NYC minority communities cheer ICE raids that rounded up violent criminal migrants: ‘Get them the hell off the street!'

Yahoo

29-01-2025

New York City residents in Hispanic and black communities that supported President Trump in huge numbers in the 2024 election hailed Tuesday's local immigration raids that nabbed scores of suspected heinous criminals.
Starting in the Bronx — where Trump's support surged 35% between 2020 and 2024 — heavily armed federal immigration agents stormed through the city, targeting migrants with warrants for murder, kidnapping and other heinous crimes, police sources told The Post.
Among those arrested was Anderson Zambrano-Pacheco, 25, an alleged ringleader of the notorious Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua who immigration officers took into custody at an Ogden Avenue apartment in The Bronx.
'Oh, thank God they got him,' said a resident who lives near the complex, visibly relieved the violent thug was taken off the streets.
Elsewhere in the borough, locals expressed similar sentiments.
'Get them the hell off the street! Get them the hell out of the street so people don't have to walk in fear,' said Evelyn Brown, 80, a Bronx resident from Jamaica who voted for Trump.
'Take the damn bad ones away!'
A resident of the Knickerbocker apartment complex in Washington Heights in deep-blue Manhattan, where Trump gained 5% in 2024 over his 2020 showing, said he's happy to see some action being taken against criminals but added that he still hopes some deserving migrant families are offered a path to safety.
The resident — who didn't want to give his name — said he voted for Trump the first time but didn't make it to the polls in 2024.
'Too many people came over the border at once, and now it has to be a whole operation,' he said of the raids.
'I don't want dangerous people on the street, especially if we're paying for it. People getting hurt on the street. Why should they get a pass?'
'But some of them are families,' he added of migrants who could end up eventually being deported, too, because of their illegal status.
'I don't want to see them separated or hurt back home.'
'It's all a mess.'
In Queens, where the president saw his support grow by nearly 10.5% from 2020 to 2024, according to Board of Election results, residents said they were glad to see criminals taken off the street.
Jason Rodriguez, 41, a forklift driver and security camera installer, told The Post while in Jackson Heights that said he's glad Homeland Security is going after Tren de Aragua gangbangers but added the ICE raids are also having a chilling effect on hardworking, law-abiding migrants who fear being deported.
'Honestly, it's good to get Tren de Aragua off the streets because they're dangerous. Trump should deport the criminals,' said Rodriguez, who was born at Saint Mary's Hospital in Brooklyn to parents who came from the Dominican Republic in the 1960s.
'Their jails in their own countries are a lot worse than here. They don't care about being locked up here, so they should be deported,' he added.
But 'there are a lot of undocumented, hardworking people busting their ass doing 14- and 16-hour days to support their families,' too, he said.
'They're doing it right. They're contributing to society, unlike the criminals.'
Electrical engineer Damso Vargas, 52, of Elmhurst moved to the US from the Dominican Republic in 2001 and has since become a US citizen.
He once worked in the control tower at Punta Cana International Airport but came to the US for a higher-paying job.
Vargas said the vetting of newly arrived migrants had been too lax under President Biden and believes the criminal element needs to be snuffed out.
Although he supports Homeland Security conducting targeted raids on criminal migrants, he said he doesn't want ICE to conduct sweeping searches and deportations.
'If you come to this country, you need to show respect and work hard. You don't come here to do gang bulls–t,' Vargas said.
'If you come to my country, I'd expect you to do the right thing.'
Vargas said there are large swaths of the borough which have rapidly gone downhill due to the influx of criminal migrants.
'I remember in 2010, you could walk around Roosevelt Avenue and enjoy yourself, but now I'm scared to walk around because there are a lot of newly arrived migrant criminals,' he said.
Dolphin Chung, 57, is a Peruvian green-card holder from Jackson Heights who sells jewelry under the 82 Street-Jackson Heights subway station. He's previously owned and run jewelry stores in Harlem and Staten Island.
He supports deporting foreign criminals but does not want mass deportations of migrants.
'The foreign criminals are dangerous, so it's good to get rid of them,' Chung said.
'We don't want the foreign gangs here. But there a lot of people around here who don't have papers but work very hard. They work from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m., seven days a week.'
On Staten Island — a Republican stronghold by city standards, going for Trump in three consecutive elections — Kevin Morales, 43, a construction worker who voted for the president in 2024 but not in 2020, drew a distinction between hardworking migrants and those being rounded up in the raids.
'Listen, there's too many people here that aren't looking to make a better life for themselves. Instead they are robbing, shooting and raping. Those are not the kind of immigrants we want here,' he told The Post at Greenridge Plaza in Great Kills.
'I'm an immigrant and come from a family of immigrants, but we work. We came here to work and make a better life for our children.'
Additional reporting by Joe Marino