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Brad Lander Showed Democrats What to Do

Brad Lander Showed Democrats What to Do

Dems have been sitting on their most effective tool to fight fascism this whole time: their own bodies.

Rafi Schwartz's avatar
Rafi Schwartz
Jun 17, 2025
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Brad Lander Showed Democrats What to Do
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Spectrum 1 News

This morning, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents physically detained New York City Comptroller Brad Lander as he attempted to chaperone an unidentified migrant out of a lower Manhattan courthouse and away from the awaiting federal officers. Footage of the incident shows Lander, grasping the shirt of the migrant he’s accompanying, demanding to see a judicial warrant from the arresting agents as he’s manhandled and ultimately disappeared into a nearby elevator along with a member of his NYPD security team. There’s also evidence to suggest that Lander’s detention was premeditated, with CITY NY reporting that one of its writers at the scene “overheard one agent say to another minutes before Lander’s arrest, ‘Do you want to arrest the Comptroller?’”

Lander—not only New York City’s highest-ranking financial officer but also a top contender for its upcoming mayoral election and one of the city’s most high-profile Jewish elected officials—was released a few hours later to the rapturous cheers of supporters who’d gathered on his behalf. Speaking briefly after his release, Lander lamented the country’s “normalizing family separation,” as well as “normalizing due process rights violations” and the “destruction of constitutional democracy."

Landers’ detention, like that of California Sen. Alex Pedilla at last week’s Homeland Security press briefing with Sec. Kristi Noem, is the latest chilling example of the Trump administration’s speed run toward total authoritarianism. Coming just days after a masked conservative gunman murdered two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers while dressed in police fatigues, the incident only accentuates the sense of chaotic lawlessness and permissive violence that the White House has created to help facilitate its morally indefensible deportation agenda.

But watching the footage of Lander’s arrest, I’m struck by a sense of optimism. Here is a Democratic lawmaker doing exactly what every single member of his party should have been doing for months now: placing his physical self squarely in between the fascist agents of the state and the undocumented people being targeted.

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