You don’t have to lie to mislead people. You just have to tell them a true thing about the wrong situation.
Before he took office, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani put out a video telling residents how to handle federal immigration agents. Most of what he said was correct. Agents usually can’t force their way into your home without a warrant signed by a judge. You don’t have to answer their questions. You can film them, as long as you don’t get in the way. All true.
Here’s what he left out.
That rule is about your front door. That’s it. Once you step outside, or once an agent finds someone at a workplace or on a public street, the rules are different — and Congress wrote them that way on purpose.
Federal immigration law works mostly on a different kind of paperwork. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issues its own arrest warrants. The law also lets agents make an arrest with no warrant at all, if they have reason to believe someone is here illegally and is about to disappear. That isn’t a loophole somebody found. It’s the law, written by Congress, signed by presidents from both parties, sitting in the books right now.
So when a public official holds up an ICE warrant and suggests it’s a worthless piece of paper — that the officer holding it is breaking the law — he isn’t educating anybody. He’s taking a narrow rule about your doorway and turning it into a much bigger claim: that immigration enforcement itself is illegitimate.
His defenders will say the video told people to stay calm, not to interfere, not to resist, not to run. That’s true. And it’s not the point. The point is what the video never mentioned. It spent its whole length explaining what you can refuse. It spent no time at all explaining what the agents outside are actually allowed to do. A lesson that teaches only one side’s rights isn’t a civics lesson. And the calm-down warning at the end, from a man who calls ICE a rogue agency and wants it shut down, isn’t the message. It’s the cover.
He’s said it more directly elsewhere. He’s called ICE a rogue agency with no interest in laws and no interest in order. As a sitting mayor, he’s said he thinks ICE should be abolished, and that he won’t help federal agents enforce federal law.
You can argue ICE should be abolished. That’s a real debate, and the place to have it is Congress, which is the only body that can do it. But an agency enforcing a law that Congress passed is not rogue. Maybe it’s a bad law. Maybe it’s being enforced badly. Both of those are fair fights. Calling it lawlessness flips the word upside down — and the people doing it are lawyers and legislators who know exactly what the statute says.
The other half of this runs through the courthouses.
There are 94 federal court districts in this country and about 670 federal trial judges. Again and again, one of them, in one case, has shut down an immigration policy for all 330 million of us.
This June, a judge in Northern California blocked the administration’s policy on arrests at immigration courthouses — not just in California, but everywhere. In August, an appeals court upheld a different judge’s order restricting enforcement near more than 1,400 churches across 33 states.
This is not unusual. This is the normal rhythm now.
Congress saw it coming. Thirty years ago, it wrote a rule into immigration law that says something close to this: no matter what kind of lawsuit you file, no court except the Supreme Court can block how the deportation system operates. There’s one exception — a judge can step in for one specific person whose case is already underway.
One person. Not the country.
That opening phrase — no matter what kind of lawsuit you file — isn’t filler. Congress put it there to stop people from getting around the rule by changing the words on the paperwork. In 2022, the Supreme Court read that line and threw out exactly the kind of sweeping order judges keep issuing. In 2025, the court went further, ruling that federal judges probably never had the power to issue nationwide orders in the first place.
Some will say that judges have another tool that’s perfectly legitimate, and that Justice Brett Kavanaugh defended it a few years back. Fair enough. But one justice writing separately isn’t a ruling. And three other justices had already said the opposite. Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, pointed out that the law judges lean on for this power never actually uses the word they claim it gives them. Then he asked a simple question: If one person can wipe out a rule for everybody, why would anyone bother with the normal rules for group lawsuits?
Three years later, we have the answer. They don’t.
The orders never stopped. They just got renamed. Judges swapped one legal term for another and kept going, and Congress’s own research service confirmed it: A full year after the Supreme Court’s ruling, nothing had really changed in the lower courts. That California judge in June used both tools in a single order. New label, same result.
And here’s why it keeps happening.
A judge who issues one of these orders takes almost no risk. If a higher court agrees with him, the policy is dead. If a higher court overturns him, the policy was still dead for the year or two the appeal took. Being wrong costs nothing. The delay is the victory, and it gets handed out before anybody has proven anything.
A system that only ever makes mistakes in one direction isn’t using its judgment. It’s showing its preference.
The answer isn’t to go after judges personally. It’s to take away the free shot.
The Supreme Court should settle, once and for all, whether a single judge can erase a federal policy nationwide. Congress should require three judges, not one, before any federal policy can be frozen for the whole country — a structure it has used before for cases this big. Lawsuits seeking nationwide orders should be assigned to a random district, so lawyers can’t shop for the courthouse they want. And the Justice Department should raise that 30-year-old limit on court power in every case where it applies, because Congress wrote it for exactly this.
Every one of those changes is politically neutral. Each would tie the hands of the next administration the same way it ties this one. That’s the whole idea.
NEW YORK IS TURNING INTO BRITAIN, AND THAT SHOULD TERRIFY AMERICANS
You can think immigration law is cruel and still admit it’s the law. You can fight to repeal it and still admit it’s on the books.
What you can’t honestly do is tell people that enforcing a law is lawlessness — and then ask a judge to shut it down nationwide while you say it.
Scott Mechkowski served more than 24 years in federal immigration enforcement at the legacy Immigration and Naturalization Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, retiring as Deputy Field Office Director for Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York. He also served more than 30 years in the U.S. Army. He is a Visiting Fellow for Deportation Studies at the Oversight Project. The views expressed here are his own.