The way ICE operates in New York is not nearly as visible as in other cities, which has only made it more effective. The numbers of people arrested and detained are quite high: ICE has made forty thousand arrests across the state, eight thousand of them in New York City. But according to recent reporting, the agency’s footprint in New York is nevertheless quite small. ICE is effectively a special forces operation of hunter-killer teams, with access to all kinds of data, intelligence, and surveillance technologies—it’s more or less guaranteed that they’re violating people’s Fourth Amendment rights—who go around the city hunting down and kidnapping people. And it seems to be staffed by a small number of officers; every time they make it onto the news, you see the same ugly mugs in the photos.

It should be said that in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, activists defeated ICE, by forcing the agency to, if not leave, then change their tactics and scale back their operations. Activists did this at great risk to themselves, and of course some were even killed in the process. It’s been hard for activists in New York City to have quite the same effect. There are plenty of Signal chats and other ways people try to keep informed about ICE operations, but agents tend to show up and depart covertly, faster than people can feasibly mobilize to put their bodies between ICE and those facing arrest. Many of the people on those Signal chats are the same people who supported Mamdani’s campaign, and so Mamdani himself is in a difficult position, having come out of this movement. Think of the video of him getting in the face of an ICE officer. Now that he’s the mayor, he can’t put his body on the line in the same way—though some might argue that he should.

Both an executive order issued by Mamdani and state law already preclude cooperation with immigration enforcement, but legally, the meaning of cooperation remains unsettled. The police department treats joint enforcement operations or turning over individuals over to ICE as verboten. Meanwhile, people at a protest who are pushed out of the roadway by police so that ICE vehicles can leave the scene will call that cooperation. And I’m not a lawyer, but according to my reading of the law that New York State passed and of Mamdani’s own executive order, a situation like that doesn’t technically rise to the level of cooperation. In my view, it is cooperation—but our legal arguments on the left are somewhat constrained, I think, by the lawyers around Mamdani and how they are interpreting his own words, as well as the words that Hochul approved.

The problem of ICE is thorny. If the mayor can’t marshal troops to skirmish with Trump’s deportation force, what can he do? Mamdani’s legal resources as mayor are quite limited. I do think that prosecutors could investigate ICE. Mamdani doesn’t control prosecutors, but it would be possible for the state attorney general, Letitia James, to investigate and even prosecute ICE officers who act outside the scope of their authority. The shooting in Marble Hill certainly warrants an investigation, and according to the New York Times, it does seem that local and federal authorities are investigating. Similarly, disciplinary measures against police are warranted if cooperation is to be defined as anything operational, rather than only bureaucratic.

There could also be grand juries. Again, Mamdani doesn’t control prosecutors, but prosecutors form grand juries to harass regular people and activists all the time. Why they aren’t doing that for ICE is a question I can’t answer, but there are many levers at the disposal of prosecutors. Likewise, states including New York and New Jersey have passed laws meant to establish bare-minimum operating procedures for ICE and other law-enforcement agencies, including banning face masks. And so when, as happened recently in New Jersey, the Department of Homeland Security openly says to a judge, “We’re going to violate state law,” I think it’s incumbent upon the judge to say “You’re going to break the law? There’s going to be a penalty for that.” So there are serious organizing challenges for activists, but there’s also a lot going on here legally with ICE’s lawbreaking.

Finally, I also think that some people are just waiting to see what will happen in the midterm elections, hoping that maybe things will change if the Democrats retake Congress. I think that’s the wrong attitude, because Trump as a lame duck will probably be even more of a terrorist than he is already.