Latest news with #ShahanaHanif
Spectator
3 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Will the L.A. immigration riots reach Europe?
The pro-immigration protests that erupted last week in Los Angeles have now spread across the United States. On Tuesday there were confrontations between police and demonstrators in Atlanta, Chicago and Denver, where tear gas was used to disperse a crowd. Police in New York City arrested 45 people as they came under attack from a variety of projectiles thrown by a mob that numbered several hundred. Demonstrators shouted 'shame, shame'; one local councillor, Shahana Hanif, accused the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of 'attacking our communities'. The protests began in L.A. last Friday when ICE officers began rounding up suspected illegal immigrants in the Hispanic districts of Westlake and Paramount. In one raid ICE arrested 44 unauthorised immigrants at a job site. Donald Trump promptly despatched 700 Marines to L.A., and doubled the National Guard's presence to 4,000 in an attempt to restore order to a city where so far 23 businesses have been looted by demonstrators.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Protests across US as anger grows over Trump's immigration crackdown
Protests against the Trump administration's newly intensified immigration raids, centered on Los Angeles, spread across the country on Tuesday, with demonstrations in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Omaha and Seattle. Thousands attended a protest against the federal government's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in New York City's Foley Square. Some protesters held signs reading 'Ice out of New York' and others chanted 'Why are you in riot gear? I don't see no riot here.' Shirley, a 29-year-old protester, condemned the Trump administration for targeting workers, which she called antithetical to the country's essence. 'I come from immigrant parents,' she said, with a large Mexican flag draped across her back. 'It's infuriating to see that this particular government is going into labor fields, taking people from construction sites, into industry, plants, into farms, and taking away what is the backbone of this country. 'So I'm here today to remind everybody that the United States started as an immigrant country, and it's a nation of immigrants, and I just want to make sure that I'm here for those who can't be here today.' Councilmember Shahana Hanif of Brooklyn spoke before the large crowd in Foley Square. She criticized the Trump administration and New York's mayor, Eric Adams, for the crackdown on immigrants. 'Mayor Adams has made it clear that he doesn't care about working class people,' she said. 'He does not care about any one of us. He is collaborating with Trump to use tactics. He's complicit.' She also expressed her desire to keep New York a sanctuary city, and called for more protections for international students. 'Stop the attacks and assaults on our students!' she yelled, and was met with cheers from the crowd. Thousands also gathered outside an immigration court in Chicago, and then marched through downtown streets, drumming and chanting, 'No more deportations!' At one point, a car drove through the marchers, narrowly missing the anti-Ice protesters, according to WGN TV News, which broadcast video of the incident. In metro Atlanta, hundreds of people marched along Buford Highway in solidarity with Los Angeles, local 11 Alive News reported. Protesters marched in Omaha on Tuesday, chanting 'Chinga la migra' (a Spanish phrase that roughly translates to the slogan 'Fuck Ice' on placards waved by the marchers) after about 80 people were reportedly arrested in an immigration raid on a meat-packing plant. In Seattle, a small crowd of about 50 protesters gathered outside the Henry M Jackson federal building in downtown Seattle to show solidarity with protesters in Los Angeles, the Seattle Times reported. After a rally, the protesters barricaded driveways with e-bikes and e-scooters to block homeland security vehicles thought to be transporting detained immigrants. Large rallies also took place in Dallas and Austin on Monday, and up to 1,800 protests are planned nationwide on Saturday, to coincide with the military parade Donald Trump is throwing on his birthday in the nation's capital.
New York Post
4 days ago
- Politics
- New York Post
At least 15 arrested in NYC anti-ICE protest as thousands take to the street
At least 15 people were arrested at a massive anti-ICE protest in lower Manhattan Tuesday where shrieking, sign-holding demonstrators flooded the streets. Thousands of angry New Yorkers took to the streets outside Foley Square in the shadow of City Hall to protest the Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations ongoing in the city and throughout the country. Thousands of angry New Yorkers took to the streets outside Foley Square to protest ICE deportations, leading to at least 15 arrests. AFP via Getty Images Picketers carried placards reading 'Abolish ICE' and 'ICE out of New York!' and chanted phrases such as, 'Brick by brick, wall by wall, this racist system has got to fall!' At least 15 demonstrators were taken into custody by the NYPD near Broadway and Duane Street for obstructing traffic and not complying with orders to disperse, according to police sources. Notable speakers at the protest included Brooklyn Councilwoman Shahana Hanif and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams.
