Power Plays

Through videos circulating among Senegalese friends in WhatsApp chats, I watched the October 21 ICE raid unfold on New York City’s Canal Street. It was a spectacle: herds of ICE agents in tactical vests and neck gaiters shrink-wrapped to their faces fanned out around a hulking armored vehicle, the purpose of which was unclear. I recognized a few masked agents from last summer, when we had stood in arms’ reach of one another in immigration court: over time, I’d come to know the contours of certain noses and lips beneath certain sets of eyes, a particular gait paired with a particular ballcap logo. One of them, I realized, was the same man who had shoved a woman to the ground in immigration court a few weeks prior, an act for which he’d been briefly suspended. Now, apparently, he was back on the streets.

For the past five months we had seen the way federal agents laid claim to other cities. The National Guard descended on Los Angeles and ICE rappelled from a Black Hawk into a Chicago apartment complex. As we watched, we tried to guess when the same force would land on the streets of New York.

ICE’s expanded budget includes $100 million earmarked for promotional contracts with influencers.

At this point, most New Yorkers had seen the images of federal agents crowding the hallways of immigration courtrooms, the roundups in Home Depot parking lots, the four-person ICE squads waiting outside of apartment buildings in Queens and South Brooklyn. But if you didn’t need to attend ICE check-ins or live in targeted neighborhoods, you may not have seen an agent in the city with your own eyes. Operation Canal Street brought ICE’s presence out into the open, in the middle of downtown Manhattan, for everyone to see.

The intersection of Canal and Broadway is a strategic location for ICE to stage a raid. It’s a straight, five-minute walk from 26 Federal Plaza, the facility where ICE often holds people they’ve just arrested in New York City. Drive five minutes west and you’ll enter the Holland Tunnel, on the other side of which is Delaney Hall in New Jersey, a private detention center that, after reopening under a $1 billion, fifteen-year ICE contract in 2025, provides an extra one thousand beds for ICE detainees, quadrupling the state’s immigration detention capacity.

Canal Street is also the location of a decades-old gray market for counterfeit goods whose sidewalks are lined with Chinese, West African, and Bangladeshi vendors selling hats, watches, wallets, and shades for highly negotiable prices. Their presence attracts hordes of international tourists, most of them wealthy and European—as well as, I’ve been told by vendors, NYPD officers looking for nice gifts for their mothers-in-law.

On the day of the raid, some vendors were tipped off and stayed home. As the agents jog-walked around the armored vehicle, black and red pepperball launchers clasped to their chests, the remaining sellers scrambled to pack up their merchandise before scattering. Bystanders turned their heads and watched the agents make their way up onto the sidewalk, where they circled around targets to demand their papers. One Black man with a Brooklyn accent yells, “I’m not doin’ nothin’! I’m from Brooklyn!” as two Homeland Security agents press him against a wall, one running his hands down the man’s arms and legs. As they began making arrests, ICE officers spawned dozens of spontaneous protesters. In response, one agent brought out a yellow taser, holding it in front of his face and pointing it at anyone in his way before shoving them aside. 

All told, the agents detained only nine people on the grounds of their suspected immigration status. Given the relatively small number of captures, it seems that ICE’s primary objective was less to get bodies inside of prison cells and more to be seen and filmed—and for those videos to sow confidence or fear, depending on the watcher.

It’s possible the raid was triggered by videos from right-wing YouTubers, one of whom was Nick Shirley, now famous for terrorizing Somali daycare center workers in Minneapolis with clips watched and amplified by top Trump administration figures. About a month before ICE appeared on Canal Street, Shirley posted a video walking down its busy sidewalks. In the video, one vendor offers Shirley AirPods. When Shirley asks how he got them, the vendor explains street markets: “Anywhere in the world there is a market [the video’s subtitles read “black market,” but that’s not what the man says] where people can get anything they want for a cheap price.”

Shirley calls the vendors “scam artists.” In reality, no one thinks they’re buying real products: vendors exist because of market demand, an insatiable appetite for lookalike Louis Vuitton bags that compels the underemployed—many of whom are shut out of formal and salaried work—onto the street. The promise of a swarm of shoppers around a vendor’s tarp when he pulls out a fresh set of faux Rolexes and YSL shades draws him to this work, with its risks of exposure and arrest.

One of the men who was detained during the raid told me that he heard the federal agents discussing Shirley’s YouTube video. Shirley himself was present that day, too, there to film a follow-up. Part of ICE’s expanded budget includes $100 million earmarked for promotional contracts with influencers: a small army of Nick Shirleys, cameras in hand, ready to clear the ideological ground for the next raid.

