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WHEN TO ACCOMMODATE, AND WHEN TO FIGHT? NY OFFICIALS AGONIZE AND
PREPARE FOR FEDERAL ESCALATION  
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Josh Kovensky
December 3, 2025
Talking Points Memo
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_ How can the New York respond to aggressive, spectacle-driven
immigration operations without triggering the showdown with federal
agents that the administration is trying to provoke?The plan is a
split approach -fight deployment, and act as buffers.. _

NYPD try to clear a path for ICE as immigration activists block a
garage used by ICE vans during a protest against a purported ICE raid
on Canal Street on November 29, 2025 in New York City. Activists
assembled outside of a garage used by ICE , and later they tried to
block ICE vehicles as they traveled from the garage down Canal Street
to the Holland Tunnel to exit Manhattan. (Photo:Ste X screenshot
@AndresKudacki / VNY Media La Voce di New York)

 

Jackie Bray has been thinking about how quickly things could spiral
out of control.

Bray is the New York state emergency leader whom Gov. Kathy Hochul
tasked with averting a Chicago or Los Angeles-style surge of
immigration agents and National Guard troops. At the core of the job
is a dilemma that the Trump administration has imposed on blue cities
and states around the country: How can the state respond to
aggressive, spectacle-driven immigration operations without triggering
the showdown with federal agents that the administration is trying to
provoke?

It’s a problem only made more acute by how geared some of the
operations have been towards gaining as much attention as possible,
and by their direction away from immigration enforcement, and towards
repressing protests in response. 

The result, state officials say, is a split approach. New York will
fight to delay and block any federal deployment of the National Guard.
But when it comes to surges of immigration enforcement officers, the
plan is restraint: state and local police will act as buffers between
federal agents and protestors, doing what they can to control crowds
and de-escalate.

Glimpses of that strategy have already started to emerge. NYPD
Commissioner Jessica Tisch reportedly
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got a heads-up about a high-profile October immigration raid on
Manhattan’s Canal Street from the Trump administration; the Daily
News reported that she directed officers to steer clear of the area.
At a protest in late November, local police placed barricades
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between demonstrators and a group of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement and Border Patrol officers who the activists had
surrounded in a parking garage. 

The approach has already led to criticism that the state is
accommodating, and not fighting, what many regard as an increasingly
harrowing example of authoritarianism. State officials respond that
their approach is necessary to stop events from spiraling into the
kind of escalation that could justify more federal deployments. 

“I feel very lucky to not be an elected leader right now,” Bray
told TPM.

OUTREACH

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) directed Bray, a political appointee serving as
director of New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency
Services, over the summer to work out a plan that would avert the kind
of splashy, violent federal presence that overtook Chicago, Los
Angeles, and other cities. 

For prevention, one model stands out: San Francisco. 

There, Silicon Valley executives, along with Mayor Daniel Lurie (D),
pleaded with Trump. They argued that a deployment would damage the
economy. He replied by calling it off: “Friends of mine who live in
the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the
surge,” he wrote on Truth Social.

That’s the plan that New York officials are trying to implement.
They’ve convened groups of Wall Street leaders (Bray declined to say
whether any had spoken to White House officials); both Hochul and New
York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani have spoken with Trump directly.

Those meetings have resulted in something less than an adversarial
relationship. As Trump shepherded Mamdani through an Oval Office press
conference last month, the mayor-elect emphasized areas where the city
and federal government could work together. 

There are other benefits that the state can provide
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Trump, whose family business is still deeply rooted in New York. This
week, a state gambling board approved
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licenses for three proposed casinos: one of them is set to be built on
a golf course that belonged to the President. The move will net the
Trump Organization $115 million. 

CHICAGO AND LA WARNINGS

The deployments in Chicago and Los Angeles brought a level of
brutality that, at first, helped to obscure their real aim.

The Trump administration cast them as immigration enforcement efforts,
albeit with a new level of aggression. But after the White House used
local, minor incidents of violence to justify sending troops in, the
ICE and CBP operations started to strike observers as pretexts to
stage larger-scale repression.

That prompted organizing between cities and states that had
experienced the deployments and those that were next. New York’s
Communications Workers of America organized one call in September
titled “Learning From Chicago and LA and Preparing for Federal
Escalation,” between elected officials in New York, Illinois,
California, and elsewhere.

