Thousands of New Yorkers flooded the streets of Lower Manhattan Tuesday evening protesting the Trump istration’s immigration crackdown, which in New York City has been playing out inside immigration courthouses for three weeks.
The throng gathered in Foley Square denouncing raids that have taken place in the city and across the country. Many voiced for protesters in Los Angeles, where large demonstrations have been ongoing since Friday, and where President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard and the Marines to quell the demonstrations.
“To the liberals who are too busy criticizing the protesters in Los Angeles — take that energy and use it on the state violence that is being used,” activist Linda Sarsour shouted to the crowd. “The root of our problem is not protesters. The root of our problem is masked men kidnapping men and women and students.”
Sarsour was referring to weeks of arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who are often seen across the country covering their faces with masks. In New York City, ICE has spent the past three weeks staking out immigration courthouses, arresting people attending regular court hearings — often in their attempt to apply for asylum — in the hallways, lobbies and even bathrooms of the court buildings.
Hundreds of protesters left Foley Square to march across lower Manhattan and then north on Church Street on Tuesday. Among them was said 23-year-old Marilin, whose family is from Ecuador and whose father is undocumented.
“I’m speaking up for my family, they’re immigrants in this country but they’re not criminals,” she said, choosing not to share her full name for fear of repercussions for her relatives. The immigration raids and courthouse arrests have weighed heavily on the family in recent weeks, she said.
“He’s like, ‘If they take me, they take me,’ but at the same time, I know he’s scared because he’s going to leave behind three kids,” she said of her dad.
As several hundred marchers continued north, a splinter group returned to the corner of Duane and Broadway outside 26 Federal Plaza, the government building that contains several floors of immigration courts as well as a floor where people taken into custody at hearings have been detained.
It has been the epicenter of ICE activity of the past few weeks, and the street outside has been a locus for demonstrations in recent days. Tuesday’s protest was the largest yet, with several hundred people gathering on either side of Duane Street, which is closed off to all but federal vehicles.
The demonstrators were met with dozens of NYPD officers from the Strategic Response Group on either side of the roadway. As demonstrators tried to block the entrance to the street, NYPD officers forced their way into the crowd and pushed protesters onto adjacent sidewalks, making several aggressive arrests.
A standoff with demonstrators went on for more than three hours, as NYPD occasionally grabbed and arrested people who stepped off the sidewalk, and sometimes rushed onto the sidewalk to make arrests, pulling people into the street and shoving them onto the roadway. They appeared to make several dozen arrests over the course of the evening.
An NYPD spokesperson said Wednesday that 34 people had been arrested and held, with 52 more receiving criminal court summonses.
“I’m mad, furious,” said one protester earlier in the evening, a 20-year-old who had traveled from Staten Island to the protest and declined to give his name out of concern for his parents’ immigration status.
“My parents and my family, they come from a lot of hard work and I feel like a lot of their hard work over these past two, three decades that they’ve been here is going to waste because some people can’t put their pride aside and understand that we’re the forefront of this country.”
Skirmishes went on until late in the night, punctuated by chaotic arrests, chanting and at one point even a bagpiper.
On Monday, Mayor Eric Adams, who has directed his istration to not publicly criticize Trump, seemed to side with the president in blaming the protesters, saying that “the escalation of protests in Los Angeles over the last couple of days is unacceptable and will not be tolerated in our city.”
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who stood with the mayor, said the NYPD “will protect every person’s right to protest peacefully” but warned they would act swiftly to quell any disruptions.
“We have no tolerance for violence, none. We have no tolerance for property damage. We have no tolerance for people blocking entrances to buildings, or blocking driveways, or blocking cars from moving,” she said. “And any attacks against law enforcement will be met with a swift and decisive response from the NYPD.”
The commissioner and mayor were flanked by NYPD Chief of Department John Chell and Deputy Mayor of Public Safety Kaz Daughtry, who days earlier had played a round of golf with Trump — on their private time, they said — at his New Jersey course. Neither the commissioner nor the mayor took any questions. (The New York Post reported Tuesday that Trump had promised Chell and Daughtry that he wouldn’t send the military into New York so long as the NYPD kept demonstrators “in line.”)
Protesters have made several attempts in recent weeks to block vans used to transport detainees from entering and exiting immigration courthouse buildings. In late May, around who quickly pushed demonstrators aside making several arrests, and used pepper spray on some.
On Tuesday, the crowd had grown substantially from recent days, but with dozens of NYPD officers stationed all around the building, vehicles entering and exiting the plaza faced no major disruption.
One protester who ed the crowd named Giselle, 24, who declined to give her last name because of her first family’s immigration status, said her uncle, who is also undocumented from Ecuador, had decided that after 35 years of not leaving the U.S., he would now self-deport.
“The very first thing he’s going to do is he’s going to travel for the first time in his entire adult life,” she said. “He’s going to travel, he’s going to take his hard-earned money, and he’s going to live off it in his retirement in Ecuador. So I’m embracing that, because what else can you do?”
“It’s a fear I have to live with every day,” said one protester, 20, whose parents are Mexican and undocumented. “It’s always in the back of my mind, what I can do if my parents are ever arrested? And so I feel that it’s my right as a citizen, as a woman, as a person, to come and show up.”
