Inside the Federal Assault on Local Law & Order
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka with protesters outside Federal Court in Newark last month. Photo/Bob Hennelly
By Bob Hennelly
In our current dystopian circumstance, it's hard to sort out the signal from the static. The barrage of Trump assaults on science, human rights, public health, global humanitarian aid, as well as on democracy and the rule of law itself make it near impossible to get our collective equilibrium.
And that's what authoritarian and fascist rule is all about as he and his minions role out their mass deportation campaign.
The entire premise of the Trump mass deportation of immigrants campaign is that he's doing it to 'restore law and order' because in Trump's demented state he sees the undocumented people present in this country as equivalent to an invasion of violent criminals. And in his absolute delusion, he is supported by millions of white supremacists who are catered to by Fox News and the New York Post infamous for finding the isolated case of an undocumented immigrant who commits a heinous violent act to represent the entire cohort.
In the last few months, when Trump's masked federal immigration shock troops have shown up they've inflamed local communities. In last month's melee in Newark New Jersey, where masked armed agents were videotaped abducting popular Mayor Ras Baraka off of a public street, they actually unified the local municipal police force and several hundred members of the local population that showed up in a mass protest of the Mayor's illegal detention.
It was a surreal scene, masked federal agents huddled on the defense behind the chain link fence topped with razor wire while the crowd outside the perimeter demanding the Mayor's release grew exponentially. Would the masked federal agents shoot their way out?
More than a half-century ago in July of 1967, Mayor Baraka's father, the poet Amiri Baraka, was beaten by the Newark Police Department, at the start of four days of civil unrest that left 26 people dead, 23 from gunshot wounds and 1,000 people injured.
A state commission documented that the National Guard and New Jersey State Police had fired some 13,000 rounds in all. No total was available for the Newark police, who reported killing 10 people, seven "justifiably," and three "by accident."
In 2025, the same Newark municipal police force had the backs of the local population who wanted their Mayor back from federal invaders sent into their community by a white supremacist president. Call it the Trump effect, bringing communities together through grotesque and oppressive federal overreach very much disturbing the peace.
Law and order indeed.
Recently, the Los Angeles Times reported that heavily armed federal immigration agents showed up in full combat regala with assault rifles as if they were in Al-Fallujah, Iraq to raid two trendy restaurants in "a serene and tree-lined neighborhood" in San Diego.
Once again, the oppressive extra-legal assault by masked agents brought an outraged community together with such real time velocity the federal agents felt they had to resort to the use of flash-bang grenades to make their exit. While the growing crowd flinched they didn't back down either. In fact, the enraged bystanders continued to advance on the camouflaged invaders with their iPhone video cameras to document the grotesque overreach.
Just this past week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams apparently broke with the Trump administration when his administration filed legal papers in support of a New York City public high school student arrested by federal immigration officers.
Dylan Lopez Contreras had in good faith showed up at his immigration hearing in the Bronx last month with his mother where the judge dismissed the deportation case against him. Yet federal agents arrested him once he got out of the courtroom. They spirited him off to a prison in western Pennsylvania.
As it turns out, Dylan, originally from Venezuela, was part of the massive wave of over 210,000 plus migrants that were cynically bussed to New York City by Republican governors including Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott.
Mayor Adams has taken heat for aligning himself with President Trump as he was navigating his federal indictment on corruption charges that were ultimately dismissed after the Trump Department of Justice intervened. Mayor Adams and New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams are in court right now over the mayor's decision to let the Trump administration station federal immigration officers with ICE be stationed at the city's Rikers Island prison complex. According to the City Council filings the move to placate Trump is a clear violation of New York City's sanctuary law which could easily result in the deportation of individuals who have NOT been convicted of any crime.
In the Dylan Lopez Contreras case, however, Adams pushed back on Trump's tactics.
“Keeping New Yorkers safe has always been our top priority, and our city is less safe when people are afraid to use public resources and are, instead, forced to hide in the shadows,” Mayor Adams said in a statement. “Dylan Lopez Contreras was going through the exact legal proceeding that we encourage new arrivals to go through in order to be able to work and provide for their families — and even accessed the center that we created for migrants to be able to avoid city shelters and become independent. But instead of being rewarded for following the law, he was punished for doing what we all asked him to do. For generations, New York City has been defined by its diverse immigrant communities, and we are sending a message to those communities: We stand with you, and you deserve to live your lives freely.”
Of course, New York City is exhibit A in the case against Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rant and Mayor Adams knows that.
Adams knows, as does anyone who knows New York City knows immigrants, undocumented and documented are the not some secret sauce that's helped reduce violent crime. Back in the 1980s, the city had 2,000 homicides a year. Last year, it was 375. The city reported NO shootings on the Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend. Last year marked the fourth-lowest year in recorded history for shooting incidents citywide.
This historic decline in violent crime happened in a city where the immigrant community, both undocumented and documented, adds up to more than 3 million immigrants, nearly 40 percent of the city’s population.
There are several academic studies that document that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit a crime.
"Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years," according to a 2020 research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that used data from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
"Welcoming immigrants into American communities not only does not increase crime, but can actually strengthen public safety. In fact, immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—are less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born," according to the American Immigration Council. "This is true at the national, state, county, and neighborhood levels, and for both violent and non-violent crime."
AIC's analysis continues, "Using Uniform Crime Reporting data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and population data from the U. S. Census Bureau, the Council also explored the relationship between total crime rates and immigrant shares of the population between 2017 and 2022 at the state level. Using beta regression analyses and data from all 50 states, the result shows no statistically significant correlation between the immigrant share of the population and the total crime rate in any state. This means higher immigrant population shares are not associated with higher crime rates, which aligns with a wealth of prior research on this topic."