Brad Lander, a New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, was arrested by ICE for daring to ask for a warrant.
A hallmark of a tyrannical government is that political rivals get arrested on fake or trumped up charges. This in an effort to silence all political opposition. That very thing appears to be what is happening in the US right now.
Last week, we noted that California senator, Alex Padilla, was tackled down to the ground and arrested for the crime of trying to ask a question. The takedown happened right after Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, pledged that the US military wasn’t going to leave California until the state was “liberated” from democratically elected lawmakers in the state. Shortly after the forceful removal, Noem said that questioning the Trump administration was “inappropriate”.
Today, we are learning that another one of Trump’s political rivals was arrested. New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, Brad Lander, was arrested by Trump’s ICE thugs for the crime of asking for a warrant. Video footage of Lander’s arrest was posted to Bluesky where he was clearly asking for a warrant before being hauled away.
The incident made the news. From Yahoo! News:
New York City Comptroller and Democratic mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested by federal agents at an immigration court Tuesday after he linked arms with a person authorities were attempting to detain.
A reporter with The Associated Press and other journalists witnessed Lander’s arrest at a federal building in Manhattan, the latest confrontation between U.S. agents and a Democratic politician objecting to the Trump administration’s mass detention and deportation programs.
Lander was released from custody after a few hours. The U.S. attorney’s office said it was investigating his actions and would decide later whether to charge him with a crime. The immigrant Lander escorted out of the courtroom was also arrested.
Lander had spent the morning observing immigration court hearings and told an AP reporter he was there to “accompany” some immigrants out of the building.
The details about what Lander was a bit confusing to me, but TechDirt was able to clear up some of the context behind what was going on:
In just the last few weeks, we’ve seen multiple examples of Democrats (and only Democrats) arrested for trying to get a better understanding of what actions ICE was taking with immigrants or making sure that immigrants understood their civil rights under the law (something ICE has made clear it doesn’t want them to know).
The latest target comes during yet another disturbing escalation by ICE: the DHS has begun targeting refugees and asylum seekers who are fully playing by the rules. These people are voluntarily going to court to advance their case, legally, seeking to gain official permission to stay in the US.
What’s happening, according to multiple reports, is that the Kristi Noem’s DHS is literally secretly dropping their cases, then having ICE agents grab the people as soon as they exit the court room in order to deport them. Contrary to what Trump and the MAGA crowd will tell you, these are not hardened criminals or lawbreakers. They were literally following the law in seeking permanent residence papers. And, in the middle of it, DHS secretly drops their cases, while lining up ICE agents to grab them as they leave the courtroom, to then seeks to deport them (not necessarily back to their own country) without any due process.
If they wanted due process, they could let the court cases continue. But they don’t want due process.
That brings us to NYC Comptroller (and mayoral candidate) Brad Lander, who was arrested by ICE agents while visiting an immigration court. Lander has recently taken to going to immigration court hearings and trying to help those at risk from this new tactic. He’s done it twice before with no incidents, but on Tuesday, ICE agents arrested him, claiming he was interfering.
This completes the picture for what’s going on. Legal immigrants were being arrested on fake charges, they appear before the courts only to have the charges quietly dropped, then they get arrested when they leave the courtroom and subsequently deported with absolutely no due process to foreign gulags to be put into slavery or torture. When Lander caught wind that this was the stunt they were pulling, he decided to start appearing at the court to escort those legal immigrants out of the courtroom so that ICE thugs don’t kidnap them. When Trump’s ICE thugs saw that this is what he was doing, those thugs arrested him for “interfering” in their kidnapping operation.
Shortly after being released pending possibly charges for daring to question Trump’s tactics, Lander gave a stark warning to American’s that says that nobody is safe in Trump’s America. Anyone can be arrested and deported without due process and, as Lander proved in very vivid detail, even politician’s aren’t safe from getting arrested by Trump’s hired goons. Of course, non of this is surprising since it was Trump himself that called for the deportation of American citizens back in April. To echo the famed Trump meme, “he said he was gonna.”
