Folks, I've been parking in the same gravel lot behind the Dairy Queen for thirty-one years, and nobody has ever threatened to sue me. Then again, I don't park in New York City, where free parking is apparently a federal crime against the mayor.

On Monday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Acting ICE Director David Venturella and ICE's New York field director, Kenneth Genalo. The subject was not a crime wave. It was not the subway. It was parking.

According to the mayor's office, ICE agents have been parking vehicles and holding meetings in unstaffed city-owned lots, including one at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and lots along 111th Street on the west side of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.

The mayor wants them gone. "Today, I'm telling DHS to order its agents off our lots," Mamdani said. "If they keep coming back, we will see them in court."

Now, I want to be fair to the man. That's a lot of parking.

But the letter, as POLITICO and The Guardian reported, calls ICE's use of the lots "unauthorized and is therefore illegal" and promises legal action "to prevent this unlawful commandeering of City property."

Commandeering. Of a parking lot. That's a strong word for a government SUV sitting next to a dumpster. Back home, if you found an open space in an unstaffed lot, you didn't call it commandeering. You called it Tuesday, and you went inside for a Blizzard.

The city didn't stop at the letter. The Mamdani administration also rolled out a new NYC Parks policy, with training, that tells frontline Parks employees how to respond when non-local law enforcement, including ICE, tries to get into park property.

So picture it. A Parks worker, trained and ready, walking up to a federal agent in a parking lot with a clipboard and a whistle. Somewhere a pigeon is filing an amicus brief.

This also isn't the first parking memo. Back on October 16, the mayor and more than 100 elected officials sent a letter urging private garage and lot owners to deny ICE the use of their property. That's right, the city of New York has now held two separate policy events about where the federal government is allowed to park. Meanwhile, every regular New Yorker is still circling the block at 6 p.m., praying for a hydrant-free miracle.

Here's what gets me. This is a city where you can get towed for parking on the wrong side of the street on the wrong day of the week during the wrong phase of the moon. Alternate side parking is basically a religion. And the first time City Hall goes to war over a parking spot, it isn't for the guy who drives a bakery truck. It's against the people enforcing federal immigration law.

Nobody's saying a mayor can't defend city property. Property is property. But I'd feel a lot better if City Hall brought this kind of energy to the potholes on the Grand Central Parkway.

So here's my advice to the folks at DHS. Don't fight it. Just do what every other driver in New York does. Circle the block for forty-five minutes, give up, and pay seventy dollars at a garage.

And if anyone in Queens wants to sue me over that gravel lot behind the Dairy Queen, you know where to find me. Second space from the dumpster.

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The Demorat is a satire publication. This article is parody and commentary based on real news reports; jokes, exaggerations and fictional elements are not factual claims. Quotes attributed to real people are drawn from published reporting.

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