On the afternoon of Oct. 21, I was walking through a typical, lively Chinatown, going from my dorm at Broome Street to Lafayette Hall. Tourists and locals milled through the neighborhood’s congested streets, ducking into restaurants and puzzling over Google Maps. Though it was, by all means, ordinary, something felt almost imperceivably different.
As if the city had shifted on its axis, what was once a block bustling with vendors was now a public spectacle: A crowd huddled around Canal Street Station, holding their phones high to get a glimpse of masked federal agents grabbing a single, disoriented man. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had invaded lower Manhattan, sent to make “intelligence driven” targeting vendors selling counterfeit goods, many of whom are immigrants.
That day, over 50 federal agents arrested at least nine vendors on Canal Street, as well as several protesters. Spontaneous demonstrations broke out along Lafayette Street, leading down to 26 Federal Plaza — where ICE brings detainees for processing — in plain view of NYU’s Lafayette Hall. Videos circulated on Instagram of the chaos unfolding in the streets. Yet, a lack of widespread student acknowledgment — let alone no universitywide communication from administrators — leaves NYU’s community with no motivation to question our role in the anti-immigrant crisis happening in our backyard.
“If you look at the video, everything was fine with the officers talking to those individuals and making arrests until violent protesters showed up,” ICE Director Todd Lyons said.
Let’s unpack that — what exactly is a “violent” protester? The word “protester” implies premeditated organization, but what I witnessed was unrehearsed desperation. Civilians yelled at officers as an immediate reaction to their conduct and aggression. They remained peaceful, refraining from touching the ICE agents unless they had been pushed to the side by them first. I witnessed grown men in uniforms forcefully shove petite, frailer women — their backs hitting the ground and losing their shoes in the process. HSI officers pushed a man’s head down as they marched him through the New York City Police Department’s barricade outside Federal Plaza.
With 21,000 international students and faculty from over 120 countries, NYU is home to the largest international collegiate community in the country. If anything, our student population is among those most vulnerable in the wake of changing immigration policies. Beyond just citizenship, students’ abilities to exercise their First Amendment rights are strangled by targeted arrests and censorship.
While NYU is known as a liberal school, the indifference that has characterized students’ response to the Canal Street ICE raids thus far is disappointing. If students at a multicultural, supposedly progressive institution cannot elicit impassioned responses toward violent discrimination happening in such close proximity, how can we expect the rest of the country to?
The events of Oct. 21 prove that NYU students live in a bubble — we learn about injustices in class, yet have the luxury of remote indifference when the people living around us face unjust treatment with little due process.
As students, we are in an immensely privileged position: one where we can call the rich internationality of our population “well-traveled” while comfortably dismissing the political reality of this internationality. It’s time we get a taste of the real-world experience and not only involve ourselves, but empathize with the injustice happening in our streets.
I was scared, not because of the civilians packing the street, but because of the overabundance of force employed so freely by law enforcement officials to corral unarmed people alarmed by random mass arrests. This disconnect has left us in a parallel reality with the rest of New York — one where we sit four stories above the streets, filming ICE agents’ aggressive arrests from our dorm rooms.
WSN’s Opinion desk strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion desk are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Angela Dong at [email protected].