New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander is the latest Democrat to put himself in a situation where handcuffs are going to come out in an attempt to portray the Trump administration as a police state.

Lander was arrested on Tuesday afternoon at the New York City courthouse where many immigration hearings are taking place. Lander linked arms with a man who was being taken into custody by federal agents, repeatedly demanding that they show him their judicial warrant before arresting the man. 

Instead, Lander himself got cufffed, and images of him being wrestled away from the migrant quickly spread across social media, where far-left activists like Shannon Watts were soon comparing the Trump administration to Adolph Hitler’s regime. 

For the record, it was Landers, not the ICE agents, who were demanding to see papers. More importantly, Landers was talking out of his backside when he demanded to see the agents’ judicial warrant. From the New York Times (of all places):

“I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant,” Mr. Lander says, his right hand on the man’s body.

Agents can be seen trying to pry Mr. Lander away. They ultimately separate him  from the man, push him against a wall by the elevators and place handcuffs on him.

“You don’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens,” Mr. Lander says repeatedly, according to the video. “I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway. I asked to see the judicial warrant.” (Agents do not need judicial warrants to make arrests in immigration courts because they are public spaces, immigration lawyers said.)

The agents walked Mr. Lander into an elevator in the building, accompanied by a member of his security detail. Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for Mr. Lander, said that he “was taken by masked agents and detained by ICE.”

I’m a civil libertarian, but Landers was clearly in the wrong here. This is far different than the detention of an Afghan man who served as an interpreter for the U.S. Army and who legally entered the U.S. after Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which is deeply troubling and will hopefully soon be corrected. 

Landers, however, was absolutely obstructing law enforcement, and he had no right to do so. The ICE agents, on the other hand, had the lawful authority to be in the courthouse and to detain and arrest the migrant they were seeking. 

If Landers was looking to increase his profile in a crowded mayoral primary, he got his wish. And given the leftward tilt of New York City politics, many voters will automatically assume that Landers’ version of events is the truth: that he was manhandled and arrested by government goons simply for asking valid questions. 

That’s simply not the case, but the truth isn’t nearly as important as the narrative to politicians like Landers and activists like Watts, who, incidentally, would probably have been thrilled by this image if it showed ATF agents arresting a man at a gun show for failing to put a buyer through a background check or selling an AR-15. 

It’s downright nuts for Watts to claim that “no one is safe” from ICE.  So long as you’re in this country legally and don’t obstruct their ability to do their job, you’ll be just fine. 

If Landers had been arrested for leading an anti-ICE chant in the courthouse or for demonstrating outside, I’d be upset too. But that’s not what happened. At best Landers was grossly uninformed about what the law says about immigration officers operating in a courthouse, and at worst decided to engage in a shameless act of political theater with federal agents and the subject of their arrest used as his props. 

Either way, it’s not a good look for the comptroller (who, by the way, is also a big fan of gun control) or his knee-jerk defenders like Watts, though I don’t expect many media outlets to even cover her comments. Thirty years ago the media and anti-gun politicians whipped up a frenzy when Wayne LaPierre referred to ATF agents as “jack-booted thugs”, but Watts calling ICE agents a modern-day Gestapo is different because reasons.