ICE, border patrol and the politics of police unions in Mamdani’s New York

Blue Power released on April 14.

Courtesy of Basic Books

Stuart Schrader is a historian at Johns Hopkins University where he teaches courses about police and prisons.

Courtesy of Christy Thornton and Basic Books

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Related

The quiet rise of police power in American politics

In the first installment of this reporting series, Stuart Schrader traced the rise of police unions and the consolidation of what he calls “blue power” over the 20th century.

In this second installment, Schrader discusses  with The Chief the relationship between municipal police and federal agencies like ICE, the growing political alignment of police unions with Donald Trump and how those dynamics are playing out in New York City under Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Schrader's book, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, released April 14, follows how that influence expanded across local and national politics.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Chief: You write that Reagan’s war on drugs “reignited faded hopes among police that they might make gains in Washington.” Today, how do you understand the relationship between municipal police and federal agencies like [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], especially as federal enforcement expands with relatively few constraints?

Stuart Schrader: I don’t really focus on ICE in the book, but I do look closely at Border Patrol, which has a longer history. The Border Patrol union has been really successful. In some sense, there’s almost an inverse relationship.

The local police unions I discuss in the book gained power on bigger and bigger scales. Border Patrol, in contrast—because they’re authorized and funded by Congress—had to figure out how to localize their political campaigning in order to build allies in Congress. So they worked with conservative legislators in the borderlands and focused on crime fears there. It’s a kind of seesaw between local and federal politics.

In the present moment, I think one of the key distinctions is between police leadership and police unions. You have police chiefs—for example, the chief in Minneapolis has been very explicit, both before and after Renee Good was shot, that this is bad, reckless and dangerous.

He’s said it undermines trust that they’ve worked hard to rebuild since 2020. But then you have rank-and-file officers and police unions, and the question is whether they see things the same way.

I don’t know about the Minneapolis police union specifically—they’ve been fairly quiet—but there have been statements from the state [Fraternal Order of Police] and the Minnesota Police Association basically saying, after Renee Good was shot, “How dare local officials be so critical of ICE?” They argued that ICE officers were put in a dangerous situation and deserve support.

It’s also worth noting that one of the most vociferous police union leaders supporting Trump was Bob Kroll, the head of the Minneapolis police union when George Floyd was killed. He had accumulated numerous complaints to the point that he’s now barred from serving as a police officer in multiple counties.

There’s a famous photo of him with Trump wearing a “Cops for Trump” shirt. You’d never see a big-city police chief doing that—they answer to Democratic mayors and constituencies—but union leaders operate differently.

TC: In the wake of the heights of movements such as Black Lives Matter and defund the police, how would you describe the current public perception of police—and how it’s evolving?

SS: I do think municipal police are, to some degree, benefiting from what ICE and Border Patrol are doing, because they’re not seen as the primary antagonists at this moment. That will probably persist.

More broadly, I hope the book, by naming “blue power” as a project—something with a history and real depth—helps explain something people sense but can’t quite name.

Having lived through the [former Police Benevolent Association president] Pat Lynch era in New York City, for example, he was constantly on the news, always visible. It strikes people that this person has enormous power, and you can almost always predict what he’ll say. So where does that come from? Is he an outlier?

People in New York might not know the politics of San Francisco or Detroit, but in fact, he’s not much of an outlier historically. So I hope that naming “blue power” helps people make sense of what they’re seeing.

TC: The book also emphasizes how dispersed and adaptable blue power is. How should we understand that fluidity?

SS: Yeah, exactly. It’s a kind of tactical fluidity. They respond to different situations as they emerge, forming alliances that are sometimes just alliances of convenience.

The book ends with police being largely “all in” on Trump. This kind of unanimity around Trump and MAGA may backfire in the long run.

Given the intensity of partisan polarization, actors who can bridge divides tend to be more successful. Police may be painting themselves into a corner, especially in big cities with Democratic or increasingly Socialist leadership.

So this shift—really part of the Black Lives Matter/Trump era—is a departure in how closely police have aligned with a single figure and a more extreme political position.

TC: How does that play out in a city like New York, particularly under a Mayor Zohran Mamdani? 

SS: I'm hesitant to make too many predictions. From what I’ve seen, the PBA has been relatively tight-lipped.

Part of that is just that [Patrick] Hendry, who came after Lynch, isn’t as bombastic. And if I’m not mistaken, they’re working without a contract right now so they’re a bit at Zohran’s mercy in that sense. They want a contract, and they want a good one.

At the same time, Zohran’s base will react as soon as there’s a story saying he’s proposing even incremental gains or benefits for the PBA in negotiations. That’s going to upset people, not to mention the more hardline critics on the left. So both sides have a fair amount to lose in open antagonism.

It’s true that Zohran has been taking advice from people connected to de Blasio, and I imagine from the very first conversation they’ve been warning him: don’t tangle with the PBA.

As I talk about in the book, de Blasio’s mayoralty was hamstrung by two factors—Andrew Cuomo, who seemed intent on undermining him, and the antagonism he faced from the NYPD. So I can imagine those advisers are cautioning him. My suspicion is that the decision to keep Tisch on was a way to avoid that fight now and deal with the problems later.

But as John Ben-Menachem pointed out in The Nation, the left doesn’t really have a pipeline to police commissioners. There’s no obvious candidate who would satisfy left critics.

So it raises a real question: is there anyone in New York who could take that role and satisfy the left? Probably not. And even if there were, the PBA would revolt.

So it’s a real rock-and-a-hard-place situation for Zohran—a practical question about how to govern that doesn’t even get to the terrain the left wants to talk about, like defunding or abolition. 

One of the things that’s challenging right now—and part of what’s different under Trump—is that while police power has often been hard to pin down, it’s become much more visible in terms of its allegiances. There’s a kind of shamelessness to it and that’s not entirely new.

It goes back to the 1960s—figures like John Harrington or Carl Parsell in Detroit helped create a blueprint for that kind of politics. People may have seen them as extreme cases, but when you start looking city by city, you see similar figures everywhere. 

That said, the full-throated embrace of Trump has still been something of a departure. It’s alerted a lot of people that something more is going on.

You can compare it to earlier moments—for instance, there’s a photo of Bill Clinton after signing the crime bill, with police standing behind him and a banner reading "Law Enforcement Stands Behind President Clinton." That was more of a quid pro quo: you pass this legislation, we support you.

With Trump, there’s no comparable legislative agenda. It’s more affective, more about identity and alignment than policy. If you follow the history I lay out in the book, you can see where it comes from, but it still feels like a shift.

There are also structural factors. In places like Baltimore, a large share of officers live outside the city—some commuting long distances—which affects how policing works on the ground.

In expensive cities like New York or San Francisco, even well-paid officers often can’t afford to live where they work. So they end up living in areas where they’re voting for Republican legislators, members of Congress, and so on.

And as the Republican Party has consolidated around Trump, that alignment becomes clearer, even as the cities themselves remain largely Democratic.

At the same time, as I show in the book, Democrats have been allies of police for a long time. Even in the post-2020 period, when some officials have pushed for reforms or restrictions, they’ve become targets of police union backlash.

And finally, there’s a cultural dimension. Trump’s style has a certain resonance with some police union leaders.

After the backlash from Black Lives Matter, he offered a kind of adoration, even celebrity, that they didn’t feel they were getting elsewhere. There’s a kind of mutual recognition there—you see it in figures like Lynch. It’s almost like that Spider-Man meme: they’re not antagonists, but they recognize something in each other.