At the annual West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn, many Haitian New Yorkers targeted by an immigration crackdown were absent from the festivities.
Page T2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 8 September 2026
IMMIGRATION LEDGER
Mexican parade dies at 30, Brooklyn's Caribbean parade mourns, both survived by 2,197 ICE arrests
As it ran on the front
Passaic, New Jersey, buried something on the calendar this week: the Mexican Independence Day parade, more than thirty years old, postponed indefinitely by organizers who cited a surge. No date was set for a return, and none was promised. The parade had run every September since before this desk stopped setting type by hand, through decades of red, white and green sashes and every mayor who ever wanted a photo with the crowd. It is survived, for now, by an announcement and by the silence where a route permit used to be.
The same weekend, in Brooklyn, the West Indian American Day Parade went forward. It did not cancel. The New York Times reported it plainly: many Haitian New Yorkers who would have marched were absent from the festivities. A parade can go on without everyone who built it. Whether it keeps going on that way is a different question, and not one an obituary is equipped to answer with a joke.…
…(cont) Six days before either parade's fate was settled, the Washington Examiner carried the number that connects them. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced that the administration's surge into New York had taken 2,197 people off the street, fulfilling what the department itself called a promise. The department did not say, and was not asked, whether the promise it kept and the parade it cost were entries in the same ledger. They were filed six days apart, in the same city, under the same operation.
No accusation was made against anyone who organized either parade. That part is just shit, plain, and no press release changes it.
Born: sometime before 1996, first Mexican Independence Day parade filed in Passaic. Survived by: a postponement notice with no return date, and a Brooklyn crowd visibly short of the people who used to fill it. Where the flowers would go, the department left its own count: 2,197 arrests, logged and announced as an achievement the same week two civic traditions turned up short a banner.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks only that the number be printed next to what it cost — one parade, indefinitely, and one crowd, thinner — so that the accounting, at least, stays honest.
“They didn't pull a permit, they made the block too hot to stand on, then put out a press release bragging about the heat. Two parades, one city, one number sitting between them — 2,197 people grabbed off the street, counted up like a scoreboard, while a float that's run every September for thirty years sits in the garage. That's not enforcement, that's a shakedown with a badge and a spokesman.”
“Nobody at the Department canceled anybody's parade — the organizers made that call, Secretary Mullin just reported a number, a strong number frankly, and if people want to read a scoreboard into a scheduling decision that's on them. The surge wasn't aimed at Passaic, it was aimed at public safety, it just happened to log twenty-two hundred arrests in the same city the same week the parade folded — okay, saying it out loud like that, that does sound bad. That's not — did I say ledger? I meant coincidence.”
The receipts
For more than three decades, the Mexican Day parade in Passaic has been one of New Jersey's largest celebrations of Mexican culture. But this year, a surge in ICE arrests has prompted organizers to postpone the event indefinitely. CBS News New York reporter Nick Caloway has the details.
· White House fulfills vow to surge ICE to New York, arrests 2,197 illegal immigrants from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.