New York

Around the corner from the entryway to my apartment building on Manhattan’s west side stands a forty-year-old man who holds forth daily from his city licensed curbside marketplace along Ninth Avenue. No matter the weather—rain, sunshine, snow, or skin-scalding gusts of winter wind howling up from the nearby Hudson River—he is there with an array of fresh fruit and vegetables for sale, plus cornball jokes at no extra charge.  

A recent example of the affable street vendor’s wares: Bananas at five for a dollar, accompanied by the question, “What did the leather coat say to the cow?” Answer: “Hello, mother.”

His name is Tuychiboy Kholikov, though he mercifully allows monolingual English-speakers such as myself to know him by his chosen nom de plume—David.

David hails from Somoniyon, a village in the central Asia republic of Tajikistan, once part of the Soviet Union and the Persian empire before that. He is fully fluent in Tajik, Russian, Farsi, and English—and can navigate in conversational Spanish, which he learned from his curbside customers.

Fourteen years ago, Mr. Kholikov stepped off a Greyhound coach at the sprawling central bus terminal in Manhattan, just one block east of his fruit-vegetables-riddles stand. His journey to the United States had been a “bumpy ride,” as he understates it—beginning with an eighteen-hour layover at the Moscow airport after a long flight from the Tajikistan capital of Dushanbe, during which time he dared not fall into sleep lest his one suitcase fall prey to thieves; during which time a Russian police officer detained him on the false claim that his travel visa was “fake,” though fixable for a price.

At last arrived in New York, he had six dollars in his pocket, his suitcase, and the address of an acquaintance with a home in furthermost Brooklyn who would host him until he scrounged enough work to sustain himself—and to send critically needed remittances to his ailing father back in Somoniyon.

He spent most of his money on a sandwich that first day, that being his only food in a painfully long time.

A bottle of water was unaffordable.

Suffice it to say, as Mr. Kholikov did, “I was scared out of my mind.” His remaining money was enough for subway fare to a station in Brooklyn. From there, he walked for hours through a sketchy neighborhood to his temporary lodgings, where he could finally know the luxury of sleep.

—NOTE: By the way, Tuychiboy Kholikov could make good use of a nom de plume, for he is a blossoming New York author. His first work, “The Fruitologyst: A Book of Brain-Teasing Puzzles & Enigmas,” will soon be available online at Amazon.com.

Tuychiboy Kholikov is more than meets an amused eye. We who care to see the depths of him see one among a multitude of New York sine qua nons, the people from other places who soften and civilize this big bad polyglot of a town.

I speak of hope- and dream-driven immigrants at work every day here in the most ambitiously American place in all America: New York, home to every race and ethnicity of the world, where more than a third of us are foreign-born, where some eight hundred languages are heard across the city’s five boroughs…

…where the Atlantic Ocean harbor is landmarked by the Statue of Liberty atop a granite plinth with a bronze-plated sonnet on view inside that gives unconditional welcome to weary travelers. Titled “The New Colossus,” the sonnet was written in 1883 by Emma Lazarus (1845-1887), the young poet and advocate for marginalized immigrants of her time—including African Americans forced to be here from 1619 until their emancipation from chattel slavery in 1863.

As a schoolboy, I was taught the poet’s stirring words. Words amounting to a solemn American promise—

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride;
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Safe to say, the man who calls himself president of the United States has not spoken to Tuychiboy Kholikov on the subject of immigration. Safer yet to say, Donald Trump has no more interest in doing so than he has in ending a pointless air war (so far) he launched against Iran. As Mr. Trump told reporters as regards to the latter business, “I read a story today that I’m desperate to make a deal. I’m the opposite of desperate. I don’t care. We have other targets we want to hit before we leave.“

Born in 1946 in the New York borough of Queens, the most immigrant-packed municipal district on the globe, Mr. Trump somehow overlooks Mr. Kholikov’s notion on the value of people and things from foreign places.