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Could a Brooklyn City Councilwoman Lose Because of Her Stance on Gaza?
Voter turnout in New York City elections is generally abysmal and City Council races are especially notorious generators of indifference. In one district, two years ago, the eventual winner took the seat with only 1.45 percent of all voting-age residents going to the polls. It is hard enough to get people invested in the elections that will directly affect whether their neighborhoods receive better rat patrol or fewer street fairs. It is nearly uncanny when a race churns up the interest of out-of-ZIP-code power brokers and billionaires. But the race in Brooklyn's 39th Council District, an area that includes Park Slope and a constellation of surrounding neighborhoods, has attracted precisely that sort of attention. The focus has had less to do with championing a new political voice — someone, for example, with an inventive plan to introduce hundreds of low-equity co-ops — than about extinguishing the existing one. In this case, the relevant voice belongs to Shahana Hanif, a child of Bangladeshi immigrants who, four years ago, was elected as the first Muslim woman on the City Council, where she has served as co-chair of the Progressive Caucus. Ms. Hanif, 34, is a district native, having grown up in Kensington, sometimes called 'Little Bangladesh.' She has been an outspoken advocate of the Palestinian cause and last year joined campus protests at Columbia to stand in solidarity with students supporting Gaza, to the displeasure of some of her constituents. Her positions on policing have also rattled some residents in and out of the district. David Yassky, a former city councilman who lives elsewhere in Brooklyn and runs a private foundation, is among those supporting her opponent, Maya Kornberg, a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. A progressive, Mr. Yassky was taken aback when Ms. Hanif and her office did not seem to treat as an urgent criminal issue the fatal beating of a golden retriever mix early one morning in Prospect Park three years ago. The dog was attacked in front of its owner by a man roaming the park, who was muttering about immigrants, throwing bottled urine around and seemingly under the spell of severe mental illness. Even before anyone had emerged to challenge Ms. Hanif, a political action committee called Brooklyn BridgeBuilders had organized to defeat her. In its online literature, the group describes District 39 as a place where 'most voters identify as progressive but feel let down by performative politics.' Ramon Maislen, the founder, explained the origins of his mission more specifically to me. 'Most of our members voted for Hanif, the first time around,' he said. But after Oct. 7, Jewish leaders met with her and went away disappointed. 'I think there was a sense among people of a rising fear of antisemitism,' he said, and some constituents felt 'abandoned.' In January, the windows of Miriam, a popular Israeli restaurant on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, were defaced with graffiti denouncing Israel and 'genocide cuisine.' In an Instagram post, Ms. Hanif condemned the 'vandalism' and 'acts of hate,' but the comments were filled with replies from people who faulted her for not calling out the writing as antisemitic. In advance of next month's Democratic primary, thousands of dollars have been funneled into the race through Brooklyn BridgeBuilders as well as a group called the Coalition to Restore New York, which is tied to Madison Square Entertainment. The money is coming from, among others, Wall Street and Big Real Estate — from well-known figures like Tom Tisch and Daniel Loeb, both supporters of Jewish causes, as well as Douglas Durst the real estate developer and investor. One particularly controversial contribution landed from a Soviet-born billionaire named Len Blavatnik, among the cohort that you are unlikely to run into inspecting the garlic scapes at the Grand Army Plaza farmers' market on a Saturday morning. Mr. Blavatnik, who donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2017 inaugural fund, would seem to have the most direct connection to Ms. Kornberg, a 33-year-old political scientist and Park Slope parent with degrees from Stanford, Columbia and Oxford, whose lineage includes two Nobel Prize-winning scientists — her father, Roger Kornberg, and grandfather Arthur Kornberg. In an open letter two months ago, Indivisible Brooklyn, a group supporting Ms. Hanif, demanded that Ms. Kornberg give the Blavatnik donation back, expressing outrage over the receipt of the billionaire's money, just as members of the Council on Foreign Relations had six years ago, when the think tank accepted a $12 million gift from him. Indivisible also claimed that Ms. Kornberg lied in an interview with City & State when she said she had 'no relationship' with Mr. Blavatnik. In an email, she called this accusation 'a classic oppo hit,' reiterating that she did not have a relationship with Mr. Blavatnik but rather that, 'he's an investor in a company my dad founded, which I am not involved in (and never have been).' Ms. Hanif looks at the drive to get rid of her as entirely the result of her 'stance on Israel and Palestine,' she told me. She had fully expected to be challenged in the election. 