Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
For more than 30 years, she was one of those neighborhood shop owners who’d tell you the truth about how something looked on you, and her customers loved her for it. On Wednesday, she was standing in Lower Manhattan next to Governor Kathy Hochul, being introduced to a room full of reporters as the plaintiff in a case against ICE. (Thanks to Steven Stark for the tip.)
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That’s Linda Wolff, 72, who ran the women’s clothing boutique CPW at 495 Amsterdam Avenue, on the corner of West 84th Street, until it closed at the end of January 2024. On July 30, roughly a year and a half after she locked up the shop for good, a masked federal immigration agent walked up to her on a sidewalk in Inwood and sprayed her in the face at close range.Wolff told Hell Gate she’d rushed uptown from a pilates class after seeing a call for a rapid response to an ICE sighting near Isham Street and Seaman Avenue. When she got there, agents were milling around an ICE vehicle with a flat tire that was being towed. She started arguing with the tow truck driver, and as the two of them yelled at each other, an agent walked over and sprayed her without saying anything. Video of the moment spread quickly online. Later in the footage, after the NYPD shows up, she tells the agent he maced her. According to Hell Gate’s account, he answers, “I’m gonna do it again.”
Wolff has hired John Burris, a California civil rights attorney best known for landmark police misconduct cases going back to Rodney King. Burris has filed what are called federal tort claims with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, which is the required first step before you can sue a federal agency for damages. He’s also weighing a second case in state court under New York’s new Bivens Act, a law signed earlier this year that lets private citizens sue individual ICE agents directly. That would reportedly make Wolff the first New Yorker to do so, though she’d first have to identify the agent, who was masked. She says she thinks the bystander videos and his visible tattoos will be enough.
ICE has defended the agent. In a statement to CBS New York, a Homeland Security spokesperson said a group of people had swarmed officers and “became combative and verbally assaultive,” refused to move, and that officers used appropriate measures after giving ample warning.
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Hochul, who has been publicly furious about the video, brought Wolff to her press conference this week and pointed to the encounter as the reason the state passed the law in the first place. She was not violent, not armed, and not blocking an arrest, the Governor said, per a transcript posted by her office, adding that in New York, “no one is above the law.”Wolff, who now lives in Hell’s Kitchen, told Gothamist that she never touched the officers. “I know how to be a simple demonstrator,” she said. She’s been protesting at the Newark ICE detention center Delaney Hall nearly every day since late May, and told Hell Gate she has been maced three times and hit in the chest with a rubber bullet. This is the first time she’s taken legal action.
None of this will surprise anyone who shopped at CPW. Wolff kept a Black Lives Matter sign at her front door starting in 2012, and when much of Manhattan boarded up during the protests in the summer of 2020, she told NY1 she wouldn’t cover her windows because she wasn’t going to live in fear.
The store itself closed after rent became unworkable, ending a run that started on Amsterdam Avenue in 2002 and stretched back to her first Upper West Side boutique, which she opened on Broadway in 1990. When she announced the closing, Wolff described what she’d built as something other than a store. “It was a community,” she said. She rebranded as a full-time stylist and personal shopper under the same initials, Creative Personal Wardrobes.
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