New York City offers a contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Border Patrol, and the Israeli Defense Forces millions of dollars in rent and construction subsidies, according to leases obtained by Drop Site through a Freedom of Information Law request.
Incentives offered by the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Crye Precision contrast with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s policy positions. Earlier this month, Mamdani issued an executive order reaffirming the city’s “sanctuary” status and restricting local agencies from collaborating with federal immigration enforcement. The mayor also campaigned extensively against the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The company currently holds three leases for spaces in the Brooklyn Navy Yard complex that were signed in 2012, 2019, and 2022. The leases range in size from 8,000 to 85,000 square feet, in terms of five to 20 years, with options to renew.
In response to Crye Precision’s military and DHS contracts, local community members organizing under the banner of Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard have been pushing the complex to evict the company, as well as Easy Aerial, another military contractor that provides drones to the Israeli military and DHS. Federal contracts indicate that both Easy Aerial and Crye Precision have additional facilities in New Jersey.
Earlier this month, the Navy Yard’s board met some of the activists’ demands and declined to renew the lease of Easy Aerial.
All of the most advanced military gear in the world, to use against a beaten population, long ago at the mercy of the invaders, forced into ghettos, everything and everyone in and out controlled, including the border with Egypt, not one gets through unless Israel lets them, no ships come in or out, to airplanes, no trucks.
But we are testing out these advanced weapons on them, filming it, and our leaders and their contractors watch it, laugh at it, and learn from them. As our own political leaders are bringing those same tactics back home here, they want to employ those strategies at home, and justify them with the same dishonest rhetoric.
This advanced gear should be tested out in Ukraine, against a developed nation, not an impoverished ghetto(s.)