The NYPD-ICE nonspiracy

With just hours to go before his scheduled deportation, immigration-rights advocate and mortgage-fraud felon Ravi Ragbir got a reprieve from a federal judge who found reason to consider whether federal immigration agents improperly targeted him for his activism.

But while we’re on the subject, let’s clear something up: No sanctuary-city-loving New Yorker should get the idea that cops here are running roughshod over immigrant rights to aid Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials as they haphazardly deport otherwise law-abiding people.

Ragbir’s treatment has raised complaints along exactly those lines from members of the City Council. Ydanis Rodriguez and Jumaane Williams say the NYPD wrongly aided ICE in taking Ragbir into custody last month as it removed him from a lower Manhattan federal building in an ambulance. (The two, who were in the crowd that tried to block the ambulance, were arrested in the process.)

It’s worth finding out what the NYPD was up to escorting an ICE vehicle transporting Ragbir from Bellevue to the Holland Tunnel.

But whatever mistakes or excesses may have happened here, only the perverse could doubt this sanctuary city’s commitment to refusal to cooperate with ICE as it sweeps the nation for deportable immigrants, heartbreakingly detaining and ejecting noncriminal, productive, beloved business proprietors and community pillars.

Last year, the NYPD received 1,527 requests from ICE to hold on to arrested individuals in its custody so ICE could pick them up. The number of these detainers the NYPD honored: zero.

That’s with a city policy in place allowing cooperation when the wanted man or woman has been convicted of a serious crime.

The NYPD isn’t perfect, but there’s no evidence it is doing ICE’s dirty work.