It’s recently stopped snowing; it’s the most beautiful time in the city when the blanket is still pristine and we pedestrians follow each other’s footsteps. Thus, wrapped in the icy whiteness, we cross the neighborhood park to reach the subway entrance, where a small elderly woman stands, wrapped up and smiling. She offers a clear plastic bag containing an informational leaflet and a whistle and tells everyone, “Protect our neighbors from ICE.” The sound is the same—ice—but it doesn’t refer to dangerous ice floes, but to something far more lethal: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the infamous agency responsible for immigration control that has been traumatizing American cities since Trump took office.
The flyer is a veritable mini-instruction manual. It tells you how to recognize an ICE agent and how to behave. The most important thing is to be ready to gather information. How many there are. What they do. Where and in which direction they move. How they’re dressed. Are they wearing balaclavas and bulletproof vests? The time of the sighting. What equipment they carry (weapons, handcuffs, batons, etc.). If you’re safe, that is, if they can’t see you, take photos and videos. Finally, forward the data collected to the neighborhood network (whose number is provided on the hotline).
The section dedicated to the whistle is touching and deserves a place in the Dadaist museum (if it existed). It illustrates two codes. Code Number 1: bwee! bwee! bwee! Blowing repeatedly means: ICE has been spotted in the area, be alert. Code Number 2: bweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! A loud, continuous beep means ICE is making an arrest – be on high alert and ready to activate the legal service, whose number is obviously provided in the manual.
Like me, other passersby enthusiastically pick up their anti – ICE kits. I wonder if we’ll ever have the opportunity and the composure to use it. I don’t know. I won’t deny that I’d love to witness a group of citizens armed with whistles fooling the ICE thugs and protecting their neighbors, their shops, and the people they cross on the street. Because these are the victims of ICE: the kind gentleman who greets you while sweeping leaves from the street, the woman who cleans the stairs of your apartment building and does you the courtesy of picking up your package while you’re on vacation, the girl who waits tables at your favorite trattoria, the boy who perfectly shakes your margarita at the corner cocktail bar, the delivery boy who delivers your groceries to your home, the mother of your son’s new friend, and so on; men, women, families like ours and mixed with millions of others, who for a year now have lived in terror of being discovered as illegal immigrants.
I know well that anti-immigration propaganda in Italy and elsewhere claims that, due to the laxity of the Democrats (who are indeed lazy and inactive, for that matter), the United States has been invaded by millions of immigrants, obviously ugly, dirty, and evil, and that the Trump administration is finally doing what we should do too: sending them back home. Unfortunately, this isn’t true, and this is their home. Most of those targeted by ICE have been living permanently in the United States for many years, even thirty or forty, working, generating income, paying taxes, renting homes, driving cars, having bank accounts, and sending their (American) children to school. So do you understand what the lady’s phrase means: “Let’s protect our neighbors”?
Some readers may be wondering why these people aren’t legalizing their status. In Italy, many illegal immigrants find a job with a contract and begin a long, arduous, and difficult process of legalization that, over time—and unfortunately, only for a few, if they wish to invest their future in the Bel Paese [le Beau Pays]—will lead to naturalization. This isn’t the case in the United States. Perhaps it’s a puritanical legacy, but if you’ve made the mistake of letting your entry visa expire, you can’t redeem yourself; you must leave the country. In fact, there is a legal way to start the immigration process over again: enlist! Either you, an illegal immigrant, or your child, as soon as they reach adulthood, can choose the army and go die for a country that didn’t want you.
I don’t think I’ll ever have the satisfaction of witnessing ICE agents flee in the field, and I know that on TV and in the tabloids they’ll continue to justify the hunt for illegal immigrants as just and necessary. But I also know that there is a new and alert humanity, advancing and growing day by day, quietly organizing to resist, to help one another, to support its weakest and most vulnerable members. I also know that the phenomenon of neighborhoods against ICE isn’t unique to Brooklyn and New York City because Mamdani was elected; it’s spreading like wildfire across the country’s major cities. In Southern California, harassed by ICE and even the National Guard, citizen groups have taken to posting in front of large stores like Office Depot, Target, etc., so that if ICE is spotted, they have time to alert the workers inside.
Emergency awakens human beings; emergency gives birth to community, unites it. It doesn’t matter if we’ll never have the chance to blow the whistle and will likely continue to be powerless in the face of ICE’s raids. But we know we won’t be powerless forever, and owning that whistle, keeping it in our purse or pocket, represents the possibility of redemption for an entire social group—or even more so, for the human community that lives up to its name and rejects barbarity, that rebels against those who would send us back to a crude and brutal society.