As David the Fruitologyst, observes, “Avocados come only from Mexico. And bananas from the tropics will not grow here, not even if you bring in the tropical air.”

The same applies to people from other places. He reasons, “We all complete each other.”

But try imparting street wisdom to the angry little man of Washington and Mar-a-Lago, who routinely denounces immigrants, to wit—

• During his nationally televised state of the union address in February, Mr. Trump spoke of immigrants as “dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.”

• At a conference in Memphis, Tennessee, Mr. Trump complained of immigrants “from all over South America, Asia, everywhere [who were recently held in] jails and mental institutions [as] drug dealers, as rapists. They were murderers.”

• Throughout his successful 2024 election campaign and now well into his second presidential term, Mr. Trump has insisted that foreign governments are intentionally emptying out their “prisons, jails, and insane asylums” by dumping scary criminals in the U.S.

None of the foregoing is or ever was true, of course. But this was, and is: Donald Trump is a world-class champion of manipulating headlines by inventing ludicrous scandal to distract us from his soul-rotting criminal actions.

As a last malignant laugh at us, the elderly egomaniac with odd yellow hair well might brag of Trumpian trickery in some eventual presidential memoir:

“Psst! Look over there at all those insane immigrants! Pay no attention to tens of thousands of documents linking me to the late Wall Street financier Jeffrey Epstein’s international child sex trafficking network! Pay no attention to  the credible rape accusations against me, your favorite president! Pay no attention to the $2 billion or so that I’ve hauled in since January from personal investments in crypto currency and other shady dealings! Look at those dirty low-down brown and black-skinned immigrants! What are you all—stupid?”

Meanwhile, continue obeying the racist diktats of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief for policy and architect of Trump-sanctioned cruelty who demands of mouth-breathing bully-boys employed by the Justice Department’s  Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency a baseline of three-thousand immigrant arrests per day, by way of mass arrests at shopping centers, schools, houses of worship, and immigration courts.

Mr. Miller’s round-ups have resulted in the trauma of family separations, with parents disappeared or deported and their America-born children thrown into the cages of a growing archipelago of immigrant concentration camps. According to reports in Vanity Fair magazine, the White House deputy chief “actually enjoys” seeing photographs of caged children.

Several members of Mr. Miller’s Jewish family have disowned him. Included in that number is Alisa Kasmer, who describes her cousin Stephen as “the face of evil.” She said her relationship ended with “Operation Metro Surge,” in Minneapolis from early last December into January when three- thousand masked ICE thugs laid siege to that city, where they shot and killed two citizen activists in support of the city’s immigrants, most from the East African nation of Somalia.

Cousin Stephen’s actions “breaks everything we were taught as Jews,” Ms. Kasmer told local reporters. She added, “[M]ost of the extended family” will ghost him, due to his directives against “hardworking, vibrant community members who are being terrorized for simply being brown.”

—NOTE: State charges of murder are pending against two ICE agents posted to Operation Metro Surge duty. The alleged killers dispatched Renée Nicole Good, mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a nurse at the local Veterans Administration hospital. In a third shooting by an ICE thug, an immigrant from Venezuela suffered debilitating leg wounds.

Safe to say, the man who calls himself president of the United States has not spoken to Tuychiboy Kholikov on the subject of immigration. Safer yet to say, Donald Trump has no more interest in doing so than he has in ending a pointless air war (so far) he launched against Iran. As Mr. Trump told reporters as regards to the latter business, “I read a story today that I’m desperate to make a deal. I’m the opposite of desperate. I don’t care. We have other targets we want to hit before we leave.“

Born in 1946 in the New York borough of Queens, the most immigrant-packed municipal district on the globe, Mr. Trump somehow overlooks Mr. Kholikov’s notion on the value of people and things from foreign places.

As David the Fruitologyst, observes, “Avocados come only from Mexico. And bananas from the tropics will not grow here, not even if you bring in the tropical air.”

