How ICE Becomes Normal
The Dangers of Cop Collaboration
Note: this article is about something that happened in the neighborhood where I live. I was unfortunately not present, as I’ve been in Portland since March caring for the family member with cancer I mentioned in an article late last year. This is also why there haven’t been a lot of articles lately. I both do and do not hope that can change soon, and I thank you for your patience and understanding during this time.
On the afternoon of May 2nd, three ICE agents broke Chidozie Wilson Okeke’s car window. Okeke, a Nigerian man who overstayed his tourist visa, refused to cooperate—who would cooperate at this point?—and so one agent moved to drag him from his car while the other pointed a taser at close range. He demanded a lawyer. Then the assault began, and all he could do was scream. “Somebody help me! They are killing me!”
The DHS claims they had to beat Okeke until he required medical attention because their victim attacked ICE agents and tried to hit them with his car. I don't mind being lied to at this point, I kind of expect it, but why must it always be the same lie? It’s a flex. The truth matters so little at this point that the lowest-effort falsehood will suffice. Lest you somehow doubt: here’s a video taken by a Brooklyn resident that shows Okeke doing neither thing.
What happened to Okeke in Bushwick last month has happened to hundreds of thousands since Trump took office. Violent, extralegal abductions are an everyday part of life in America now, which is great news for the Trump administration, because it gets them that `much closer to their end goal: mass acceptance of violent, extralegal abductions.
We do not have to like these abductions to accept them. We can hate them, even protest them, as long as we think of them as normal. Mosquitos on a hiking trip. Rain on your wedding day. Police beating the hell out of people they consider subhuman.
Speaking of which: ICE would really, really like you to believe there’s no real difference between their agents and your local cops, because if you start thinking of their violence as cop violence, their violence becomes normal. The DHS can’t get through a single press conference without loud and outraged assertions that ICE aren’t armed paramilitary thugs, but rather good, hard-working law enforcement agents protecting and serving the American people. Which American people? Oh, you know the ones.
As with most abductions over the last few months, ICE had Okeke out of his car and into the back of a van within minutes of initiating the abduction. ICE agents have to move quickly to avoid confrontation with outraged residents who do not accept their abductions as normal and are willing to put their bodies on the line to stop them. If these ICE agents had shown even a little bit of restraint, our story would end here. No DHS statement. No national coverage. Just another day in America.
Restraint has never been ICE’s strong point, though, which is why they beat Okeke so badly that he had to go to the hospital. Now they had to wait around for discharge. Three thugs in ill-fitting armor, hanging out at Wykoff Hospital; sore-thumb visible as the sun went down.
Word of ICE’s presence spread quickly through group chats. All across the city, hundreds of residents dropped their Saturday night plans and travelled to Wykoff Hospital to do what they could to thwart the abduction.
Al (not her real name) was among the first to arrive on scene. An agent inside one of the unmarked ICE vehicles idling outside the hospital preemptively pepper sprayed the first person in her group as they sprinted around the building towards his SUV, which made it clear they were in the right place. “People were moving stuff in front of the vehicles and standing in front of the vehicles,” Al said. “We didn’t want to let the agents leave with someone.”
As Brooklyn residents poured onto the scene, an undercover police car drove by with lights flashing. “They rolled down the windows and it turned out they were NPYD.” New York is a sanctuary city, which means the cops legally cannot help ICE. “We were like, we don’t care about what you’re doing. So we let them go.”
A second unmarked car with flashing lights drove past a few minutes later. This one contained an agent, and so residents moved to block that car as well. The agent kept driving. “He was going pretty slow, so people were slow walking and pushing back on the vehicle,” Al says. “A lot of the people who were on the scene at that point kind of got pulled with that car.” Al remained behind to block the initial vehicle, which saw its chance to escape and also began to drive slowly away. That original group continued doing what they could to block the van’s departure as they moved with the vehicle down the street.
Al remembers looking behind her and seeing a swarm of New York police officers descend upon the protesters surrounding the second vehicle just down the street. They began to violently clear a path for Trump's secret police. She turned her attention back to the moving SUV in front of her. Minutes later, that swarm reached her.
“Suddenly I hear more noise really close behind me,” she said. “There were like 10-20 NYPD officers right behind us with that first van. They were ripping people off of the cars, just grabbing people by the shoulders, by backpacks, by whatever they could, and just throwing people into other cars, into the street. I remember being grabbed from behind and thrown down in between some cars.”
