‘Vibe shift’ as New Yorkers force ICE to back down

Protesters on offense instead of defense

Protesters blocking ICE vans. (Screengrab from Talia Jane video.)

There was a remarkable scene outside a federal government garage in New York City’s Chinatown on Saturday morning.

Dozens of masked federal agents had gathered inside in preparation for a raid.

Hundreds of New Yorkers wouldn’t let them out.

“As the agents’ vehicles moved to leave, protesters blocked them, forming a barricade at the mouth of the garage with their bodies and piling mounds of garbage bags beside them. The standoff continued for the better part of an hour as more and more protesters arrived,” the New York Times reported. .

“By the early afternoon, nearly 200 people had gathered on the street outside, chanting and yelling at the agents, who peered out from inside the garage.”

Here’s video from early in the confrontation.

The federal agents called the New York Police Department for help. The crowd continued to grow. Here’s video from Getty Images.

NYPD officers tried to clear the way for the federal agents to leave, arresting several protesters and spraying others with chemicals.

“Just after 1:15 p.m., the confrontation erupted into chaos when agents burst from the garage in their vehicles and protesters chased them down Canal Street, hurling planters and trash cans after them,” the Times reported.

The agents fled the city and headed to New Jersey.

As the Times concluded: “The confrontation, which appeared to foil the raid, underscored the numerous challenges the federal government faces in trying to stage raids in a dense city like New York, where pushback from protesters in a largely liberal city appears inevitable.”

Independent journalist Talia Jane, who reported on the confrontation in real time on Bluesky, wrote afterwards:

The vibe shift today is, I think, due to the fact that New Yorkers were on the offensive instead of the defensive. Usually with protests, demonstrators have to defend the space, defend their right to march, etc. They get beat up and pushed around and antagonized into chaos and trauma.

Instead, demonstrators spent today jamming up operations for ICE and the NYPD….

People refused to go easily with any order. You want us to move back? You’ll have to make us. Even the tiniest thing, like adjusting a barricade to latch into another one, was met with enthusiastic resistance. Cop pushing a barricade into people? Barricade gets pulled away from him.

It doesn’t hurt that there were massive dumpsters full of stuff for protestors to play with but the consideration to grab things at all - those instincts were like the guiding light of god shining down on people. It wasn’t chaos for the sake of it. It was tactical, strategic, intentional.

A clarity of thought seemed pervasive through the crowd, not from training together or even knowing each other. I think it was having a shared goal that is inherently disruptive (block ICE) that made the steps to that end collectively understood and embraced.

City officials – including the police chief – expressed outrage over the federal agents’ conduct.

ABC7 News reported that “the special agent in charge of the New York Homeland Security Field Office Ricky Patel called NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch later in the afternoon to apologize for what happened. Tisch told Patel it was ‘unacceptable’ and put federal agents and police officers in harm’s way -- and if this activity continues someone will get hurt.”

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani reiterated his opposition to immigration raids in the city, saying: “When I met with the president, I made very clear that these kinds of raids are cruel and inhumane, that they are raids that do nothing to serve the interests of public safety, and that my responsibility is to be the mayor to each and every person that calls this city their home, and that includes millions of immigrants, of which I am one.”

City comptroller Brad Lander said the police officers shouldn’t have sided with the federal agents. “I really do want to ask the NYPD to remember who you’re sworn to protect and serve, and it is the people of New York City,” he said. “And yesterday, the people who were protecting and serving New Yorkers were the protesters who showed up.”

And Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition and a member of Mamdani’s transition team, told Time Magazine on Sunday that the confrontation was a sign of what’s to come:

“New York City is unlike any other place in this country or even the world, and what you have seen yesterday and time and again is that New Yorkers of all stripes, across all creeds, are not going to allow a rogue, lawless, violent and horrific agency to continue to mess with their neighbors,” he told Time. “I think the message here is that we’re all walking each other home together.”

New Orleans is Next

Immigration sweeps are expected to begin imminently in southern Louisiana. Protests have already begun.

Katie Schwartzmann and Conor Gaffney, lawyers from Protect Democracy, are offering a “playbook for the federal immigration surge in New Orleans” based on the lessons of Chicago.

Their advice:

Before deployment happens, pre-bunk bogus federal justifications. The administration claims that its enforcement operation will target only those immigrants convicted of crimes. That is false. Every resident can do the work of truth-telling: Speak to your neighbors, your city council members, and your social circles to debunk that lie loudly and repeatedly.

Document federal abuses. The most damning evidence in Chicago’s litigation came from residents filming federal violence on their phones and sharing far and wide on platforms like TikTok, Reddit, X, and others. Treat this not just as social media content, but as a shared civic duty.

Force the issue. When neighborhoods stand united to say, “We don’t need federal help,” it makes it impossible for the administration to claim they are here to “save” the city.

Keep it peaceful. Portland protesters used humor, showing up in costumes that successfully deflated federal attempts to portray them as threats. Nonviolent resistance from a broad cross-section of the community demonstrates that opposition comes from ordinary Americans defending their city, not from fringe agitators.

Where’s the Anti-War Movement?

Politico newsletters are typically breathless tip sheets, but Monday’s Politico Nightly newsletter actually raised a fascinating question: “Is the anti-war movement poised for a comeback?”

