New York City socialists are mustering an army of more than 4,000 anti-ICE activists to form “rapid response” battalions and obstruct the feds in an expected imminent crackdown on illegal migrants in the Big Apple.
Mayor Mamdani’s comrades with the DSA outlined the mission Thursday at a monthly meeting of their Immigrant Justice Working Group in the swanky Midtown digs of the Chinese Communist Party-linked People’s Forum, where photos of communist idols Fidel Castro and Che Guevara decorate the walls.
“As we’ve seen in other cities, we still do anticipate a big wave of federal immigration enforcement,” a DSA leader who only identified herself as Marina told the crowd of more than 100 members.
“It can be confusing, it can be scary, it can be kind of uncertain what’s happening in New York right now. . . . But we want to be on our front foot if and when it does.”
The NYC chapter is training 2,000 DSA members and another 2,000 non-members, along with activating 50 additional trainers.
It’s also beefing up staffing of its ICE hotline to operate it 24/7.
“If you speak Pular, if you speak Creole, if you speak Fulani – come find us,” urged a leader. “We really want you on the team.”
The group didn’t say what all of this will cost, but the member-funded organization repeatedly asked for money throughout the nearly two-hour long meeting – with one leader even going around the room with a red beanie soliciting cash donations in the socialist version of a collection plate.
The majority of the crowd of mostly white, Gen Z socialists said they were first timers galvanized by the death of Renee Good, the 37-year-old Minneapolis mom fatally shot by an ICE agent during a confrontation earlier this month.
The anti-ICE group Good was part of was trained to “resist” immigration crackdowns – and a model for the combative Minnesota tactics they hope to bring to Gotham.
“ICE is a violent organization and has been emboldened to respond to a lot of the work that many of you participated in,” lambasted a leader.
“The immigrant crisis is part of the US imperialist project, and yet we treat immigrants to the experience of ICE,” complained Landry, a tenant organizer in Crown Heights and DSA member.
The NYC DSA plans involve showing up en masse to confirm ICE sightings — and swarming immigration agents.
“This has been in the past in New York specifically enough to deter ICE detentions,” said Marina, an elusive Queens based musical artist who only goes by “Marina F” in her synth-pop two-person band The Observation Room, and who specializes in “sleazy, neon and queer sounds.”
The anti-ICE technique she told the group about — known as “form a crowd, stay loud” — also includes the use of rape whistles.
“If you’re interested in doing this kind of work, we can hook you up with whistles,” she said.
“We do have a lot of whistles,” assured Leemah Nasrati, another leader, who works as a pro bono refugee lawyer and hosts the Q&A portion of the DSA’s “Know Your Rights” trainings, which the group puts at least once a month to tell people “what the deal is with ICE.”
Using various whistle codes, the sound would reverberate through the neighborhood to alert people of ICE’s presence, members were told.
“The whistles carry far and wide,” Marina promised.
The DSA has been patrolling and canvassing immigrant neighborhoods that include Chinatown, Bushwick and Jackson Heights in search of new recruits.
“There are more of us than them,” said Nasrati, as she told members to join a closely guarded Signal chat, where DSA members have to go through another round of vetting, to get involved in the group’s “rapid response.”
ICE has more than doubled its headcount in the past year, as agents descend on cities for large-scale operations to arrest migrants convicted of crimes or living in the US without legal status, with a senior White House source vowing after Minnesota that “California and New York are next,” WIRED reported this week.
A recent nationwide ICE operation nabbed criminal illegal migrants who had been convicted of heinous crimes including forcible rape, aggravated sexual assault of a child and strangulation, the agency said in December.
“ICE law enforcement officers are sending criminal illegal aliens where they should have been all along – HOME for the holidays,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said at the time.
The Department of Homeland Security announced plans earlier this month to open a new ICE detention facility upstate in Chester, an hour outside New York City, that would hold 1,500 illegal migrants.
It would more than double the area’s detention capacity – currently the only NYC-area ICE facility is a 1,000-bed center in Newark, which the Trump administration reopened last year.
The increased holding capacity is expected to be accompanied by a surge in ICE enforcement in the New York City area.
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