Al picked herself up and got back in front of the vehicle. Once again, the police grabbed her. This time, they didn’t let go.
“I just remember my glasses got thrown off and they did something to my face. I have a bunch of bruising on my cheek and forehead, and my face is all scraped up, but I don’t fully remember what happened. Somebody had to tell me in jail that there was something on my forehead.” Al said. The NYPD would arrest eight other people before the night was over.
To hear the DHS tell it, the biggest problem their patriotic agents face on the mean streets of your average American city isn’t massive popular resistance, but the unspeakable barbarism of sanctuary laws. This obsession seems odd, since sanctuary city laws haven’t exactly thwarted their efforts thus far. Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis are all sanctuary cities, and yet these cities deployed no on-the-ground protection for their residents as ICE disappeared tens of thousands of them in broad daylight. Only civilian action has meaningfully thwarted these kidnappings so far.
And yet, the DHS is correct to fear sanctuary laws. They might not stop ICE abductions, but they do stop abductions from becoming normal. Real hard to argue you're a federal police agency when local police can’t work with you. Hard to argue that only Soros-funded radical blue-haired lunatics object to their remigration project when city governments are telling their people that ICE agents are lawbreakers, not law enforcers: an outside paramilitary menace whose violence should be resisted.
Sanctuary laws broadly reflect the will of the American people, in and out of the cities they target. Sixty percent of Americans disapprove of ICE’s current mission. Only 39 percent are certain the agency should exist at all; fully half of all Americans want ICE abolished entirely. Little wonder that the majority of Americans support active civilian resistance: 59 percent believe anti-ICE demonstrations are “mostly legitimate protests.”
These numbers are very similar to anti-cop sentiment at the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests—with one important exception. Approximately two-thirds of Americans believed that cops treat Black people less fairly than white people and that civilians should be able to sue police officers for excessive force. Even larger majorities favored police reform measures like civilian oversight boards and abolishing chokeholds.
And yet, despite this near-univeral outrage, 73 percent of respondents wanted police budgets to either stay the same or increase. The VAST majority of Americans opposed defunding the police, and outright abolition was as fringe as it gets. BLM succeeded in raising awareness and stoking justified outrage, but never managed to shake the public perception that the police are normal. Their violence is unfortunate, perhaps there should be reform, but cops do a lot of good and we should keep them around….right?
All ICE has to do to become normal is convince the public that their violence is equivalent to police violence. They don’t have to become more popular. They don’t need widespread public buy-in. They need people to say things like “well yes, they go too far, but obviously we need ICE to protect us from violent illegal aliens. The answer is body cameras, anti-mask laws, and all the other things the Democrats proposed when they shut down the federal government over ICE funding.”
Once ICE becomes a necessary evil in the public’s eyes, residents like Al and others who actively resist their activities become pro-crime agitators. Dems distance themselves from ICE resistance for all the reasons they’ve distanced themselves from BLM. Thinkpieces in major media outlets start talking about how whistles disrupt the peace, blocking traffic endangers neighborhoods, and filming is basically doxxing. All these things become The Wrong Way To Fight This.
ICE agents are worse than cops, who are plenty bad already. Letting the NYPD through was absolutely the right call, and it’s the call most residents are making across the country. To protect our friends and neighbors, the public must continue to see ICE and the cops as distinct, separate agencies.
Unfortunately, a lot of cops don’t see things that way.
By the time the NYPD arrested Al, hundreds of residents stood outside Wykoff hospital. Many of them documented clear, direct cooperation between ICE and the cops throughout the night. This video compilation, which comes to us courtesy of Freedom News TV, shows New York’s finest talking to ICE, shutting car doors for ICE, and physically assaulting residents so ICE could get away, all in direct defiance of New York City law.
Police cooperation with ICE in defiance of city governments doesn’t just undermine sanctuary city laws; it boosts ICE’s credibility as a law enforcement agency. When ICE agents and the NYPD stand side by side, target the same people, and crack the same heads, ICE violence becomes police violence. ICE targets become dangerous criminals. And civilian opposition becomes pro-crime agitation.
