Despite weeks of threats, ICE raids begin with a whimper yet still stoke fears

Protesters march to offices of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Saturday in Chicago. “They’re going to attempt to go to work, because they need the money,” said Rodriguez, 43, a U.S. citizen and a community organizer on Houston’s north side. “This is horrible.” On Saturday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said his office was “receiving reports of attempted but reportedly unsuccessful ICE enforcement actions in Sunset Park and Harlem.” Three attempted ICE raids were reported later — two in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn and one in Harlem — according to the New York Mayor’s Office of Immigration Affairs. Jojo Annobil, executive director of New York-based Immigrant Justice Corps, said that even though no arrests had been made in the raids, “people are still scared.” “It’s going to carry over into the week, with children scared their parents won’t come home” from work, he said of the ICE raids. “ICE claims they’re giving people a list of phone numbers of pro bono agencies, but if they call, those numbers are useless — they can call that agency but no one is going to answer,” said attorney Hamid Yazdan Panah, an advocacy director of the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.