In front of a Manhattan ICE office, a fence is covered in photos of vanished immigrants

For as long as I’ve worked in TriBeCa, the Broadway side of 26 Federal Plaza, aka the Jacob Javits Building, has been an active construction site in one form or another, to the point where for years you couldn’t even walk on the sidewalk in front of it. It’s been a truly awful-looking eyesore, even in a city where scaffolding can live on for decades at a time. Obviously there are much bigger issues with the Javits Building these days, namely the fact that the immigration check-ins at the building have turned into a hunting ground for  Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and that a facility inside the building is currently being used to keep immigrants arrested by ICE in inhumane conditions.

26 Federal Plaza is an otherwise anonymous federal building among the courthouses and municipal buildings downtown, but it’s been in the spotlight much more these days as ICE officers have ambushed people coming to the building for routine immigration check-ins, and a smirking functionary has stymied members of Congress trying to inspect the 10th floor ICE office. 

There still hasn’t been much hubbub outside the building on most days, save for the day Comptroller Brad Lander got arrested while observing immigration court proceedings. One day while walking past it, I did see a guy flipping it off and screaming curses at the building, but at least in my experience walking up and down Broadway, it’s been an otherwise quiet space.

This week, though, I noticed that a bunch of Jersey barriers and fences that are still on the curb were covered in dried flowers, bouquets, signs and pictures of people kidnapped by ICE. I don’t know who put them up and I don’t actually know the first day the grim decorations went up, but the effect is striking.

After all, it was always the stories they told us of other places where the citizens had to carry photos of the missing and wheat paste them to buildings in an attempt to get justice or call attention to the fact that they were being arbitrarily disappeared. The one analogous thing it brings to mind here is the wall of missing people after September 11th, because talking about photos of missing persons in lower Manhattan, it’s the obvious thing that comes to mind whether you want it to or not. But here we’re not dealing with the aftermath of a terrorist attack, it’s an attack by our own government.

“When I speak to college classes, I ask them, in what country do you recall students being black bagged off of a street, not one person ever says the United States of America,” New York Immigration Coalition President and CEO Murad Awawdeh told me. “But that's exactly what is happening at this moment, people are being black bagged, snatched off streets, snatched from courtrooms and disappeared. It’s the most un-American thing that is currently happening in this moment where people's rights are being violated day in and day out by the Trump administration.”

The photos on the fence highlight high profile people inside and outside of New York who ICE has kidnapped in an effort to terrorize immigrants for sport:

• Delmy Rendon, who was arrested when looking for help after she crashed her car into a deer.
• Brayan Rayo-Garzon, a 16-year-old migrant from Colombia who died in an ICE detention center in St. Louis.
• Anyelo Jose Sarabia, a Venezuelan immigrant who was accused of being a gang member and sent to the CECOT mega prison in El Salvador.
• Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, the gay asylum seeker who was also sent to CECOT and was finally released this week.
• Dylan Lopez Conteras, a Bronx high school student who was the first city's public school student to be snatched by ICE.

If the decorations aren’t yet a full-fledged Wall of Disappeared or a kind of Plaza de Mayo, where family members of people disappeared by Argentina’s government would gather to call attention to the disappearances, the effort to use the fence to highlight what’s going on is at the least one more symbolic effort to stake out the position that this isn’t what’s supposed to be going on here, and one more effort to show solidarity with immigrants. 

"We're living through some really dark times," Awawdeh said. "This administration's sole goal right now is to bring us so far from seeing each other as human, that that their hate and violence is justifiable, because it's happening to someone else. The beauty of people showing up for each other in whatever way they can is that even the simple act of showing up is proving that [the Trump administration] is failing at what they're trying to do."

At the same time as New Yorkers are making this quiet stand, other fresh evidence of The Horrors is currently popping up around the Javits Building:

This is a city of memorials. Ghost bikes, murals, even the occasional tagged up train. So this memorial to both the living and the dead fits in with the city's existing fabric. Still, in a just world, I wouldn’t have to wonder if there are going to be new pictures of new people disappeared or even killed by the government going up on the fence. At the very least I wouldn’t have to wonder if the mayor of my city gave a shit that just 1,500 feet from where he works, agents of the federal government are stashing people they snatch from civil court proceedings and high schools.

Instead, our current mayor is only grumpily finally assenting to give a shit about this. And only after hand waving away what he can see right in front of him, calling it someone else’s problem to deal with, and going on a podcast hosted by a cretinous right wing Australian to praise the president who wants more than anything to see our neighbors stuffed into a holding cell on the 10th floor of Javits Building, and see more signs of people who were here one day until they just weren’t. Even with that, it's less that we're alone and more that, as the old saying goes, we keep us safe.

"Our safety is in our solidarity. Simple acts of dissent like putting up a sign or flowers for those who've disappeared or died in ICE custody is a gesture that's more than just the act of putting up a sign or flowers. It's an act of dissent," Awawdeh said.

Which leaves us with the fence, and the knowledge that it’s going to take all of us to return 26 Federal Plaza back to its place as one more mundane and anonymous federal building among the courthouses and municipal buildings, and not a symbol of despair and terror.