When the residents on scene confronted the NYPD about their direct violation of New York City law, a police captain named James G Wilson was kind enough to respond honestly:
Wilson: [Mamdani] is temporary. He’s expendable. Who’s Mamdani? He’s nonsense.
Protester: He’s your boss.
Wilson: Not my boss. He’s total nonsense. He’s an embarrassment and total nonsense. Not my mayor. All Democrats, no: waste of human race.
James G Wilson is not some random beat cop. He was the executive officer for the 94th precinct, which covers the neighborhood of Greenpoint in Brooklyn. Greenpoint residents elected Mamdani by a 50-point margin, which means that Wilson apparently believes most of the people he allegedly protects and serves are a “waste of human race.”
Wilson has not been fired for insubordination, or placed on administrative leave, or punished in any financial way—it would be highly abnormal if he were. Instead, the NYPD has transferred him to the communications division, where he continues to draw his six-figure salary.
One might expect Mayor Zohran Mamdani to be upset about a police officer defying city law and calling him expendable. Instead, Mamdani distanced himself even from the decision to transfer Wilson. He also denied that the NYPD violated sanctuary laws that night. “I want to be very clear that there was no prior coordination or planning between the NYPD and ICE ahead of this incident,” he stated at a press conference three days later. “NYPD officers were not dispatched to the hospital to participate or facilitate an ICE operation. Rather, they were responding to 911 calls regarding a protest outside of the hospital.”
It is illegal to block traffic, as hundreds of Brooklynites did that night. It is also illegal—unconstitutional, even—to abduct people, deny them due process, and imprison them in concentration camps (and there is truly no other term to describe the places they end up). Laws are words written on paper, nothing more; they only work when a critical mass of people decide to follow them. On paper, jaywalking is illegal. In practice, everyone jaywalks and the cops don’t care unless they’re trying to get you for something else. The actual rules that govern us aren’t determined by what’s legal. They’re determined by what’s normal. Blocking traffic to thwart an ICE abduction is a profoundly, unequivocally moral action. No law on earth can change that fact.
The NYPD could treat active resistance to ICE like jaywalking, and we should be outraged when they don’t. “I feel like people in New York have gotten so used to NYPD’s violence that it almost feels natural, or explainable, or excusable,” Al said. “They could literally do nothing. Ideally they’re being more supportive of responders and actual New Yorkers and community members who are concerned about what is happening to our neighbors. But they could literally just do nothing.”
May 2nd was not the first time the NYPD has helped ICE get away from rapid responders. “We saw this in February when ICE moved from Bushwick to Clinton Hill. We saw this at Canal street,” E, a Brooklyn resident active in rapid response, told me. “I think that what we saw on Saturday and the direct collab between NYPD and ICE leaves a lot of questions for our elected officials to think about.”
Mamdani has good reason to tread lightly when it comes to the police. James G Wilson’s claim that his mayor is “expendable” wasn’t just some random asshole mouthing off, but an accurate description of how cops deal with elected officials who make them angry. Law enforcement officers often respond to laws they don’t like by quiet quitting, then arguing the reforms they hate have hobbled law enforcement and empowered criminals. Police unions are big spenders in local elections, and can make or break reelection campaigns. When all else fails, they mount vicious harassment campaigns against politicians and district attorneys that defy them.
Mayors and city councils across the country have tried to reform the police forces allegedly under their control. A recent academic article suggests the issue may be our insistance on pretending the cops operate like cops. “American police forces undermine local democracy by encroaching upon the decision-making powers of city officials in ways that resemble militaries in fragile democracies.”
Here’s the thing about association: it goes both ways.
We accept cop violence as normal thanks to a collective fiction in which police forces enforce the law at the behest of our government. This is fundamentally untrue. The Supreme Court has ruled that police are under no obligation to protect and serve the people. Some people join the police force out of an honest desire to protect and serve anyway, and some even manage it against all odds. But entrenched cop culture actively corrodes everyone inside it. We are seeing the fruits of that corrosion on our streets.
If these institutions continue to openly align themselves with ICE in defiance of our elected officials, people may start to see them as a corrupt paramilitary force that feels entitled to flout the law. In this scenario, ICE doesn’t become law enforcement in the eyes of the public. Law enforcement becomes ICE. Something that ought to be abolished, so we can build something that actually protects and serves the people.
Cops are what they are