At this point, we must conclude that the principal function of ICE isn’t the enforcement of immigration laws, but the occupation and policing of cities. “[We] must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside,” Trump posted on TruthSocial, not long after the rain fell, in every way, on his June 14 military parade, and, more significantly, while millions of Americans protested his brazen “will to [authoritarian] power.” Trump then described “Radical Left Democrats” as “sick in the mind,” unpatriotic, and so on and so forth.
And then Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in New York City on Tuesday, June 24. He is an immigrant, a socialist, and a Muslim. He is the embodiment of all that is considered wicked in our hyper-MAGA times. The message issued from this stunning victory against America's increasingly and frustratingly milquetoast center-left—a center-left whose leading strategy for Trump’s authoritarianism is to do nothing and let it somehow burn out on its own—is that something must be done. Our values, which are under attack, must be asserted, even if that means imprisonment. It is illegal to kidnap brown (or any kind of) people from the streets or our cities. The US is, and has always been, a multicultural society. This assertion is at the heart of the protests on the streets of LA and the ballots in NYC. But first, we must understand the core of the developments that led us to where we are now.
The line in Trump’s June 14 post that requires our attention is found here: “[City people] believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s sports.” When you identify cosmopolitan values with lawbreaking, then those values are, in this interpretation, criminal. And so you have crime in the streets, and crime in Pride parades, and crime even in City Hall. On Tuesday, June 17, Brad Lander—New York City’s comptroller, a progressive, and a candidate in the recent NYC primary that saw Andrew Cuomo and the Dems’ conservatives go down in flames—was manhandled and arrested by ICE thugs for doing his job in a court of law. Before that, the thugs did pretty much the same thing to a California senator for legally participating in a Homeland Security press conference. And before that, it was the mayor of Newark, who, again, was doing nothing more than following the law. The appearance of ICE in blue states—blue because they are dominated by their urban centers—doesn’t explain, of course, the essence of this appearance, which has its source in the GOP’s long and steady project of repressing the Black vote.
With ICE, voter repression leaves the judiciary apparatus and enters the US’s repressive apparatus, which includes the conventional police (by means of compliance), immigration enforcement, and the army, as demonstrated by the National Guard’s current and ever-expanding occupation of Los Angeles. This occupation, which will eventually expand to all major metropolitan areas, has as its mission the enervation of the blue voters. Why?
The GOP, which first lost command of the white vote in cities and, gradually, the suburbs, is in actuality the minority party. Without certain institutional (and therefore structural) advantages, the country should have long accepted the obvious fact of its multiculturalness and been organized by a politics that spanned from the likes of Joe Biden (conservative) to the likes of Mamdani (progressive). Trump would be unelectable if our national democracy were as robustly representative as in states such as California, New York, and, of course, Washington. The urban values supported by the Democratic Party should be regarded as conventional, as the usual, as the everyday. What must be registered as bizarre is not Mamdani, but Stephen Miller. The former actually represents, like the current composition of the Supreme Court, a small segment of America, but is, instead, the expression of a larger political structure that artificially amplifies his voice and views. If the left does not grasp the fact that what is at stake is our lopsided democracy, then we will continue fighting against apparitions (“more should be done to attract MAGA voters,” “Mamdani is a radical,” and so on), but not the real stuff of American life.
During his first term in office, Trump continued the GOP’s repression of the Black vote but left urban white voters, who over the past 30 years moved from the graveyard of the right to the spectrum on the left, unbothered. Not so with his second term. He is going after them with the hope of grinding what’s left of American democracy into the dust. This is where ICE comes into the picture. It’s not really about brown people (who, nevertheless, pay the traumatic price of ICE’s brazen lawbreaking); it’s about the white voters who, through urban processes, became liberated not so much from racism (we still have lots of that, even in progressive Seattle) but from the hot, anti-immigrant stuff of Trump’s rallies.
Stephen Miller Invokes Racist Conspiracy Theory To Dismiss Mamdani newrepublic.com/post/197219/...
— Ray Beckerman (@raybeckerman.bsky.social) June 25, 2025 at 1:21 PM
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And so, this is where things presently stand, Seattle. Los Angeles is coming our way, and it will definitely be a time of trouble, a time when our values are bombarded daily, when America’s white nationalist minority oppresses its multicultural majority. So, how are we going to come? Let’s turn to New York City for an answer.
