In 2018, Presleigh Hayashida was a 22-year-old from Wyoming who won a university science fair with a project about composting. The University of Wyoming posted photos: a shy, grinning student holding up a cartoon garbage monster made from cardboard and cat food tins.
By 2021 she was in Brooklyn, serving as a “disobedience trainer” for Extinction Rebellion — sitting on the FDR Drive, arms locked through plastic tubes, blocking traffic. By 2022, she was speaking publicly about climate change as “the greatest threat our species has ever faced.”
By 2023, that threat had been replaced by a more urgent one. She joined a yearlong harassment campaign against a drone manufacturer with offices at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Weekly protests. Lobby occupations. Targeted email campaigns. The company — Easy Aerial, which makes drones for Israel and the US Border Patrol — eventually left. Hayashida described the campaign on a podcast.
This past Saturday night, she was outside Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn, where she was arrested for resisting arrest in a brawl that sent nine people to court and lasted until 3 a.m.
Climate. Palestine. ICE. Same person. Seven years. No gap between causes.
The New York Post spent time this week mapping the network that produced that Saturday night, and Presleigh Hayashida is its clearest illustration. The Post’s description of the people running these protests: “largely young, upwardly mobile transplants to New York City” who are “intent on picking a fight with authority first and cause second.”
They don’t organize through public announcements. They use Discord and encrypted messaging apps — vetted membership required to join. When ICE arrived at Wyckoff Heights with a detainee Saturday night, 200 people were outside the building within two hours.
Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform put it plainly: “These are well-organized and well-funded. They’re clearly not grassroots, spontaneous disruptions.”
“People are signed up for notifications, they can turn out at a moment’s notice,” he said.
The public-facing side of the network is NYC ICE Watch on Instagram — 67,000 followers, live alerts on ICE activity. The account also posts that “a month of rioting has gotten more results than a decade of voting” and actively encourages property destruction and vandalism.
Then there’s Jennifer Hansen, 34, a California native arrested Saturday after allegedly smashing the rear window of an ICE vehicle with her fist and attempting to flee.
It was her third time.
October 13, 2023: Hansen was among 60 people arrested at an anti-Israel demonstration marching from Baruch College to the United Nations. Charges: resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration, assault, disorderly conduct.
Spring 2025: arrested again outside a Brooklyn synagogue during a protest against a scheduled speech by Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Charges: resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration, three counts of disorderly conduct.
Neither of those prior charges made it to court.
Three different causes. Three sets of charges. Two times the city’s prosecutors decided not to pursue them. On Saturday, Hansen was back — same charges, third cause.
City Council Member Sandy Nurse was also at Saturday’s demonstration. Nurse is a self-described “anti-capitalist,” co-chair of the NYC Council Progressive Caucus, and ran on defunding the NYPD. According to the New York Times, Nurse shared details of the ICE vehicle being tracked with one of their reporters the night of the protest — suggesting she had inside knowledge of how a 200-person crowd assembled outside a hospital in the middle of the night.
Nurse did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.
Now — here’s what those 200 people were actually there to protest.
They believed ICE had raided the hospital to seize a patient.
ICE had not raided the hospital. ICE brought their own detainee there — at his request.
Chidozie Wilson Okeke, a Nigerian national, had entered the US on a tourist visa in August 2023 and overstayed it. At some point, he was arrested for assault and criminal drug possession. When ICE came to arrest him, he threw a violent fit and attempted to run officers over with his car, according to DHS. When he then claimed he needed medical attention, agents took him to Wyckoff Heights. Once there, according to DHS, he “threw himself to the floor and screaming” before being medically cleared to leave.
The 200 people outside had come to stop an ICE hospital raid that wasn’t happening, to defend a man who had tried to run federal officers over with his car.
Even on local Bushwick message boards — populated by the same far-left community these protesters claim to represent — some pushed back. “This fear mongering will deter them and others from seeking medical attention,” one resident wrote, warning that chaos outside a hospital would make immigrants afraid to seek care. Another called the mob irresponsible.
The most skeptical voices about what happened Saturday night weren’t conservatives. They were the far-left residents of Bushwick, who watched their neighborhood get shut down until 3 a.m. over a situation that turned out to be the opposite of what the crowd had been told.
The network got an alert. Two hundred people mobilized. Nobody checked what the alert actually said.
Presleigh Hayashida currently works as an associate project manager at a Minnesota civil engineering firm, where she is “working on solar projects.”
The cause keeps changing. The arrest record keeps growing.