“If Not Us, Literally Who?”: New Yorkers Want ICE Out of the City

TUESDAY 5:03 PM JUNE 10, 2025 DOWNTOWN

On Tuesday in Lower Manhattan, the rain let up just in time for the city to break a sweat. By 5 p.m., Foley Square was electric—bodies packed tight, drums pounding, chants roaring. The protest, organized by a collection of grassroots organizations including The People’s Forum, was a response to recent immigration crackdowns and the continued presence of ICE in local communities. Under the second Trump administration, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in immigrant detentions and deportations without due process—a steady slip from democracy into fascism, felt deeply in the souls of Americans. From the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the deployment of the National Guard against protesters in Los Angeles earlier this week, New Yorkers decided they’d had enough. People of all ages filled the square, in Crocs and Docs, hoodies and heeled boots, pushing baby strollers and brandishing bullhorns. Nothing staged—everything alive, messy in all the right ways and angry in all the necessary ones. On this hot, humid day, we stood among them—watching, listening—and found out what they had to say.

Text and interviews by Simon Dwihartana, Olamide Oyenusi, and Charlotte Zager.

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LEAH

“How could you not be here today, while our community members and our neighbors are getting kidnapped off the street and disappeared? If we don’t stop it, no one will. No one has to be a fucking hardworking person to deserve to be in this country safely. I want to make that point that part of the rhetoric is like, Well, they’re hardworking people. They should be here. Fuck out of here. People deserve safety and dignity and to be able to go home to their families and eat and sleep in peace without being detained by the state and kidnapped. “

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AYUUB

“Well, if we look at the history of America, it’s founded on slavery and genocide. America was built by settler colonialism. Then you have what’s basically a modern-day settler colonial colony saying that other people don’t belong here. I mean, you kill their original inhabitants and then tell immigrants who are mainly from Mexico and Central and Latin America that they can’t be in this continent. I mean, that’s wild.”

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YARI OSORIO

“These are people that want to work. They are the secret sauce. What has made America so prosperous is hardworking people like these immigrants. We just have to have a policy that makes sense. But both the Democrats and the Republicans, all they want to do is just keep a tiered system of labor where there’s one regular and one not-regular class.”

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VICTORIA

“ICE out of New York City, we need them out. We need them out of the whole entire United States. There’s no need for all the raids going on. There’s no need for all the violence. The police and all that started it, the National Guard started it, and now they’re bringing in more National Guard Marines. I feel like it’s ridiculous and we need to be out here standing for it.”

SANIYA

“It’s literally a prison state at this point, like a police state. It’s history repeating itself and we’ve learned this time and time again. They’re using weaponized rhetoric to marginalize a specific community of people, like they did in the 60s. They did it on the land that we’re on right now, which is stolen. And I think the inhumane brutality is against what we stand for as a country.”

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“S”

“There are definitely some people [for] whom it doesn’t matter, because they are of a certain race or a certain socioeconomic class and they don’t care because it doesn’t matter to them at all. But these are real people with real lives who are being affected. Just because it doesn’t affect me, how can I therefore say, Oh, it does’t matter?“

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DENISE

“I’m a Mexican-American and both of my parents are immigrants from Mexico. I understand wanting deportations, but in a humane way. He’s passed the line where it’s not humane, and if he wants that to happen, there’s so many better ways to do it, not violence. Keep protesting and using your voice, because others can’t use their voice. We have to use it for them.”

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DAVE JOHNSON

“I’m here because of the raids that ICE has been conducting in L.A. and the protests that have sparked. I’m also a communist. I’m organized with the Revolutionary Communists of America, and we want to build a party that can not only stop ICE, stop these immigration raids, [which is] basically kidnapping people and sending them to prisons in El Salvador, but we also want to overthrow the capitalist system as a whole and bring the working class to power. We need a party of the working class. But if we organize in our workplace, organize neighborhood self-defense committees, and we connect that with working class strike action, the working class has the power to stop the police and ICE in their tracks.”

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DAISY

“I think we’re going back as a society. We’re entering an era of division, and it’s so heartbreaking to see. But America is so much more than what the Trump administration is making it out to be. America’s composed of immigrants, people of color, it’s composed of the LGBT community. That is what America is for me.”

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SARA LINA

“The deportations that are happening right now are just awful. The fact that there’s young kids literally representing themselves in court while their parents are virtually tuning in from a detention facility is disgusting. The fact that our country is allowing that, ripping families apart—it’s sick. And I think it’s time that New York stands up the way L.A. did and joins in solidarity with the rest of the country. Because if not us, literally who?”

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