Artful

Dear Diary:

My trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art typically include a stop to see Seurat’s Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” a precursor to his much larger “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”

That painting, almost certainly the artist’s best known, has been viewed by countless visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago, and by many others who have seen a certain popular 1980s movie in which the piece has a small, but meaningful, role.

On my most recent visit to the Met, I heard a man behind me explaining the work to his group: And there’s another one at the Art Institute of Chicago that’s three times as big as this one, he said.

I turned around.

“You really know your stuff,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I saw ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’”

— James Devitt

Bathtub in the Kitchen

Dear Diary:

Now he’s sleeping the sleep of a dead man,
In a flat on the Lower East Side.
Oh, we tussled and wrestled,
Then we spooned and we nestled.
He’s a master of love, and I’m satisfied.

But I’m leavin’ that boy on 10th Street,
There is something that I cannot ignore.
Much too glaring and numbing,
Has to do with the plumbing.
Turns out it’s an undeniable flaw.

He’s got best-sellers and electronic toys,
He likes clean fun and connubial joys.
Now I don’t care he’s not rich an’—
Still it breaks my heart.
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my back with a roasting rack.)

What a daunting dilemma,
After scarfing up the lamb vindaloo.
It just isn’t nice ’cause when I scrape off the rice,
Gotta move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.

Yeah, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,
Our steaming pizza fresh right outta the box.
All of our dinners are quite bewitchin’
But it tears me up —
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(Gotta wash my toes with a rinsing hose.)

It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,
I know for sure that I won’t ever be back.
He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,
Don’t want bathroom water in the kitchen pipes.

Now, I’m no stranger to heartache,
Trouble has knocked at my door.
But I’ll go it alone and I won’t answer the phone,
Leave his gritty Ajax and his strange décor.

Adios my man, keep your fryin’ pan.
Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.
You’ve got a bathtub in the kitchen.

— Lou Craft

Sounds of the ’60s

Dear Diary:

I was taking an uptown express to the Upper West Side. A trim, older man with a well-worn accordion got on at 34th Street.

He immediately jumped into a set of ’60s rock classics. Man, he rocked. Among the highlights was his version of the 1966 Rolling Stones hit “Paint It Black.”

As we both prepared to get off at 96th Street, I gave him a nod of approval and put some money in his cup.

He grinned and rushed toward the uptown local that was waiting across the platform.

He said, “96th Street, ‘96 Tears.’”

— Chris Parnagian

Northbound Traffic

Dear Diary:

It was about 10 years ago. I was in the passenger seat of our Toyota, my husband was at the wheel and we were stuck in northbound traffic on the West Side Highway.

It was warm out, and we had the windows down. I had a copy of “Life of Pi,” with its distinctive blue dust jacket and orange spine, on my lap.

I heard a man’s voice that sounded like it was next to me but much higher up. It turned out it was coming from the open window of a cab on a tractor-trailer that was idling next to us.

“Great book,” the voice said.

I looked up and saw the truck’s driver looking down at me. His elbow was resting on the edge of the open window. Beneath it was a copy of “Life of Pi,” open so I could see the dust jacket.

“Great book!” I said.

Slowly, traffic began to move.

— Connie Beckley

What Will You Have?

Dear Diary:

It was lunchtime in Midtown, and the deli counter line snaked its way along a refrigerated unit filled with cheeses, salamis and tomatoes.

It was all new to me, a recent arrival from Ireland. Finally, it was my turn to order.

“Yeah?” the counterman said.

“Do you have whole wheat?” I asked.

The counterman furrowed his brow and nodded.

“Do you have Cheddar?”

“Yes.”

“Do you … ”

I felt a tap on my shoulder.

Turning around, I saw a short, older man wearing a pork pie hat and a bow tie and peering at me though his glasses.

“Stop asking questions,” he said. “Tell him what you want.”

