By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
When ICE enforcers in hoodies and masks started pulling people out of cars in Washington Heights in November of 2025, I was stunned and amazed, and so was the NYPD. As Charles Lane reported in the Gothamist back then:
“Two NYPD officers sustained minor injuries during a scuffle involving federal immigration agents in Washington Heights Wednesday morning, police said. The incident happened as federal agents made multiple arrests in the neighborhood and residents called 911 to report four armed men pulling people out of cars, according to the NYPD and local officials. NYPD officers began driving around the neighborhood searching when they spotted a group of people chasing somebody near 164th St. and Broadway. The officers jumped out of their cars to intervene before realizing the people chasing were federal immigration agents, according to the NYPD. Officials said the federal agents verbally identified themselves as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after the interaction but wore sweatshirts without any visual markings of their agency. The NYPD is forbidden from assisting in civil immigration enforcement. Authorities said the officers were treated for minor injuries and that it happened during the interaction with ICE.”
Over the past year and a half, I kept thinking that the actions of ICE around the nation were out of step with America’s values and culture and appeared more like the tactics of an authoritarian regime in the face of a subdued population. Mass protests against ICE all over the country and protests preceding and following the killings in Minneapolis reassured me that Americans were not willing to tolerate police state tactics, whatever the supposed purpose. The election last week reinforced my perception that many ICE actions were un-American. The massive shift in the Hispanic vote was at the center of the electoral storm, most notably in Texas. Certainly, the blue wave was a response to inflation and the costs of gasoline, but late in the campaign, issues of corruption and opposition to the immigration crackdown added to the momentum of opposition to the President and to all Republicans.
Over the course of the past year and a half, as deportation quotas were enforced by poorly trained ICE brigades, everyone seemed to know of people who had been here for decades being swept up in incompetent, vicious, and often illegal enforcement actions. People who worked in construction, farming, hospitality, and medical care, often beloved members of their community, were suddenly arrested by masked men dressed like hoodlums, torn from their families and detained. Immigrants, regardless of their legal status, closed their curtains and hid in their homes. Parents kept their children out of school. Closing the southern border and deporting hardened criminals received political support, but deporting the hard-working crew that fixed our home after the flood and leaving their children without parents at first surprised people but eventually made them angry. That’s because, as many visitors from abroad learned during last summer’s World Cup tournament, Americans are kind to strangers and are not a cruel people. Most Americans respect law enforcement and the service of the armed forces and first responders. We are not used to seeing authority abused, and when we see it, we don’t like it. We prefer kindness and community to cruelty.
As a New Yorker, I sometimes suspect that I don’t really understand American culture. In 1970, I moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Franklin, Indiana, to attend college. When I settled in Franklin, I soon realized that I did not really grow up in America. Then and now, New York City and Franklin, Indiana, are incredibly different. But when I started to engage with small-town Hoosier culture, I discovered kindness, empathy, and a warm and welcoming place. Certainly Indiana, like Brooklyn half a century ago, had its share of antisemitism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of bias. But people were nice to me and not put off by my accent, long hair, or demeanor. It was my memory of those days that made it difficult for me to believe that Americans supported the effort to deport productive, law-abiding immigrants and break apart loving families. When I lived in Indiana, during the “anti-Nixon Watergate” election of 1974, Indiana’s Congressional delegation flipped from 7-4 Republican to 8-3 Democratic. This year, the Congressional delegation went from 7-2 Republican to 6-3 Republican, but Democrats in House races received 51.4% of total votes, an increase of nearly 13%, and Republicans received 47.8 % of the vote, a decrease of over 10%. In both cases, the corruption and mean-heartedness in Washington were rejected by most Hoosiers.
The opposition to everything international is alien to our culture. As all Presidents before Trump understood, we are a nation of immigrants. Our ability to welcome people from around the world and encourage them to become Americans is what has always made this nation unique and is the very source of the greatness that MAGA seems to think we’ve lost. As an educator, I am shocked and dismayed by the federal government’s restrictions on international students coming to study here and hoping to work here. It is harming our universities just as much as the efforts to restrict speech and delegitimize open debate have impaired education. Along with idiotic tariffs, it is damaging our economy. Trump seems to think immigration and free market global trade are harming America’s economy. Since we remain the richest country in the world, I’d argue that global competition and trade make our country more productive and wealthier. While we are not doing a good job of distributing that wealth, we are doing very well at creating it.
And then on this past Friday, our out-of-touch President appointed Stephen Miller, the architect of this cruelty, as his Chief of Staff. I had been hoping that he would read the election results and move Miller out of the White House, rather than putting him in charge. Neither Miller nor Trump seems to understand that the absence of empathy and the use of force against innocents is un-American. We have seen cruelty before in our history. Slavery was once legal, and Native Americans were massacred, their lands stolen. Every new wave of immigrants has faced bias. Our history is not free from cruelty, and we should acknowledge it and learn from it. I like to think we have grown away from those behaviors toward a higher level of civilization.
The mid-term election results had many causes, and we should resist any temptation to attribute them to a single cause, but one key aspect was the revival of our civic culture. People voted in large numbers, despite the fears of federal disruption and challenges to the vote. Our bipartisan, decentralized, and judicially enforced system of voting held firm. Trump failed in his effort to delegitimize the election. He lost by so many votes in so many places that contesting the result is simply infeasible. After the election, he claimed that if he had been on the ballot, he would have won by a landslide. He begged people to imagine he was on the ballot. To his detriment, they did, and that led to his party’s defeat.
What I find so heartening is that despite the nasty advertising and billions spent on disinformation, Americans tuned out the noise and believed the reality they directly experienced. This nation has a written set of laws and an unwritten set of norms and beliefs. Both have been attacked relentlessly by the President and his cronies. The courts have largely managed to uphold the rule of law, and the public voted for a resumption of our norms. For the revival of our civic culture. The attacks will keep coming. The new White House Chief of Staff embodies the attack on our norms and on the rule of law. The era of high-handed Executive Orders is far from over. In Stephen Miller, the President has found his 2nd-term wartime consigliere, his successor to the equally evil Roy Cohn. But the President’s monopoly on federal power has been broken. Trump relishes battles but always blames his losses on someone else. Stephen Miller should not consider himself immune from that practice. While our Lame Duck President is a master of distraction, he will soon find attention and power drifting away. America’s character and civic culture have been revived. The voting public came to the rescue. A sleeping giant seems to have awakened.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