The following day, DHS posted grainy mugshots of the nine people it arrested on its X page, naming all except one a “criminal illegal alien.” A friend of one of the detained men told me he had looked into getting his image taken down, but abandoned the effort after a lawyer said it would cost thousands of dollars.

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The first raid demonstrated ICE’s imperious will to be seen. At the second raid a month later, a small army of observers gathered in response. In the days before the operation, tips circulated among the group chats of ICE watchers, and warnings were translated to French, Wolof, and Mandarin. Vendors began their own countersurveillance, sending videos and photographs of suspicious clients to vet them after rumors circulated that plainclothes ICE agents were buying counterfeit merchandise to be used as evidence for future arrests.

When a suspicious figure approached, vendors whispered to each other, in a kind of telephone game that filtered down the sidewalks of Little Italy, “Mafia, mafia, mafia.” It was a term that new West African asylees had learned to use after their encounters with Mexican police extorting them on their journeys towards the southern U.S. border. For them, mafia had come to mean any shadowy force posing a threat to the collective: in New York, such forces included police officers, journalists, companies like Uber or DoorDash, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, scam lawyers, and increasingly, the American government writ large.

On the day of the second raid, I was on the other side of the country, but through videos and photos I constructed a shaky iPhone collage of the entire event. Dozens of federal agents had staged their vans in a parking garage off Canal Street. Protestors surrounded the vehicles, blocking them in. A wall of agents stood looking out from the garage’s open entrance, their ranks extending back into the shadows, visible by the glints of light on tinted sunglasses. Those at the front waited with wide stances, arms hanging at their sides, swaying and fidgeting. At first, they were remarkably still, as if waiting for a cue, while the growing crowd of protesters, chanting, willed them out of the city. Then the agents advanced, pushing against a crowd that refused to budge. When the NYPD arrived, responding to a call that the street was being obstructed, they began making arrests. Police officers erected metal barricades to cordon off protestors, while protesters dragged potted trees out in front of ICE vans to block them from pulling out.

The watchers see past the spectacle of the military parade, focusing our attention on the moments the agency would rather conceal.

At the end of the day, although more than a dozen people were taken into NYPD custody, nobody had been detained by immigration enforcement. Flashing police vans filled with protestors carved a slow path of retreat through the crowd, clearing the way for ICE vans filled only with ICE agents. By any measure, the second raid was unsuccessful, stymied by a mass mobilization of watchers whose numbers have grown alongside DHS’s ballooning payroll.

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A month later, from a windowless room in One World Trade Center, Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, and Frank Russo, New York’s Director of Field Operations for Customs and Border Protection, held a press conference to tout the success of Operation Salvo, a series of arrests targeting fifty-four people allegedly affiliated with the Trinitarios gang. For the occasion, ICE had printed posters with yet more grainy mugshots, this time of young Dominican men, with text above each photo reading ARRESTED, designed to look like a rubber stamp. “The best thing about this operation,” Russo told reporters, “is that it was done the way law enforcement loves to do it: quietly, discreetly, behind the scenes. Often under the cover of darkness.” Those tactics are a far cry from the first raid on Canal Street, with its midday military procession down a commercial thoroughfare, or similar operations across the country. In ever-proliferating videos of agents with their knees on the necks of teenagers, or taking their batons to car windows and dragging out drivers across broken glass, the visual evidence captured by ICE watchers is at odds with the agency’s claim to quiet, discreet, and thus more orderly and precise enforcement. Officers often claim that those filming them are disrupting their work, even when distance is maintained. Agents insist that the watchers step back. Observation itself, they suggest, is an obstruction. ICE wants it both ways: to be seen swooping in to return law and order to American streets, but to do so anonymously, faces hidden. The watchers see past the spectacle of the military parade, focusing our attention on the moments the agency would rather conceal: a girl managing to get safely inside her house, closing the door behind her moments before men lumbering in pursuit can reach her out on the icy sidewalk; four agents carrying the limp body of an unconscious protester, limbs bent unnaturally, head lolling forward.

Noem and Russo were speaking just a few blocks south of the parking garage where ICE had spent an afternoon surrounded by immigrants yet unable to make a single arrest. Almost all the questions posed to Noem were about one person; her name was being chanted by a crowd of protesters on the sidewalk below. She was someone who, despite the immense capaciousness of the term, did not fall into the category of immigrant, and whose final act was watching: Renee Nicole Good. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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