— Tommy Weir

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Illustrations by Agnes Lee

Marlon Luna said he and his girlfriend came into the United States three months ago after fleeing death threats in Venezuela. They waited in Mexico for four long months to secure a Border Patrol appointment instead of crossing illegally. Then they wound up in a New York migrant shelter.

Now, they fear that New York — and America — may be over for them.

On Thursday, the Trump administration issued a memo that widened the scope of people it would seek to deport, including those who, like Mr. Luna, used CBP One, a mobile app, to enter the country.

The Biden administration had used the app to manage the movement of 900,000 migrants through legal ports of entry. Mr. Luna, 23, said he had assumed that if he followed the rules he would have a fair shake. Now, he fears, deportation could happen at any time.

“Some people crossed illegally, but some people wanted to enter in the way that one should,” he said in Spanish outside a Randall’s Island shelter on Friday. “What we are hearing here, and really what everyone is saying, is that at any moment something could happen.”

For nearly three years, thousands of migrants have come to New York City under Biden-era programs that allowed migrants from Venezuela, Haiti and elsewhere to legally enter the United States and temporarily remain for as long as two years. Now the Homeland Security Department has empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to expel those with a temporary legal status known as parole, which also allows migrants to work here.

The new directive could have an outsize impact in New York City, where more than 225,000 migrants have arrived since early 2022, many under parole. It raised the possibility that the city’s 187 migrant shelters, where more than 49,000 people still reside, would be prime targets if ICE aggressively pursues migrants allowed in under the Biden administration.

The action in Washington came as officials in New York City, a liberal stronghold with an additional 400,000-some immigrants with temporary or no legal status, have been bracing for an immigration crackdown.

The city has so-called sanctuary laws, which limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. City agencies have been racing to issue guidance to schools, shelters and social services offices on how to respond if ICE officers show up.

In a message to agency heads last month, Camille Joseph Varlack, who is chief of staff to Mayor Eric Adams, said that leaders would “stand firmly by the values that have made New York City a thriving city of immigrants, regardless of immigration status.”

However, Mr. Adams’s public messaging and remarks have done little to reassure people who work with immigrants and his fellow Democrats, instead creating a sense of dissonance and discombobulation.

Mr. Adams has denigrated aspects of the sanctuary laws and expressed support for modifying them to allow the city to work with ICE to deport people charged with crimes — all while declining to publicly criticize Mr. Trump. The mayor faces a trial on federal corruption charges in April and has moved to stay in the good graces of Mr. Trump, who could pardon him.

On Thursday evening, when Mr. Adams was asked about a newly issued Justice Department memo that threatens prosecution for local officials who fail to comply with the president’s immigration initiatives, the mayor signaled that he was inclined to cooperate.

“If the federal government is stating that you cannot interfere with the actions, we can’t do anything that is going to jeopardize city employees,” Mr. Adams said, adding, “We need to read through these executive orders and fully understand what they’re saying, what our authorizations may be and what they are not.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Adams said in a statement Friday that the mayor believes that “federal immigration enforcement should be focused on the small number of people who are entering our localities and committing violent crimes.”

She added, “While the mayor and president will not always agree on everything, Mayor Adams is focused on how we can work together to do what is best for New York City.”

The measured tone from City Hall was in contrast with that of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat. She, along with 10 other attorneys general, responded to the Justice Department memo with a fiery statement: “These vague threats are just that: empty words on paper,” the statement said. “But rest assured, our states will not hesitate to respond if these words become illegal actions.”

Under current city guidelines, federal immigration authorities can only be allowed into a shelter if they have judicial warrants for specific people. Some immigration lawyers said that they had not heard of ICE showing up at New York City shelters since the migrant crisis began almost three years ago.

But they speculated whether that would change soon if Mr. Trump decides to go after migrants who entered using CBP One or under the program that allows certain migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to legally stay for as long as two years. Mr. Trump and his allies have long criticized the programs as tactics abused by the Biden administration to allow illegal immigration under the guise of legal migration, and have moved quickly to end them.