'I know that constituents decide, and it holds me accountable to be better. I find it very healthy.' But, she joked, 'of course it is annoying.' Such is the nature of a political contest in many quarters of Brooklyn, that the two candidates have similar views on many issues. They both support better and cheaper child care, immigrant rights and more affordable housing. Ms. Kornberg is also marketing herself as a progressive, and to an extent the race has found resonance as a debate about what the term means in the current discourse. When New Yorkers are surveyed by pollsters they typically tell them that housing affordability is their top-of-mind issue. A few months ago, Ms. Hanif accomplished a major success in that domain. After a long fight over the rezoning of the Arrow Linen Supply Company in Windsor Terrace, she negotiated a deal in which residents wound up with more affordable apartments than originally planned, all in shorter buildings than her constituents had asked for, to maintain the neighborhood's architectural synchronicity. If all politics are local, as former House Speaker Tip O'Neill famously said, it also feels true that local politics have become increasingly global. When we talked, Ms. Kornberg mentioned that she spoke Arabic and Hebrew. She described herself as 'a democracy advocate.' She talked about the work she did with the United Nations Development Programme on political and economic institution-building in the West Bank and the engagement she had with parliamentarians around the world about their response to Covid. When I caught up with Ms. Hanif this week, she had just left a community board Zoom meeting about a concrete recycling plant that was relocated last year to the Columbia Street Waterfront, a neighborhood in her district. Those living nearby were angry about the accompanying dust and health risks, and she was very much on the side of those demanding that the city move the facility somewhere else. Regardless of the rhetoric of electoral campaigns, this is the actual work of collaborative municipal governance — the daily communications with constituents worried about pollutants or empty storefronts or wanting more crosswalks or trash cans or bookstores. A casualty of the current political moment is the freedom that local politicians once enjoyed to keep from staking out ideological or foreign policy positions. It was enough to do the big work, which looked at from the wrong angle might appear small. But now that seems like just another luxury we have lost to our divisions.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Lefty NYC Council eases process for illegal migrants to get ID residency cards
The NYC Council's woke majority passed legislation this week making it simpler for illegal migrants to score already-easy-to-get, city-issued residency ID cards for free benefits — in a move one critic slammed as 'legislating against [President] Trump.' Brooklyn Democratic socialist Shahana Hanif's bill requires the Department of Social Services to make IDNYC photo-ID cards more accessible, including allowing walk-in appointments at designated centers in each borough and implementing an appeal process for rare cases where applicants are denied. The Council voted 39-7 in favor of the measure Wednesday. Critics slammed the bill as nothing more than a direct slap at Donald Trump's ongoing crackdown on criminal migrants. 'At a time of rising migrant crime and national security threats, it's reckless — and it just seems like we're legislating against Trump rather than doing what's right for New Yorkers,' said Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens). 'The Access to IDNYC Act guarantees dignity for every New Yorker, especially as federal policies target our transgender, non-binary, and immigrant communities,' said Hanif. Illegal migrants and others can show more than 120 types of IDs, including expired foreign passports and driver's licenses, or other papers to obtain an IDNYC card. Applications are rarely rejected and demand is rising. The city issued cards to 183,682 — or 91.4% — of 200,922 applicants during the fiscal year ending June 30, according to the annual Mayor's Management Report released in January. From July through October, it issued another 64,265 cards, up 14% from the same period a year earlier. Former-Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration first offered the cards in 2015 to help migrants more easily access free healthcare in city public hospitals, open bank accounts, sign leases and enroll in school, among other things. More than 2.3 million cards have been issued since then, records show. The IDNYC program is 'essentially government-sanctioned fraud' to 'obtained taxpayer-funded benefits, ' insisted Council Minority Leader Joann Ariola (R-Queens). 'We should scrap this program and incentivize them to go through the proper, lawful process of obtaining citizenship,' said Ariola.