“We were just cautioning people to not lose the messaging war,”
Hugo Martinez, a Los Angeles city councilmember on the call, told TPM.
He said that the administration was seeking grounds to escalate, and
that community leaders needed to “try to have as much control as
possible over the response that the community has.”

Byron Sigcho-Lopez, a Chicago alderman, was on the call as well.

He took the message to heart. His community, Chicago’s Little
Village, became an epicenter of CBP operations. One video
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of an October encounter with Bovino demonstrates how he internalized
the approach: at several points, when demonstrators started to
approach federal agents, Byron-Lopez would wave them off.

“They wanted to see escalation,” he told TPM last month.

Bray, the New York state commissioner, said that she had spoken to her
counterparts in California and Illinois. For her, a few points became
clear: litigation needed to start early. Local law enforcement needed
to be prepared for the administration to direct federal authorities to
stop communicating with them. Certain sites — like ICE detention
facilities — became flashpoints.

AVERTED, BUT FOR HOW LONG?

The charm offensive has worked for now, state and city officials told
TPM. But nobody can say how long that will last. 

City officials are already taking some steps to prepare. The city sold
a still-functional but out-of-use prison barge that was anchored near
Rikers Island to a scrap company in Louisiana, removing 800 beds that
the federal government could have seized for immigration enforcement.
The city’s Economic Development Corporation, which is responsible
for the project, declined to comment. 

New York Attorney General Tish James’ office is preparing legal
strategies and lawsuits to file that would challenge any National
Guard deployment, one official told TPM. 

Community organizers — some of whom have held calls with their
counterparts in Chicago, LA, and elsewhere — are preparing as
well. 

They envision a campaign of resistance that will start with measures
already in place, like flyers calling for people to report ICE and CBP
operations. That information is then relayed to a network of people
who can mobilize in response, organizing through messaging apps and
staging spontaneous protests like one that appeared in Manhattan over
the weekend and corralled federal agents for roughly two hours. 

On the less risky end, that can mean mutual aid programs to provide
legal and other forms of support. But some organizers also want to see
more disruption. Jasmine Gripper, a state director of the Working
Families Party, was on the call with local officials from LA and
Chicago. Gripper told TPM that she envisioned a series of tactics that
she described as “not letting ICE be at peace in our city.” That
means persuading restaurant owners to refuse to serve immigration
agents, following agents around with large bullhorns announcing their
presence, and finding out where they’re staying and making loud
noises at night. 

“How do we disrupt at every level and have peaceful resistance and
noncompliance to ICE being in our communities and what best can keep
our folks safe?” she said. 

Bray, the New York State emergency and homeland security commissioner,
told TPM that she’s devoting around half of her schedule to trying
to avert a federal escalation and to planning for one if it does
happen.

The aggression in federal operations in Chicago shocked her, she said.
Federal agents walked around in fatigues, unidentified while wearing
masks, as if they were an occupying foreign power. In one incident in
Chicago, law enforcement rappelled from a helicopter into a
dilapidated apartment building for a showy immigration raid. 

“Why? Tell me what the strategic, tactical, operational, requirement
for that is?” Bray asked. 

It’s illegal to block federal agents from doing their job, Bray
said. The overriding risk is that things spiral out of control. In
California, federal law enforcement cut off communication with local
cops as operations there ramped up. Bray told TPM that the state will
do what it can to make sure that those lines of communication stay
open, even when that means having police prevent demonstrators from
blocking federal agents. 

“You get images where people will say to me, ‘well, wait a second,
look, isn’t that the NYPD helping?’ No, they’re not helping,”
Bray said. “They’re doing crowd control. They’re making sure
that there aren’t violent clashes in front of a government building.
That’s their job. That’s not cooperation with feds. But, you know,
this is gonna test us all.” 

_[__JOSH KOVENSKY _
[[link removed]]_is an
investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo, based in New York. He
previously worked for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine, covering politics,
business, and corruption there.]_

* ICE
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* DHS
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* Border Patrol
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* New York
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* New York City
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* Gov. Kathy Hochul
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* Immigration
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* Immigrants
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* Donald Trump
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* National Guard
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* chicago
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* Los Angeles
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* Washington DC
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* NYPD
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* protests
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* resistance
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