The scene was comical and unnerving. High summer in Manhattan, the entire island under a furnace, the tourists red-faced and antsy and not far from Carnegie Hall, a street vendor switching from sales to flight mode. He had handbags and purses laid out on a rug and spoke in a strong African accent. An associate of his came sprinting down from the next block and within seconds, the wares were scooped up in the rug, bundled into a nearby trolley even as a car with officers inside came crawling down the avenue.
The vendor ducked behind parked cars and played a game of cat and mouse with the police car before making a dash up the avenue and disappearing into the crowd. He was laughing, as though avoiding the threat of arrest, incarceration and deportation had become just another part of his day.
The scene came to mind watching the coalition of political faces and voices gathered in New York on Thursday night in advance of the court appearance of the state’s attorney general in Virginia on Friday morning.
Letitia James is facing two felony charges, of bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution relating to a home purchase in Virginia. The indictment claims she intended using it as a rental rather than residential property, and avoided a higher interest rate. Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, said the case against James is “the culmination of one man’s revenge tour. And that man is Donald Trump”.
READ MORE
“My question is this,” she continued. “If they can do this to an attorney general of a state like New York, heaven help the rest of us. Because they can come after anyone. And they’re coming after people – they came after people on Canal Street just hours ago. They are coming after people who came here in search of a better life, people who are part of our own family. It has to stop. But also: what kind of country do you want to live in? A country where the president can jail his political opponents? Where government is used as a weapon against adversaries?”
[ As the diggers tear into the White House, Trump is reminded: ‘It’s not yours’Opens in new window ]
The reference to Canal Street related to amazing scenes during the week when hundreds of New Yorkers interrupted Ice (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents attempting to make arrests on the street vendors who for years have gathered to hawk knock-off designer garb to tourists. The enforcement team arrived with armoured trucks and carried guns. Many were masked. Passersby formed a human barrier and shouted “Shame! Shame!” and “You’re not Americans”. There was jostling, pushing. People were thrown to the ground. Four protesters were arrested.
It was a stunning display of civic solidarity in a city that, for all of its overwhelming scale and height and noise, operates like a honeycomb of tightly-knit villages. The Department of Homeland Security said “rioters” were “shouting obscenities, became violent and obstructed law enforcement duties including blocking vehicles and assaulting law enforcement”. They listed the criminal records of the eight undocumented immigrants arrested, including drug trafficking, forgery, robbery and assault.
The Ice raid even provoked a rare rebuke of the Trump administration from outgoing New York mayor Eric Adams, whose office stated that Homeland Security should be going after criminals rather than street vendors.
There is a connection between the events on Canal Street and Friday’s court appearance by New York’s attorney general. Almost all legal opinion suggests the case against James is flimsy, and may fall apart because of the flailing manner in which the grand jury indictment was brought about by Lindsey Halligan, the Trump loyalist appointee with minimal prosecutorial experience. But Trump has been hell-bent on seeing James brought before the courts as an atonement for his grievance over the net-worth inflation fraud case she took, as New York attorney general, against the Trump organisation.
[ US ICE agents took half their workforce. What do they do now?Opens in new window ]
Trump’s contention is that the litany of criminal charges he faced during 2024, including the Manhattan hush money case in which he was found guilty, was a Democrat-sponsored witch hunt. And now the tables have turned.
“Tish James is being attacked because she had the audacity to hold Donald Trump to the same laws that each and every New Yorker should be held to,” Zohran Mamdani said on Thursday. On November 4th Mamdani is expected to succeed Adams as the 111th mayor of New York. Seldom has that thorny, coveted role been under such scrutiny.
“If a communist gets elected to run New York, it can never be the same, but we have tremendous power at the White House to run places where we have to,” Trump warned recently.
“New York City will run properly. I’m going to bring New York back. I love New York.”
It is all leading towards a spectacular collision between Trump, the exile from Queens, and the people of Gotham City.