“They’re intending to cast as wide a net as possible to really try to remove as many people who were admitted in the last two years,” said Jodi Ziesemer, the co-director of the Immigrant Protection Unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group. “We’re talking about tens of thousands of people, mostly families, who could be rounded up and deported. They’re very vulnerable.”

Accomplishing the directives in the Homeland Security memo would be a significant escalation of arrests and deportations, and would present a daunting logistical challenge. Some of the immigrants might have other legal shields, such as asylum or Temporary Protected Status, lawyers said. It might also prove hard for the United States to deport people to Venezuela, given the severely strained diplomatic relations between the countries.

Migrants in city shelters, many of whom speak scant English, were left to parse Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive orders and directives this week. Many wondered whether the asylum claims they have filed in immigration court would offer them a level of protection. Rumors of ICE officers showing up at shelters have swirled in conversations and text messages. Some migrants said they were limiting their time outside the shelters, while others were urgently trying to leave the system altogether, fearful that they could be easy targets.

Pedro Cumana, a Venezuelan living in a small tent outside the Randall’s Island shelter, said in an interview in Spanish that when helicopters have flown over or sirens have gone off at night this week, he has poked his head outside, wondering whether it’s immigration officials or a routine police run.

“I haven’t been able to sleep well,” said Mr. Cumana, who has a hearing related to his asylum claim this month. “I feel uncertain. I’m not sure how to feel, because what if at my own court hearing they arrest me? It’s not easy. You don’t know what to expect.”

Immigration lawyers and activists expressed outrage at the memo’s suggestion that immigration officials could retroactively strip migrants of parole status and seek to move them from formal deportation proceedings to a sped-up exit.

“The barrage of things that have happened this past week is very intentional, obviously,” said Deborah Lee, the lawyer in charge of the immigration law unit at The Legal Aid Society. “But it’s also intended to be so overwhelming that people cannot fight back and make legal challenges because of the full volume of everything.”

Still, other migrants, like Ramon Cortez, 43, also from Venezuela, refused to panic about what was brewing in the news and on social media. Mr. Cortez, who arrived in New York two months ago after using the CBP One app to enter the country, said in an interview in Spanish that he would not fret until he received official notice that he was at risk of deportation.

“If I receive a formal document, a court or something that tells me, ‘This is going to happen there,’ I’m going to start to believe what they’re saying,” he said.

Wesley Parnell, Olivia Bensimon and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.

Last year in New Jersey, federal immigration officers took more than 1,300 undocumented migrants into custody. That figure was roughly 300 more than in 2023.

But on Thursday, less than a week into President Trump’s second term, the arrests of three people at a fish distribution warehouse in Newark appeared to tap a well of pent-up fear about mass deportations in a region teeming with immigrants.

The streets around the warehouse filled early Friday with television crews. Newark’s mayor held a news conference to decry the methods used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials as unconstitutional and blamed Mr. Trump, who campaigned on a promise to initiate the “largest deportation program in American history.”

Whether Thursday’s arrests in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood were part of a new crackdown, or fairly typical of ICE enforcement actions in the city in recent years, was not immediately clear. Immigration arrests in the city are common. Last month, under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ICE officers based in Newark announced 33 arrests to little public notice. And ICE officials did not reply to several requests for comment.

But the enforcement activity left immigrants across the region on edge. There were reports of ICE officers knocking on doors in Vineland, in New Jersey’s southern agricultural region, which is heavily dependent on migrant labor. On Long Island, immigrant rights activists said they were busy fielding reports of “ramped-up” activity by ICE officers. And a police captain in Ossining, N.Y., Brendan Donohue, warned that rumors often multiply more quickly than facts.

“Fear spreads very quickly, and even just the suggestion that ICE could come here turns into a ‘ICE was here’ kind of a situation,” Captain Donohue said. “These things can snowball, of course.”

Merchants in Newark who run body shops and cafes near the fish distribution center, Ocean Seafood Depot, said Thursday’s midday raid was unusual for the industrial neighborhood, which is dotted with two-story homes and some of the city’s best restaurants.

