Start with the cart, because the cart is the document.
On Monday morning, according to the FBI, a forty-three-year-old named Andrew Arrabaca wheeled a pull-wagon to the employee entrance of 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. Affixed to it was a hand-lettered sign. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch read it into the record: “ICE off our streets.” Inside the cart and the bag he carried, per FBI Assistant Director James Barnacle, were two axes, a hammer, a machete, three fixed-blade knives, six fireworks or incendiary devices, two airsoft rifles, and a container of flammable liquid. There was also a manifesto.
That slogan is not a private derangement. It is a movement product. And the gap between the four words on the cart and the machete underneath them is the whole story of what a year of eliminationist rhetoric about a federal agency has produced.
Here is what the government says happened. Barnacle said Arrabaca poured gasoline, ignited it with a lighter and a large firework in a canister, then fired five to seven airsoft pellets toward the building before three officers tackled him. Tisch said he dumped incendiary liquid into the landscaping along the building’s perimeter and set it alight. One of the three people hurt, Barnacle said, was an immigrant who had come to 26 Federal Plaza for a hearing in his own immigration case. And this is the sentence that ends any argument that this was symbolic: Barnacle said Arrabaca, after being read his rights, admitted he was targeting the building and was “OK if he hurt or killed people going in and out,” federal employees or civilians alike.
Note what this is not. It is not, as the airsoft rifles might tempt a sympathetic writer to argue, a piece of harmless political theater by a broken man who only had toys. A man who packs a machete and three fixed blades and tells the FBI he is willing to kill is not staging a performance. He is under-equipped for the massacre he described, which is a different thing from being harmless.
Now read the slogan back into its ecosystem, because it did not originate on Worth Street. For over a year, elected officials and public figures have described this agency in the vocabulary of extermination and manhunt. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner vowed to “hunt down” ICE agents, invoking the pursuit of Nazis. Representative Maxine Dexter of Oregon called immigration enforcement “terrorism” and pledged to abolish the agency. A San Antonio council candidate posted that he wanted to see “a few dead ICE agents.” Representative Pramila Jayapal called ICE a “terrorist force.” Governors, senators, and late-night hosts have reached for the Gestapo comparison so routinely it has stopped registering. DHS says assaults on ICE officers rose several hundred percent over the period.
This is the part that should have been impossible to ignore before Monday, because Monday was not the first time the rhetoric produced a bag with a manifesto in it. In February, federal authorities arrested an eighteen-year-old in Oregon, Rayden Coleman, who they allege wrote a manifesto detailing a plan to kill ICE agents at a Portland office with Molotov cocktails and a rifle. In July of last year, gunmen ambushed the ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, drawing officers outside by shooting fireworks at the building, the same overture Arrabaca used, before opening fire. Two anti-ICE activists, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, have themselves died in confrontations with federal authorities and been elevated to the status of martyrs, which feeds the next cycle. Fireworks to draw them out. A manifesto in the bag. A federal building chosen because, as Barnacle put it, it has long been a target. None of the individual elements were new. Only the address was.
There is a real and uncomfortable observation buried in the sympathetic read, and it deserves to be kept even after the theater frame is discarded. Arrabaca is, by the Army’s account, a veteran who served from 2001 to 2005 with no deployments and left as a specialist, and police sources say he had a prior encounter with federal agents as an emotionally disturbed person. A movement that tells an isolated and evidently 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 that man a script that converts private collapse into public catastrophe. That is not an excuse. It is a mechanism, and it is the mechanism the rhetoric relies on whether or not its authors intend the result. The people who chant that the system is pure evil and that its enforcers are Nazis are not merely expressing an opinion. They are writing the manifesto’s first draft and trusting someone else to sign it.
The response that is now arriving is the usual one, and it is inadequate. Mayor Mamdani called the attack “deeply disturbing” and pledged city support for the federal investigation, which is the correct and minimal thing to say. But the harder question is not whether an attack on a federal building is disturbing. It is whether a year of describing that building’s occupants as a genocidal secret police was ever going to end anywhere else.
So here is the demand, and it is narrow enough to be actionable. Every elected official who has 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 and contestable question, but to retire the exterminationist frame that keeps producing men with carts. The DSA-aligned officials who have built political identity around “abolish ICE” as a moral absolute should be pressed on whether the slogan on Arrabaca’s cart was a distortion of their politics or a straightforward reading of it. And federal prosecutors should charge this case as what the Joint Terrorism Task Force is already treating it as, so that the manifesto in the bag enters the public record and the pipeline that produced it can finally be read in full.
The words on the cart were not the ravings of one man. They were the slogan, delivered as written. The only surprise left is that anyone is surprised.
