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.

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.

First, it needs to be said that however shocking Lander’s arrest has been, he is hardly the first Democrat to put his body on the line to draw attention to the Trump administration’s amoral deportation enterprise. While Sen. Pedilla’s detention last week was ostensibly for speaking out of turn at a Homeland Security press conference, both Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver were themselves arrested and charged for investigating an ICE detention facility last month. They, like Lander, understood that in instances like these, real power derives from a physical presence at the site of the injustices in question, rather than just giving eloquent (and often perfectly decent!) speeches after the fact—as so many of their colleagues have done and will likely continue to do.

What sets Lander’s detention apart is how deliberately he uses his body to protect a specific human being. The sheer physicality of the incident is striking, with Lander not only acting as a buffer to shield the migrant he’s leading out of the building, but actively grabbing the man as ICE agents move to separate the two. Unlike the jostling scrum that quickly sprouted around Padilla, or Baraka and McIver as they were being detained—the sort of rubbernecking spectacle that is as much about the arrest itself, rather than the larger issue being protests, Lander’s arrest is the direct result of his refusal to abandon his charge ahead of time, and willingness to place himself tangibly in the path of those working to do so. In other words, Lander’s arrest is notable not simply because of who he is and where he was, but because he was proactively using his body to extend the privileges of his position and stature to someone in need of that protection.

Imagine, now, if other state and local lawmakers took a page from Lander’s book and started making themselves a physical presence at ICE’s abominable courthouse arrest sorties. Yes, some liberal politicians have made a point of showing up at individual ICE raids across various commercial sites around the country, but the very nature of those workplace raids renders the whole effort ad hoc and sporadic. Courthouses, on the other hand, offer Democratic politicians a regular, reliable venue to use their bodies as shields to those who need it, and as sand in the gears of this fascist deportation agenda. While this option is, of course, available to everyone, Lander and his fellow lawmakers simply have more sand to offer, and more professional largess to ensure results. Unlike party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, Lander is willing to literally and preemptively walk the walk, rather than issue ex-post-facto statements designed to impart a sense of resigned disappointment.

After Lander, and Padilla, and Baraka, and McIver, the question now becomes which other Democrats will rediscover the power their bodies hold when it comes to making a physical stand for those in need. Who in the party will understand that Washington rhetoric against Trump’s fascism and lawlessness only matters when coming from lawmakers willing to use their bodies in the service of a higher goal. That there’s already been as many as there have in the short span of Trump’s second term is encouraging. If the Democrats were smart, they’d start putting their elected bodies where they can do the most immediate good and prove to the public that theirs is a party of action. Lander showed them how. It’s up to them to take the hint or get left behind by someone who will.