Newark’s mayor, Ras J. Baraka, a Democrat who is running for governor, warned that the city intended to defend its residents.

“If he thinks that we’re just going to go to jail quietly,” Mr. Baraka said of Mr. Trump, “he’s got another thing coming.”

Immigration officers entered legally through a fish store at the front of the facility. But Mr. Baraka said that they had proceeded, without presenting a warrant, into a large nonpublic warehouse where workers pack fish and load it onto delivery trucks.

He said ICE officials had also challenged the validity of a military ID presented by a U.S. citizen who works at the warehouse and was questioned during the raid. Mr. Baraka urged workers and their employers to become familiar with their rights — before ICE officers show up.

“We can disagree about whether you support mass deportation or not,” Mr. Baraka said. “But what we must agree on is — the thing that separates this country from many other countries around the world — is the Constitution.”

“Everyone has a right to due process,” he added, “and no one can go around these laws.”

Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said she had raced to the warehouse after receiving reports of a raid before lunchtime on Thursday.

“They were heavily armed,” she said of the uniformed officers who conducted the search.

“They were blocking off entrances and exits. They were scrambling up delivery ramps. They were banging down bathroom doors to make sure no one was hiding inside,” she added.

All but a handful of the roughly 80 people who work at the warehouse abruptly left for the day, fearing a repeat visit by the enforcement agency, Ms. Torres said.

The effect of the enforcement action remained palpable on Friday. Barbershops were empty along a normally bustling commercial corridor near the seafood company. Customers were scarce at a cafe that its owner said routinely fills each morning with warehouse workers who come in to buy coffee before their shifts.

A Newark councilman who lives in the area, Michael Silva, said he, too, had noticed an immediate change.

He said he typically wakes each morning at 4:45 a.m. to the sound of his next-door neighbor opening a gate to leave for work.

“This morning, I didn’t hear that gate,” said Mr. Silva, the son of Portuguese immigrants. “He told me that he was scared to go to work.”

Jessica Greenberg, the legal director at CARECEN-NY, an organization that works with immigrant communities on Long Island, said that alarm about Mr. Trump’s immigration policies had intensified over the last week.

“They are going after people that were considered ‘low-hanging fruit’ in past administrations,” Ms. Greenberg said, adding, “We’ve been on the phone with individuals while ICE has been banging on their door or shortly after ICE has left.”

ICE arrests are hardly novel in the region. In December, while Mr. Biden was still in office, ICE officers based in Newark conducted what the agency called a “weeklong, targeted, surge operation.”

Still, immigrant rights leaders have been holding events designed to instruct documented and undocumented residents on their rights in anticipation of a broad crackdown by Mr. Trump.

New Jersey education officials also released guidance this week to school leaders, offering instructions on what to do if immigration officials show up at public schools. The instructions came in response to Mr. Trump’s Tuesday announcement that ICE and Homeland Security officers would no longer be barred from detaining people at schools or churches, so-called sensitive locations that since 2011 had been considered safe spaces.

Rui Lorenço works at a car repair shop in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, which is home to a large number of Portuguese, Brazilian and Ecuadorean residents. He said he had noticed heightened panic on social media over the last week.

Mr. Lorenço, who moved to the United States about five years ago from Lisbon, said he supported clearer rules on immigration, but not what he described as “hate speech” spread by Mr. Trump and his supporters.

“This is a country made of immigrants,” Mr. Lorenço said. “If they come to take people away that are just working, that’s concerning.”

Larissa Cardoso, 22, emigrated to the United States from Brazil about a year ago. She said she was afraid about what a stricter immigration policy could mean for her and her friends in the days ahead.

“I always dreamed to come here, and I try to do things right,” said Ms. Cardoso, a waitress and bartender in a popular Ironbound restaurant who has been working to gain legal immigration status.

“People come here because they literally want to change their lives,” she said. “With what’s happening now — their lives could now stop.”

Hurubie Meko and Lola Fadulu contributed reporting.