Newton’s third law of motion applies to everyday life as much as it does physics and science: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Along with the U.S. Constitution and civil rights, it appears ICE has also ignored this law.
The sights of masked agents marauding through the halls of 26 Federal Plaza, seizing law-abiding immigrants who obeyed court orders to appear for hearings, enraged New Yorkers who see the images of these brutish operations in the pages of this paper, online and on television.
That in turn has spurred action to resist ICE operations in the Big Apple and beyond. We saw the impact of this Saturday when protesters rushed to Chinatown and intervened with an apparent major ICE sweep of the community, directly confronting the armored agents and boisterously demanding that they leave the city. The NYPD was called in, and the protest descended into chaotic clashes between cops and protesters.
Then there are the unseen unintended consequences of ICE’s increased enforcement operations — from children being kept home from school because their undocumented parents fear they might be deported, to a report released Tuesday suggesting that the city’s construction industry might suffer from delays and higher costs because of a reduced immigrant workforce (nearly half of all NYC construction workers, the study says, are foreign-born).
From the beginning, the Trump administration insisted that ICE’s mass deportation effort would concentrate largely on criminals. Few oppose that idea.
Nearly a year later, however, it is obvious to everyone that ICE is arresting just about every immigrant, documented or undocumented, that they can get their hands on.
But ICE’s ongoing, escalated deportation effort is hurting everyone, including the detainees and their families, most of all.
It goes against the core mission of Homeland Security to keep the country safe.
It undermines public trust in law enforcement and stokes anger.
It is making it more difficult for the NYPD to enforce the law and keep the peace.
It is hurting absentee public school students.
It is jeopardizing our economy.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. There are many reactions to ICE’s increased enforcement in New York City this year; none of them have been good or have made our city safer.
It is time for this madness to end. ICE must end its indiscriminate enforcement efforts and focus again on criminals, not law-abiding people, for the good of our city and our country.
