200 New Yorkers tell Trump and ICE "not in my city!" This is why I love New York and New Yorkers, by Hal M. Brown

I'm an example of the saying "you can take a New Yorker out of The City, but you can't take The City out of a New Yorker."

Reading the Time Magazine article about New Yorkers and ICE (here) made me realize just how much I identify as a New Yorker and how much I love what anyone who lives there or nearby calls “The City.”

Excerpts from Time:

For the second time in just over a month, a large-scale raid by dozens of immigration agents in New York City was met with a similarly large-scale counter-protest. This time, however, the protesters thwarted the authorities’ plans before they began.

Multiple arrests were made on Saturday during scuffles on the edge of Chinatown, during which hundreds of protesters faced off with federal agents, eventually supported by the New York Police Department (NYPD), as they prepared to launch a raid in the area.

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Saturday’s incident demonstrated how the city’s physical infrastructure —its narrow streets and densely populated areas, built mostly by immigrant labor over the last two centuries—can impede ICE’s so-called “enforcement surges,” which involve large numbers of federal agents conducting sweeping raids, often moving quickly in and out of an area.

Not only are large-scale ICE raids being met by hundreds of protesters, but in two months, New York will be led by an immigrant mayor for the first time in 50 years. Mamdani, who moved to the United States when he was seven years old, campaigned on protecting New York’s immigrant community from these very same raids. He received a boost early in his campaign from a viral moment in which he screamed at Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, accusing him of abandoning the First Amendment.

A spokesperson from Mamdani’s transition team told TIME on Sunday in response to the clashes in Manhattan that the Mayor-elect “has made it clear — including to the President — that these raids are cruel and inhumane, and fail to advance genuine public safety.”

I lived on West 87th Street for two years when I dropped out of college after the first semester of my junior year at Michigan State when I went home to live after my mother got terminal cancer. My girlfriend, then and a year later my first wife, and I lived in two apartments on West 87th Street. They were across the street from each other. We were just steps away from Central Park.

Above is a current Google Images street view of one of the apartments where we lived.

When my mother had brain surgery it was at Mt. Sinai Hospital which was just across from Central Park where I lived. When I would visit her in the evening I would run home as fast as I could through the park even though it wasn’t the safest place to be at night. I figured that if someone wanted to mug me they’d have to catch me first.

I worked at the Yeshiva University Graduate School of Education library on 57th Street. It was close enough to home that I could walk the 30 short blacks to work. My wife worked as a secretary for a famous physicist at Rockefeller University, which is next to The United Nations.

We used to hang out at the West End Bar which was within walking distance of our place. Until writing this I didn’t know it was famous.

Those who grow up NYC bedroom communities as I did (I lived in Mt. Vernon, which borders on the Bronx) feel like New Yorkers even if they don’t live in The City. My father worked in White Plains as an upholsterer, but most other fathers I knew had high paid jobs in Manhattan. They commuted there by train.

The term “New Yorker” can refer to someone who lives, say, in Albany or further away in Buffalo. However, generally how it is used in the media and among others it refers to residents of New York City.

This is how “New Yorkers” is used in the Time Magazine article.

At the age of 17 I went off to Michigan State where I lived in a dorm as a freshman. Some kid on my floor asked me “what are you?” This took me aback. He was reacting to my New York accent and perhaps how I looked.

I didn’t know what to say in response. If I grasped the meaning of what he was asking I might have said “I’m a New York Jew.”

Living in The City for two years made me feel even more like a New Yorker. It is a feeling that I still have.

I took the photo above in Time Square when I lived there.

When I say “I love New York” I mean I love everything about the city, but mostly I mean I love the New Yorkers who live there. I really, really love the 200 or so who risked dire consequences to themselves to put themselves in harm’s way to protest the ICE invasion of their city.

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