WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
  • About 30 anti ICE activists blocked Manhattan entrances and Brooklyn bound lanes at the Brooklyn Bridge on Wednesday afternoon.
  • Drivers pleaded to pass, saying they needed to reach work and pick up their children.
  • Protesters demanded Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch resign and compared the NYPD and ICE with the KKK.
  • The NYPD removed multiple activists and ultimately cleared the bridge area.

A group of anti-ICE activists brought another round of disruption to New York City on Wednesday afternoon, blocking traffic at the Brooklyn Bridge while drivers trying to handle their daily responsibilities pleaded to get through.

About 30 activists blocked the Manhattan entrances to the bridge as well as the Brooklyn-bound lanes. Their demonstration prevented motorists from moving through the area and quickly tested the patience of people caught in the mess.

The activists carried a sign reading, “Stop Shooting Our Neighbors,” and demanded the resignation of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. They also chanted, “NYPD, KKK, I-C-E, they're all the same!”

Blocking ordinary drivers did little to win sympathy for their cause. Instead, the stunt irritated people who needed to reach work, collect their children, or simply cross the bridge without being drafted into someone else’s protest spectacle.

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Among the motorists affected were immigrants, the very people the activists claimed to be helping. The contradiction was hard to miss as drivers asked the demonstrators to move and allow traffic to continue.

“Please let us go,” one person pleaded as the activists remained in place. The request captured the basic frustration of drivers who had no role in the protesters’ grievances but were forced to pay the price anyway.

Another exasperated driver directly challenged the logic behind targeting stranded motorists. “Your beef is not with us; I'm not the one shooting people.”

The drivers pointed out that they had jobs to reach and children to pick up. Their responses exposed the pointlessness of blocking people who had no control over Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations or the policies the activists opposed.

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The mostly white group of activists showed little concern for the drivers being delayed. In the protest’s upside-down logic, inconveniencing the public apparently took priority over the actual people whose interests the demonstrators claimed to champion.

The blockade also did nothing to change what ICE does. It merely trapped motorists, created anger, and handed drivers a front-row view of a political demonstration aimed in the wrong direction.

One white woman wearing a PINK tracksuit sat in one of the vehicles and applauded the protesters. Her explanation, however, quickly veered into the kind of overheated comparison that has become familiar in attacks on immigration enforcement.

“Well, because ICE is taking away people, and deporting people, and it's just inhumane,” she said. Logic rejects that argument, noting that deportation is part of the law and that the law existed long before President Donald Trump.

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The woman then claimed that with ICE, the country was “going back to Germany,” where people were “deported and killed for being of a different ethnicity or being from somewhere else.” The comparison attempted to equate enforcement of immigration law with Nazi Germany.

That rhetoric did not help the stranded drivers reach work or pick up their children. Nor did it make the bridge blockade any more relevant to the federal immigration actions the activists wanted to protest.

The New York Police Department ultimately moved in, carting away a number of the activists and clearing the area. Traffic was able to resume after the demonstrators were removed from the bridge entrances and Brooklyn-bound lanes.

Democrats are inflaming the situation by comparing ICE with the Gestapo, fascists, and secret police. On the bridge, motorists delivered the more immediate verdict by telling the protesters that their grievance was not with the people they were blocking.

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