June 11, 2025
New York City, America’s premier metropolis by far, was built by and for immigrants. It’s where the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the most famous symbols of immigration, are located. It’s the city where neighborhoods are named for waves of immigrants from the World over. It’s where you can enjoy the authentic cuisine of any country on Earth, listen to live music of any culture, overhear dozens of different languages, and enjoy seeing fashion from every continent on the streets and in the trains below them. We have parades for lots of countries, “days” for others, and street fairs for the rest. And we do love it all. The I Heart NY logo is one of the most well known memes on Earth.
A couple of decades ago, an Atlanta Braves baseball player thought he could insult our great city with his racist Dixie shtick by claiming, “it’s the most hectic, nerve-wracking city. Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you’re riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing… The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”
Needless to say, we weren’t amused. New York Mets fans of all ethnicities heartily boo’d him whenever he played here. Why? Because the diversity he sought to denigrate is our calling card. It’s in our City’s DNA. And when ignorant racists start in on trashing people who aren’t of White European descent, we take it personally. As a sign often seen at protest marches plainly states ‘Hate Is Not Welcome Here.’ Unfortunately, about ten years ago, one of our homegrown racists hijacked a political party and made it OK to talk smack again like we were back in the 1930s. He plunged into the race for President by declaring that Mexicans were criminals who brought only problems when they came. Jaws dropped around here in astonishment that anyone seeking public office could be so blatantly racist. He went on to channel that Atlanta ballplayer and to become, incredibly, President of the United States.
In that role he dissed African countries as ‘shitholes‘ and claimed they wouldn’t ‘return to their huts‘ if they were allowed to visit the USA. While COVID-19 took tens of thousands of American lives, he called it the “Kung Flu.” His racist wisecracking might have been ‘edgy’ in a 1970s comedy club, but a decade and a half into the next Century, it’s just repulsive. We caught a break when he lost in 2020, but that reprieve ended in January when he returned to the White House. This time the racism was on steroids. He’d campaigned on an explicitly racist message: that non-White immigrants were a mortal threat to the USA. That they were ‘invading’ us to take our jobs, to ‘poison the blood’ of our country, to lay about and collect welfare, to murder unsuspecting good old boys in the Rust Belt with fentanyl that they’d smuggled across Biden’s ‘open border’ – the same one he’d sealed shut with a wall 4 years earlier. That Haitian refugees were stealing and then eating people’s pets in the Midwest. That his opponent, a very well educated and highly accomplished Black Woman, was the most unqualified candidate ever. Every accusation is a confession, as they say.
All of that brings us up to last night when several thousand New Yorkers filled the streets of downtown Manhattan to nonviolently protest this vicious war on migrants. He’d campaigned on smoking out the bad ones and sending them back to from where they came. He’d shone a spotlight on heinous crimes committed by undocumented migrants to imply that was typical of them all. Nobody had objected to sending rapist, cop killer, or drug kingpin migrants back to their home countries. But that’s not what happened. Having pegged the number of ‘criminal aliens’ at between 15 and 20 million, it soon became obvious that a lot of people that weren’t criminals would have to be swept up to make those numbers work. So men waiting for work outside Home Depot were collared. Kids attending school activities were grabbed. A 4 year old with cancer was deported…and he’s an American citizen. People appearing for their scheduled immigration hearings, i.e. ‘coming in the right way’ have been ambushed outside of courtrooms and spirited away. Others have been grabbed off the street by unidentified masked men and thrown into unmarked vans, basically kidnapped, because they exercised their 1st Amendment Right to express their opinions. A man in Maryland was deported to the Salvadorean contract torture jail without any due process and in violation of a Court order that he NOT be sent to El Salvador if deported. In other words, whatever mandate voters gave him, it wasn’t for this sort of thing.
People carried protest signs (“No ICE, please!“) and chanted slogans (“No ICE, No KKK. No Fascist USA“) supporting migrants as they filled Foley Square around 5PM Tuesday. After a few people addressed them, the group headed west and then north on Church St toward the Village. The Gazette estimated that around 3,000 marchers passed by Canal Street and 6th Avenue on their way uptown. This mobilization took place against the backdrop of Federalized National Guard and active duty Marines being deployed to LA, over the objections of the California Governor Gavin Newsom. As such, the protesters were exceedingly well behaved and the small army of NYPD Officers had little to do but stand around and watch them go by. There were no ‘incidents’ or arrests observed by this reporter. The march eventually wound up in Washington Square Park. After a few light-hearted dance breaks the activists made their way out of the park, melting away into the warm New York City night.
It marked the beginning of a Summer that just might determine the future of our country. Saturday is the big military parade in DC for the king’s birthday, and the possibility of confrontation between troops and activists in LA looms ominously in the background. Perhaps this action was the calm before the storm, but hopefully it’s rather the calm that lasts all Summer long.
