Video of ICE Raids Spurs New York Backlash as Support Shifts Across Boroughs

New scrutiny of U.S. immigration enforcement in New York signals a wider reckoning with official impunity and public trust.

In the ice of a recent February dawn, snow melted only by flashing blue lights, federal agents in dark vests tore through a modest row house in Elmhurst, Queens. Within minutes, ChongLy Scott Thao—a longtime city resident—stood shivering in little more than underwear, hands zip-tied behind his back, while a dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers rummaged through his family’s rooms for documents and phones. It was not the first such raid this winter, nor the most lethal. That grim honour belonged to the episode just two nights earlier, when ICE officers, pursing a tip, fatally shot Alex Pretti as they pinned him face-first against a Bronx pavement. By week’s end, a leaked video of both incidents made their way onto social media, prompting not only the customary protests, but—remarkably for New York—an earnest policy rethink.

The news event is plain enough, if all too familiar across 2024’s inflamed immigration battleground. After years of sporadic tension between New York officials and federal immigration authorities, a trio of high-profile ICE encounters has ignited public outrage. First, Renee Good, a Brooklyn nurse, was shot and killed in her car by agents purporting to serve a warrant. Days later, Pretti died during what authorities described as a “brief struggle”. Then came the Thao raid, captured in all its chilly chaos. The incidents, coming in rapid succession and with the aid of clear-cut video evidence, have torpedoed what once passed for plausible deniability among law enforcers. Mayor Eric Adams has called for answers. City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams demanded federal oversight. Even the stolid NYPD brass, ever wary of alienating Washington, hinted that ICE’s tactics had become “untenable” for an allegedly sanctuary city.

For New Yorkers, such scenes bruise the city’s reputation for gritty tolerance and deep diversity. New York’s workforce draws heavily from immigrant labour—over 36% of city residents are foreign born, and more than half of Bronx and Queens families claim immigrant roots. Police-community trust, long fragile, has flagged further as ICE operations appear to disregard local “detainer” policies, shafting both public safety and established legal protections. As stories ricochet through WhatsApp groups and local newswires, working families suddenly worry that a school drop-off or medical visit could end in custody, or worse.

Beyond metropolitan distress, the implications drift into New York’s economy, politics, and collective psyche. The city’s $60bn food and hospitality industry—overwhelmingly staffed by immigrants—has already suffered workforce churn amid pandemic aftershocks and restrictive national quotas. Civil libertarians point out that unregulated federal incursions undermine due process and chill civic engagement. Politically, both progressives and centrists now angle for distance from ICE, eager not to appear callous. But conservatives, in suburban enclaves or Staten Island, argue the city cannot “pick and choose” which federal laws to enforce, stoking a familiar battle line at a moment when migration policy is Washington’s most divisive wedge.

The second-order effects are subtle but cumulative. Racial and ethnic divides, never paltry in this city, have quietly widened, as some communities feel especially targeted. Social cohesion—already rattled by housing affordability and COVID-19’s psychic toll—now frays further under the dual threat of crime and heavy-handed enforcement. Legal aid groups, most recently the New York Immigration Coalition and Bronx Defenders, claim their dockets now bulge with “excessive force” allegations. Insurance premiums and public hospital costs inch upward amid mounting injury claims. Perhaps more corrosive, say public-health officials, is the quiet uptick in untreated trauma and depression in immigrant-dense neighbourhoods.

Nationally, New York is hardly alone in grappling with these dilemmas. Across sister sanctuary cities—Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles—local governments are sparring with ICE over the scope of municipal authority, immigrant rights, and the limits of federal reach. Yet New York’s scale and symbolic heft render its tussle instructive. While the U.S. Supreme Court has recently affirmed broad leeway for federal enforcement (see Arizona v. United States, 2012), cities have found legal and practical recourses: refusing local jail cooperation, steering clear of federal funding entanglements, or pushing for state “right to counsel” laws for immigrants.

These deaths and raids mirror a broader American reckoning with police accountability. The twin forces of body-camera proliferation and social media have upended the old model of “plausible deniability” for law enforcement. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, the majority of wrongful convictions in recent years have been overturned in part due to video evidence—a data point not lost on New Yorkers. If ICE’s own oversight offices seem mostly toothless, public pressure appears more potent. In the wake of this month’s events, the City Council has proposed redirecting $40m in municipal legal defence funds away from federal deportation cooperation and toward family support services. The legal push promises to test the resolve not only of local officials but also of ICE’s national leadership.

A crisis of authority, an opportunity for reform

Some fret that such standoffs merely portend a descent into “blue state nullification”, with cities opportunistically ignoring federal law. But the situation in New York suggests something subtler: public trust is the oxygen of effective governance, and when official impunity is habitually filmed and shared, legitimacy can evaporate at internet speed. Jurisdictions with the lowest ICE-related injury and death rates, such as Seattle and Boston, tend to blend clear local protocols with robust contractor oversight—not endless legal wrangling.

Can New York forge an approach both lawful and humane? The evidence is mixed, but offers grounds for guarded hope. After previous backlash—most notably the 2017 “Dreamer” raids—city leaders quietly negotiated ICE’s withdrawal from courthouses and public schools. Recent council hearings make clear that even Adams’s centrist administration seems keen to avoid another season of wrenching headlines. Legal reform, if paired with data transparency, could restore a measure of trust—or at least buy time for federal politics to cool.

The battle over immigration enforcement in New York is, at root, about more than manpower or ideology; it is about whether American urbanism, with all its messy diversity, can withstand the centrifugal pressure of federal diktat. For now, public-opinion winds seem to favour a more chastened ICE, checked by civilian review and city oversight. Whether Washington can tolerate such autonomy in its flagship metropolis is a contest still very much underway.

Not for the first time—and surely not for the last—the eyes of the country are fixed warily on New York, waiting to see whether law’s heavy hand can be steadied by open scrutiny and common decency. ■