Hands Off NYC Anti-ICE Protesters!

Time and again, Zohran Mamdani has shown where he really stands. In the past week alone, he doubled down on the demolition of Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea housing projects, pledged 30 million to institutions of the Zionist butchers, and last night unleashed his cops against New Yorkers protesting the ICE shooting of Oscar Belgal, an immigrant Dominican man in the Bronx. ICE stormtroopers were conducting an anti-immigrant sweep when they fired bullets at Belgal and a five-year-old child sitting in a car, injuring the man.

Over the summer, ICE arrests have hit record highs. From L.A. to Minneapolis, calls on Democratic Party politicians to do the right thing have done nothing to stop the wave of anti-immigrant terror. NYC is no different. Mamdani talks fine words about how we need to get ICE off our streets, but he is complicit in the anti-immigrant crackdown. He had an hours-long call with his pal Trump, while keeping the NYPD busy clearing the streets for ICE to carry out its terror and abduct Belgal. He can talk about “abolish ICE” all he wants; how about he abolish his Strategic Response Group, which he’s been deploying to attack protesters? We can’t trust these fake politicians to protect us. We need to look to the working class.

NYC’s working class is heavily black, brown and immigrant. These anti-immigrant attacks aim to tear the working class apart. Driving immigrants into the shadows weakens unions’ ability to struggle. From mass layoffs of federal workers to the axing of voting rights, Trump has made clear that the attacks won’t just stop with immigrants. The more the agents of repression get away with going after immigrants, the more emboldened they will be to go after everyone else. The attacks on immigrants are the leading attacks on the working class as a whole.

Working New Yorkers have every reason to defend their immigrant coworkers and neighbors. It is urgently necessary to mobilize labor at the front of anti-ICE protest to give it the social muscle necessary to force ICE to stand down. Making that happen will require a fight against union leaders who suppress struggle out of loyalty to City Hall and the Democratic Party. This will not be easy, but it’s what we need to do to really get ICE off our streets.

• Release Oscar Belgal and all detainees!
• Drop the charges against all protesters!