The Manifesto Was Not the First: Anti-ICE Rhetoric Has a Body Count Now

Andrew Arrabaca brought a pull-wagon to the employee entrance of 26 Federal Plaza on Monday morning. The FBI says the forty-three-year-old had loaded it with two axes, a hammer, a machete, three fixed-blade knives, six incendiary devices, two airsoft rifles, and a container of flammable liquid. Assistant Director James Barnacle laid out the inventory. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch read the sign taped to the cart: "ICE off our streets."

After he was read his rights, Barnacle said, Arrabaca admitted he was targeting the building and was "OK if he hurt or killed people going in and out," federal employees or civilians. There was also a manifesto in the bag.

Start there, because it forecloses the sympathetic read before anyone can reach for it. The airsoft rifles invite a writer to call this theater, a broken man with toys. A man who packs a machete and three fixed blades and tells the FBI he is willing to kill is not performing. He is under-equipped for the massacre he described, which is not the same as harmless.

Here is what the government says he did. Barnacle said Arrabaca poured gasoline, lit it with a lighter and a large firework in a canister, and fired five to seven airsoft pellets at the building before three officers tackled him. Tisch said he dumped incendiary liquid into the landscaping along the perimeter and set it alight. One of the three people hurt had come to 26 Federal Plaza for a hearing in his own immigration case.

The slogan on the cart did not originate on Worth Street. For more than a year, elected officials have described this agency in the vocabulary of extermination. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner vowed to "hunt down" ICE agents and invoked the pursuit of Nazis. Representative Pramila Jayapal called ICE a "terrorist force." Representative Maxine Dexter of Oregon called immigration enforcement "terrorism." A San Antonio council candidate posted that he wanted to see "a few dead ICE agents." The Gestapo comparison has been repeated by governors, senators, and late-night hosts until it stopped registering as a claim at all. DHS says assaults on ICE officers rose several hundred percent over the same period.

Monday was not the first bag with a manifesto in it. In February, federal authorities arrested an eighteen-year-old in Oregon, Rayden Coleman, who they allege wrote out a plan to kill ICE agents at a Portland office with Molotov cocktails and a rifle. Last July, gunmen ambushed the ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, drawing officers outside by shooting fireworks at the building before opening fire. Arrabaca used the same overture. Two anti-ICE activists, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, have died in confrontations with federal authorities and been elevated to martyrs, which feeds the next man. The fireworks, the manifesto, the federal building chosen because, as Barnacle put it, it has long been a target. None of the elements were new. Only the address was.

Arrabaca's own record complicates the picture without excusing him. By the Army's account he served from 2001 to 2005 with no deployments and left as a specialist. Police sources say he had a prior encounter with federal agents as an emotionally disturbed person. A movement that tells an isolated and unwell man that a federal agency is a Gestapo, that ordinary politics is useless against it, and that violence against it is righteous, has handed him a script that turns private collapse into public catastrophe. That is the mechanism the rhetoric runs on, whether or not the people using it intend the result. The officials who call the enforcers Nazis are writing the first draft and trusting someone else to sign it.

The response so far is the usual one. Mayor Mamdani called the attack "deeply disturbing" and pledged city support for the federal investigation, which is the correct and minimal thing to say. Whether a year of describing that building's occupants as a genocidal secret police was ever going to end anywhere else is the question no one in that coalition has been made to answer.

So make them answer it. Every elected official who compared ICE to the Gestapo or vowed to "hunt down" its agents should be asked, on the record and by name, to withdraw the comparison in the specific light of Worth Street, Alvarado, and Portland. Not to soften enforcement policy, which remains a legitimate fight, but to retire the exterminationist frame that keeps producing men with carts. The DSA-aligned officials who built an identity around "abolish ICE" as a moral absolute should be pressed on whether the slogan on Arrabaca's cart distorted their politics or simply read them back accurately. And federal prosecutors should charge the case as what the Joint Terrorism Task Force is already treating it as, so the manifesto enters the public record and the pipeline that produced it can be read in full.

The words on the cart were the slogan, delivered as written.

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