99 Days
BX, Stand up
Ninety-nine days ago, a New Yorker named Fei Zheng brought his six-year-old son, Yuanxin, to a routine immigration check-in. They showed up where the government told them to show up, when the government told them to show up.
ICE agents arrested them both.
They sent Fei to a detention center upstate. Nobody knew where the boy was being held.
He was six.
In New York City, ICE arrests have already surpassed the 2024 total. Seventy percent of those arrested had no criminal record.
That was ninety-nine days ago.
And what was our congressman doing about it?
Voting to make it worse.
Ritchie Torres voted for the Laken Riley Act, the first bill Donald Trump signed into law. The bill mandates detention based on arrest, not conviction. It strips judges of discretion and expands ICE’s power without accountability.
Then he voted for a resolution expressing gratitude to ICE agents for their work.
Instead of representing one of the largest immigrant communities in the country, our congressman voted to expand the deportation machine and praise the people operating it.
After three cold-blooded murders by ICE and DHS, public outrage exploded. Torres responded with a proposal: QR codes on ICE agents’ uniforms.
Because when a woman is pepper-sprayed while watching her husband get beaten and dragged from their home, she can simply ask the rabid thugs to pose for a QR flick. Problem solved.
That’s not policy. That’s performance.
This is what crimmigration looks like. Criminal enforcement and immigration policy fused into one system designed to treat immigrants as suspects first and human beings second. In New York, Ecuadorians are 4 percent of the non-citizen population but nearly 25 percent of ICE arrests.
Not the worst of the worst.
Papi at the corner bodega. The nurse pulling double shifts at Lincoln Hospital. The young father who brought his six-year-old to a check-in because he believed the system would treat him fairly.
The Bronx was built by people like them. Dominican. Mexican. Jamaican. West African. Bangladeshi. Honduran. Ghanaian.
My parents were two of them.
They came from Jamaica ready to build. They taught me that my country’s promise isn’t a birthright. It’s earned, one sacrifice at a time, and can be stolen in an instant.
When your congressman funds the machinery that terrorizes families instead of protecting them, he is not representing you.
He’s betraying you.
99 days from now, NY-15 gets to make a different choice.
But only if we build the field operation to win it.
Your support helps us build a grassroots field operation from Little Jamaica to Little Yemen, from Kingsbridge to Grand Concourse. No AIPAC. No billionaire donors. I’m not taking a dollar from corporate PACs.
If you believe The Bronx deserves a congressman who fights for it, help power this campaign today.
With faith and purpose,
Rev. Michael Blake
LET'S DO THIS, BX!