The same applies to people from other places. He reasons, “We all complete each other.”

But try imparting street wisdom to the angry little man of Washington and Mar-a-Lago, who routinely denounces immigrants, to wit—

• During his nationally televised state of the union address in February, Mr. Trump spoke of immigrants as “dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.”

• At a conference in Memphis, Tennessee, Mr. Trump complained of immigrants “from all over South America, Asia, everywhere [who were recently held in] jails and mental institutions [as] drug dealers, as rapists. They were murderers.”

• Throughout his successful 2024 election campaign and now well into his second presidential term, Mr. Trump has insisted that foreign governments are intentionally emptying out their “prisons, jails, and insane asylums” by dumping scary criminals in the U.S.

None of the foregoing is or ever was true, of course. But this was, and is: Donald Trump is a world-class champion of manipulating headlines by inventing ludicrous scandal to distract us from his soul-rotting criminal actions.

As a last malignant laugh at us, the elderly egomaniac with odd yellow hair well might brag of Trumpian trickery in some eventual presidential memoir:

“Psst! Look over there at all those insane immigrants! Pay no attention to tens of thousands of documents linking me to the late Wall Street financier Jeffrey Epstein’s international child sex trafficking network! Pay no attention to  the credible rape accusations against me, your favorite president! Pay no attention to the $2 billion or so that I’ve hauled in since January from personal investments in crypto currency and other shady dealings! Look at those dirty low-down brown and black-skinned immigrants! What are you all—stupid?”

Meanwhile, continue obeying the racist diktats of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief for policy and architect of Trump-sanctioned cruelty who demands of mouth-breathing bully-boys employed by the Justice Department’s  Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency a baseline of three-thousand immigrant arrests per day, by way of mass arrests at shopping centers, schools, houses of worship, and immigration courts.

Mr. Miller’s round-ups have resulted in the trauma of family separations, with parents disappeared or deported and their America-born children thrown into the cages of a growing archipelago of immigrant concentration camps. According to reports in Vanity Fair magazine, the White House deputy chief “actually enjoys” seeing photographs of caged children.

Several members of Mr. Miller’s Jewish family have disowned him. Included in that number is Alisa Kasmer, who describes her cousin Stephen as “the face of evil.” She said her relationship ended with “Operation Metro Surge,” in Minneapolis from early last December into January when three- thousand masked ICE thugs laid siege to that city, where they shot and killed two citizen activists in support of the city’s immigrants, most from the East African nation of Somalia.

Cousin Stephen’s actions “breaks everything we were taught as Jews,” Ms. Kasmer told local reporters. She added, “[M]ost of the extended family” will ghost him, due to his directives against “hardworking, vibrant community members who are being terrorized for simply being brown.”

—NOTE: State charges of murder are pending against two ICE agents posted to Operation Metro Surge duty. The alleged killers dispatched Renée Nicole Good, mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a nurse at the local Veterans Administration hospital. In a third shooting by an ICE thug, an immigrant from Venezuela suffered debilitating leg wounds.

•

The anti-immigrant history of America—nation of immigrants—is endemic, based in white racism and religious prejudice. As evidence of this cultural disease, I offer a branch of my own family tree as evidence.

Wishing not to starve to death during the 1845-1852 potato famine in Ireland—An Gorta Mór, as it is known in Gaeilge (The Great Hunger)—my ancestors Sean and Polly Ann McClanahan set sail to America aboard a commercial ship from the port of Queenstown (now Cobh), County Cork.

Steerage section, of course, indentured to a Dutch-owned plantation owner in Columbia County, state of New York. When their bond of servitude expired, the McClanahans found barriers to gainful employment in the downstate bustle of Manhattan, given ruling class attitudes of the era toward “papist bead rattlers” of Irish Catholic newcomers, and general assumptions of their habitual drunkenness.

