Hello. It’s me. Carl the Crane.

I have been watching a parking garage. That is not unusual for me. When you have been standing in the same place for several years, you become interested in things other people might overlook.

This particular parking garage is at Independence Plaza. Until recently, it was open to the public. Neighbors could park there, which is useful because cars prefer not to be carried upstairs.

But lately, people in the neighborhood have reported that the lot was closed so it could be used as a base camp for government vehicles. At first, I felt sad that Stellar and Vornado took away yet another thing that served ordinary people in the community.

So I started watching the vehicles come and go and wondered what service they were providing.

Then I heard these unmarked government vehicles might be Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE.

That was scary.

Not the nice kind of ice that goes in lemonade.

This is the ICE whose agents have recently shot and killed people during immigration operations. In July alone, ICE agents fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine. Witnesses have challenged parts of the government’s accounts of those shootings, and both incidents have prompted demands for independent investigation. At least seven people have been shot and killed by on-duty immigration agents during the current administration.

There have been other deaths, too. On July 14, Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, a tourist visiting the United States on a valid visa, was struck and killed by a truck while fleeing an encounter with ICE agents in Florida. And between January 20, 2025, and June 4, 2026, 52 people died in ICE custody—a mortality rate that Human Rights Watch found was the highest in more than a decade.

The presence of ICE makes people afraid to go to work, take their children to school, attend court hearings, seek medical care, or simply walk through their own neighborhoods. That fear does not remain neatly inside a parking lot. It travels home with people.

And now, according to reports from our neighbors, vehicles belonging to that agency may be gathering at Independence Plaza. That means the landlord may have taken a parking garage that served the public and turned it into a staging ground for an agency that terrorizes immigrant communities.

I do not think that is a small change. A neighborhood is supposed to help people feel at home. It should not quietly provide the parking spaces from which other people are hunted.

So I will keep watching the garage.

I hope everyone else will watch it, too. Because ICE may prefer to operate where people are frightened, isolated, and unsure of what they are seeing.

But Carl is very tall. And Carl can see the whole thing.