Intern Riya Misra wrote:

With rising criticism on the right and the left surrounding the possibility of a U.S. military intervention, not to mention residual anger over the deployment of troops to U.S. cities, it’s raised the prospect of a Trump-era rebirth of the anti-war movement that sparked in the 1960s, and again in the 2000s.

Her Q&A with New University history professor Jeremy Varon, whose new book examines the movement to stop the War on Terror, is worth reading in full. An excerpt:

What might an anti-war movement look like in the Trump era?

First off, it would have to make the case for its own existence by arguing that Trump already is at war, even if it doesn’t feel like the major armed conflicts of the past. There’s the strikes against alleged “narco-terrorists” on the high seas and threats against the Venezuelan government. There’s also the use of the military in domestic anti-immigrant operations, and threats to use the military to suppress dissent. Trump seems to want another Kent State, in which the National Guard shoots demonstrators, prompting chaos and additional lethal force.

A successful movement would contest the use of the military action for drug interdiction, for law enforcement, and at the whims of a trigger-happy president. It would say: “We don’t want to be a nation that assassinates people without any due process for alleged offenses normally punished by time in prison. That’s war crime stuff. We don’t want the army to squelch the free speech. That’s dictator stuff.”

Building a mass movement around such appeals is a tall order. For Trump, “stupid wars” are simply ones the U.S. can’t easily “win.” So he goes after soft, largely defenseless targets, like alleged drug runners or vulnerable immigrants and those who protect them. The dream is war with zero losses, one-way “lethality.” The calculation is that the public will care only so much if no Americans die. History supports that calculation. Large swaths of the U.S. public turned against the Vietnam and Iraq wars only when sizable numbers of U.S. troops got killed.

An anti-war movement today can’t simply warn of “another Vietnam,” like Iraq became. Trump wants to avoid that, too. So the trick is to get Americans to see three things: First, that who a nation kills, and why, is the measure of its soul; war crimes are un-American, a stain on our soul, and our soul matters. Second, that questions of who has the authority to kill, within what constraints and with what oversight, are not mere legal abstractions or wonky, institutional detail. It’s life and death, for someone, with great bearing on whether America is a constitutional republic or a rogue state. Third, and most important, that all lives have dignity and worth and are worthy of due process — including hapless civilians running drugs, undocumented migrants, and foes of whatever the current policies.

Public Citizen’s Legal Plans for 2026

In an end-of-the-year email, Public Citizen outlined its goals for the coming year, which include continuing to mobilize the American people and build massive nationwide coalitions.

The group filed 22 lawsuits against the administration in 2025, and expects to file even more in 2026.

These are some of the areas the group is monitoring for more litigation, investigation, and advocacy:

Trump’s Grift
Trump’s shady business dealings in this term are even more egregious than in his first term. We are exploring litigation opportunities around a range of schemes that benefit Trump and his family financially, including a possible plan to siphon off a share of government drug purchases.

Health Care
We are adding staff to monitor the chaos at the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We anticipate even more health policy-focused litigation in the coming year. We are tracking efforts to weaken Medicare and shovel money to for-profit insurers, among other key issues.

Corporate Subsidies
The cronyism of the Trump regime and its readiness to deploy taxpayer dollars to subsidize allied corporations knows no bounds. We are monitoring a major new initiative to throw massive subsidies at coal plants, tech companies, and more.

Immigrant Rights
The regime’s rabid cruelty toward immigrants means that anti-immigrant animus is informing all kinds of governmental activity — not just involving ICE, but also at the IRS, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, and more. We’ll build on our existing docket of cases challenging the administration’s illegal and unconstitutional actions targeting immigrants.

Open Government
We expect to file a significant number of lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act, forcing the disclosure of information that the regime is trying — illegally — to keep secret.

Recent Legal Action

• A federal judge in Denver last week ordered federal immigration officers to stop making arrests in Colorado without a warrant unless the detainee posed a flight risk. Judge R. Brooke Jackson noted that some immigrants had been held for as long as nearly 100 days instead of being released on recognizance, despite no probable cause that they might flee.

• A federal judge in Washington issued a similar order for D.C. on Tuesday. “Put simply, immigration enforcement officers may conduct a warrantless civil immigration arrest only if they have probable cause to believe that a person is both in the United States unlawfully and an escape risk,” Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote. She cited statements from Stephen Miller and other top administration officials to the effect that agents are using a much lower, “reasonable suspicion” standard.

• A federal judge in Boston has blocked the Trump administration from depriving Planned Parenthood and local affiliates that perform abortions of Medicaid funding. The ruling applies in the 22 states and Washington D.C., which filed the lawsuit in July.

• A federal judge in Washington has blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to skirt federal privacy laws that protected taxpayers’ sensitive information. The court’s stay will prevent the IRS from sharing data on millions of taxpayers with ICE.

End Notes

• In a news conference on Monday, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly spoke at length about his willingness to stand against Trump, who he cast as a bully. The Arizona Republic said the speech seems likely to “raise the senator’s profile as a prominent symbol of Democratic resistance to Trump and his agenda.”

• A new group called CommonLoop is proposing to create a nonprofit social media platform “where every dollar from advertising and sponsorship supports charitable missions and research. “

• A Catholic church in Massachusetts has replaced the baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in its nativity scene with a sign saying “ICE was here.” Father Stephen Josoma of the St. Susanna Parish in Dedham, told Boston.com that it’s a church tradition to use the nativity scene to “hold the mirror up to what’s happening, and this year, it seemed to be, my God, it seemed to be right there in front of us.”