In due time, however, Sean and Polly Ann managed to scrape together funds that covered the rental of proper clothing for a studio photograph. Never mind the continuing insult of “No Irish Need Apply” notations in the help wanted advertisements published in newspapers of the day, they stood in dignity before the camera.

—And never mind that the Irish of New York were for many years considered something apart from the white race. Psst! Look at me with an inherited face as fair as any you’ll find in Mayo. What, are you Brits—stupid?

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•

There may be a way out of our sickness. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times suggests an exit ramp in his hometown of Minneapolis, population of 430,000. It was there in the state of Minnesota’s premier city where a quiet social offense grew to defy the face of evil—this time, three thousand masked, grunting brutes who swanned about the city in helmets and combat drag, armed with clubs and long knives, machine guns and semi-automatic sidearms.

For his long essay about Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge, orchestrated by Stephen Miller, Mr. Friedman began his piece in the March 21 edition of the Times by defining a newly-coined term—“neighboring.” He wrote of a people’s revolt against fascism à la Trump and Miller:

“It was one of the most courageous battles ever fought by American men and women not in uniform. It was led by moms ready to donate their breast milk to strangers and dads ready to drive someone else’s kids to school because their parents, terrified of ICE agents, were too afraid to go outdoors.

“[It was] an uprising of civic activism propelled by a single idea—I am my neighbor’s keeper, whoever he or she is and however he or she got here.

“Well, Stephen…your private ICE army—‘governed by strength’ and ‘force’—was sent packing by a bunch of moms and dads armed only with cellphone cameras and whistles, ready to walk out on a freezing morning in bathrobes and bunny slippers to defend their neighbors, some of whom they barely knew.

“…The longer I stayed in Minneapolis, the more a phrase that Jews recite on Hanukkah to commemorate the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks came to my mind: ‘Nes gadol haya sham,’ a great miracle happened there.’

“My shorthand for it is that Donald Trump, who seeks to govern only by division, never by addition, accidentally created ‘out of many, one’ in Minnesota.

“Thank you, Mr. President. We needed that.”

•

Printed on each of the six dollar bills Tuychiboy Kholikov spent to build his American life—now complete with his wife, Tajikistan-born Nilufar and their two young sons—was his new country’s motto: the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum, meaning “out of many, one.”

Even in the American zeitgeist of indecent political leadership and societal division, Thomas Friedman reminds us that great miracles can still happen.

A commanding majority of  us here, born to the land and those recently arrived, hold fast to the aspirational motto of America—yellow-haired bigots and hateful xenophobes be damned. The everyday folks of Minneapolis drove away Donald Trump’s sturmtruppen, rendering them embarrassed to hide their faces any longer.

Thus a miracle: In the frozen depths of winter 2026, ICE has melted.

And now comes The Nation magazine with an unprecedented request, by way of nominating “the people of Minneapolis” for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the thwarted goal of a warmongering president for whom such honor could only serve him as yet another distraction from his filthy crimes.

The Nation was founded in 1865 by a group of Northern abolitionists— including the Irish-born journalist Edwin Lawrence Godkin—who helped bring about the end of slavery in America.

…We have miles to go yet in cleaning up the traumatic generational aftermath of slavery, but we strive.

In its nomination statement to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the magazine’s editors praised residents of Minneapolis for their “disciplined collective restraint” and non-violent protests in the face of what they termed “violent authoritarianism.”

Recipient of the committee’s peace will be announced in Oslo on Friday, October 9.

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, “Nes gadol haya sham” as it is said at Hanukkah. As it is said by Tuychiboy Kholikov, a Muslim, “All of us complete one another.”

And as our money reminds us, E Pluribus Unum—Donald Trump and Stephen Miller be damned.  

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                                                                                                        Thomas Adcock U.S.correspondent

tadcocknyc@gmail.com
www.thomasadcock.com

Click here for his monthly essays in our magazine.
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