Trump might like Zohran Mamdani, but I went to see one Long Island Republican’s last stand.

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Only days remain until Zohran Mamdani ascends the throne of New York City, and nearly all his great opponents have given up. Andrew Cuomo, vanquished. Financier Bill Ackman, reduced to congratulations for the mayor-elect and even offers of support. Donald Trump, singing his praises after inviting him over to hang. Maybe the great socialist boogeyman isn’t so scary after all.

But not everyone is in the mood for total defeat. In a recent interview with Fox News, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman in Long Island announced a novel approach to combat the threat of socialism bearing down from America’s largest city: He is building a wall.

Mamdani, he said, “talks like he’s pro-criminal, not pro-victim.” And as such, in a last-ditch effort, Blakeman is going up with a wall on the border of Queens and Nassau counties, where New York City ends and what most think of as Long Island begins.

This makes plenty of sense. All truly great civilizations have a signature wall. China, for example. Also Donald Trump’s America. So why not Long Island? And this is not some archaic cinderblock and mortar contraption: It’s a top-of-the-line, high-tech fabrication.

“We are installing technology along the border of New York City that will read license plates, that will have facial recognition, that will have video cameras,” Blakeman said in late November. “Nassau Exec Bruce Blakeman plans a wall of surveillance at NYC border after Mamdani win,” boasted the New York Post. So maybe not a Great Wall of China exactly, but certainly a wall with Chinese characteristics, given that an estimated 90 percent of surveillance cameras are made in China.

I appreciate the great works. But my request for a tour of the construction site was shot down; the county exec’s office gave me the elliptical redirect to watch Fox News. No one could tell me whether the wall was up or not. And the clock was ticking. So I headed for the borderlands, to watch the county batten down the hatches for the impending arrival of pro-criminal socialism, or else to delight in the last few days of open borders, Long Island–style.

I spoke with numerous sources in Long Island politics to pin down just where this wall might begin. The Queens–Nassau border is no small tract. To make matters worse, the border is effectively a stretch of highway, the Cross Island Parkway.

I began my tour at Bellerose Terrace, which I was told might be singled out as high priority. I got off at Jericho Turnpike. No surveillance wall in sight.

I stopped by the Bellerose Village Hall and asked for directions to the wall. A very kind woman working behind the desk straightened me out: I was being too literal.

“I think they’re talking about cameras,” she told me. But even so, she couldn’t point me to any new ones. “We haven’t seen any of that yet. They didn’t tell the village anything.”

The wall would be a crowning achievement of Blakeman’s tenure as county executive in Nassau. He has, in some sense, made Long Island into one of the world’s policing laboratories. In August, the county unveiled a $70 million police training village, replete with New York City–style homes, a church, a courtroom, a bar, and even a Long Island Rail Road–style station, where police run around doing what look a lot like combat exercises. Blakeman has also chartered a militia, hiring and deputized armed citizens for mobilization during emergency declarations. And now the wall.

Some would say that astronomical financial commitments to policing have gotten results. A 2024 U.S. News and World Report study found that Nassau County was one of the safest counties in America. Others would say that that same survey also found that the rest of the New York metropolitan area—aka crime-infested hellscape teeming with socialist policies—was similarly safe. Ten of the top 25 safest counties in the country were in New York metro, including Queens County and Brooklyn. The next year Blakeman announced even more police hires, and no more tax hikes to pay for them.

I got back on the Cross Island Parkway and headed for Elmont. This was another town, I was told, that had been identified for wall construction.

Again, I saw nothing.

I saw a Nassau County Police Department squad car and talked to the officer inside. “That is coming from way more higher up than me,” he told me, of the wall implementation. He, too, was at a loss as to where I could identify some of these new cameras. “I mean, they could be up in any of the towers,” he said. Street lights and telephone poles and electrical wires were all fair game.

This abstracted wall, hung high in civilian infrastructure and currently invisible, couldn’t come at a more important time. With Elise Stefanik summarily bounced from the New York gubernatorial race after a swift falling out with Republican national political leadership, Blakeman is now likely to be the Republican standard bearer, in a race Republicans continue to tell themselves they can actually win because of the unpopularity of Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, the fantastic ineptitude of the New York Democratic Party, and some anti-socialist backlash to the Mamdani ascendance. Republicans love to point out Blakeman won his most recent race by close to 12 percentage points in a county with over 100,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. Trump has already endorsed him.

The result of Blakeman’s police push is that, obviously, the police budget is gargantuan. The 2025 budget of $4.2 billion doesn’t raise property taxes for the fourth year in a row, even though it adds over 50 new cops; over $1 billion of that is going to the police. He has boasted that he has hired 600 law enforcement officers and vetoed over $150 million in tax hikes, which would seem to spell financial trouble in the long run.

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When asked how he would foot the bill for it all, Blakeman told Fox News it would come from civil asset forfeitures, an extremely controversial practice that allows law enforcement to seize property—including cash, cars, and assets like homes—from people merely suspected of being linked to crime, even without being charged or convicted. Some might say that they were going to pay for the wall by stealing from people in New York City.

I drove down to Valley Stream. Same story, no construction cones, no earth-moving, no camera crews. I stopped by another Nassau County Police Department office, where they instructed me to call the public affairs contact, who told me not only that he didn’t think they’d even started yet, but that he wasn’t “even sure they’re even gonna be allowed to do that.”

So maybe it was open borders after all. What else was there to do? I got back on the Cross Island Parkway, drove it north and south, crossed freely into Nassau and back into Queens. I counted preexisting security cameras as I went: three on a large gray tower on the west side of the parkway. One on decommissioned road work sign. One on a streetlight near the off-ramp. One more on another gray tower. Did I commit crimes all the way? Wouldn’t you like to know.

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