felon and a convicted criminal. You will be remembered that you took the worst president crown from Tricky Dick Nixon! The only future America has now is to get rid of this crumb bum, because he has left us naked and vulnerable!

Devorah Easton:

So you have mixed feelings about ICE.

I don’t believe in our justice system anymore. I believe it’s completely corrupt. But on the one hand, I’m very in favor of getting rid of the illegal people that commit crimes. On the other hand, I think people who have been living here and paying taxes and being law-abiding citizens should be left alone. Especially if they’ve been here for years and years. They should just go after the criminals. And the ones that they know are criminals should be deported right away. And I’m not prejudiced at all, but I also believe in deporting the Islamists that are extremists, the ones that go around saying “from the river to the sea” (an anti-Zionist expression) and beating people up. I was at a protest and I nearly got killed. I was holding a [pro-Israel] sign, and this guy comes up to me, this Muslim guy, and he has this baton, and he’s yelling and yelling at me. So, my general way of dealing with idiots like that, I turn my back on them. I don’t engage. I didn’t say a word to him, I just turned my back, and I’m standing in front of another person who’s with me, and he goes around this person and he starts yelling at me again, calling me a dirty whore, saying things that would make a sailor blush. And I just turned my back again. And eventually, after about half an hour of this name calling, he went away. But not before waving his baton, like this…

You really felt as though you could have been physically attacked.

Yeah. But the best way to get rid of somebody like that is not to engage.

So you do agree with the deportation of undocumented people who have committed crimes, and of Muslim extremists like the man who verbally assaulted you at the protest.

Yes. But we could also do what Poland did. They put up this huge electrified fence. And they will not let anybody in who is undocumented. People stand outside there yelling and screaming that they want to get in, and they don’t let them in.

Really? I didn’t know that Poland actually took this measure. So I’m assuming that Poland, unlike so many European countries, does not have a problem with a lot of people entering its country illegally.

Yes. Because all the borders are blocked off, except for the ones that are official checkpoints.

(I looked it up later: “Poland built a 5.5-meter-high steel fence along a major portion of its border with Belarus. The government deployed thousands of soldiers and border guards to secure the frontier. Polish authorities suspended the legal right to apply for asylum for individuals crossing irregularly from Belarus. Roughly 30,000 attempts to cross the Belarus border occur each year despite the heavy security. A small number of migrants still manage to enter through methods like forest tunnels or sudden group rushes.”)