The New Yorker:

As protests against Trump’s immigration raids spread nationwide, a crowd gathered in lower Manhattan—complete with bullhorns, balloons, and a toy doughnut to bait the cops.

By Adam Iscoe

In the summer of 1857, lower Manhattan festered with riots. People took to the streets for many reasons, including rioting for its own sake, but chief among them was that some local residents were born in America and others were not. Near what is now Foley Square, the Dead Rabbits gang (immigrant, Irish) threw broken jars and bricks. The Bowery Boys (nativist, anti-Irish) chucked stones from rooftops. Even women and children joined in. The police were nowhere to be seen. One spectator asked, “Why don’t the authorities interfere?”

Last Wednesday night, near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office downtown, a police officer who gave his name as Charlie looked around and said, “If you think about it, in a hundred and fifty years, nothing’s really changed.” He was surveying a group of demonstrators who had gathered to protest President Trump’s immigration raids, which have been occurring with increasing ferocity—at meat-processing plants, outside courthouses and schools, even in church parking lots. A protester named Jessica Galeas, who had a Guatemalan flag wrapped around her shoulders, said that five people she knew had recently been deported. “Imagine you can’t go to the grocery store because they’re just waiting out there to grab you,” she said. “People are asking me for favors—‘Can you drop off my kid at school?’—because they’re afraid.”

Around a sculpture called “Triumph of the Human Spirit,” demonstrators held signs that read “dear ice, gtfo. love, nyc.” People carried balloons, cowbells, GoPros. A few had their faces obscured with balaclavas or KN-95 masks. Others had their parents’ phone numbers scribbled in Sharpie on their forearms. Protests the night before had been intense, with thousands of people in the street and dozens of arrests, so the N.Y.P.D. had turned out early. One officer, who immigrated from Trinidad when he was nine, said that he wasn’t wearing a riot helmet because tactical gear scared people. “It’s better to be approachable,” he said. Another officer, a beefy gent with a helmet in his hand, announced, “I’ve had seven cups of coffee today.”

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