Chaos erupted in Lower Manhattan Tuesday afternoon, as dozens of masked federal agents targeting street vendors on Canal Street were met with droves of New Yorkers who joined in a spontaneous protest of the arrests.
It’s unclear how many street vendors the federal agents ultimately detained, though video and eyewitness accounts suggested as many as four — and likely several more. Agents responded, sending an armored tank to patrol streets and agents with tactical weapons to confront New Yorkers as the protests grew.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request from THE CITY for comment.
THE CITY watched one street vendor being detained on the corner of Canal and Church street. Several eyewitnesses said they knew the man as a vendor who’d sold merchandise on the block for more than 15 years. The man pleaded with federal agents in English if he could call his mother. They handcuffed him and put him in a car and sped off from the scene.
“People just want to live,” said Lydia Leal, a Bronx woman who was on her way home from work when she saw the arrests on Canal and joined protests against them. The men getting taken away reminded her of her father, who immigrated from Cuba seeking a better life, she said. “It’s not right.”
As the operation carried on, agents were confronted with a spontaneous crowd of protesters, who heckled them to leave New York City and called them Nazis.
“Why do they be having their face covered?” one passerby shouted at the agents.
“Cause they know they’re not fucking welcome here,” another responded.
Cornered and outnumbered, the masked agents pushed and shoved demonstrators out of the way so vehicles could clear the area, while one whipped out a Taser and pointed it at protesters.
A crowd of protesters followed agents who left the area on foot, moving south on Lafayette Street towards 26 Federal Plaza, where federal law enforcement has offices and a holding area where immigrants arrested are frequently detained.
As they did, more federal agents joined them, along with an armored vehicle and agents with assault rifles on Lafayette Street, a striking scene of a kind that has become common for Trump’s immigration crackdown in other cities, but one that had yet to hit New York City before Tuesday.
Several New Yorkers who had joined the protest were slammed to the ground by federal agents and dragged past police barricades into 26 Federal Plaza.
“The amount of weapons that they had on the street pointed at bystanders, something I’ve never seen in my life,” said local City Council member Christopher Marte, who heard about the agents on Canal Street and followed them with protesters to 26 Federal Plaza. “I haven’t seen this much military action in lower Manhattan since the days after 9/11,” he added.
The raid on Canal Street Tuesday took place two days after right-wing influencer Savanah Hernandez had posted a video of herself on Canal Street saying, “20-30 illegals in the area conducting business” and tagging ICE to “go check this corner out.”
It also followed a sustained, year-long campaign by city law enforcement to crack down on unlicensed vendors in the area — many of them new migrants from West Africa selling electronics and unlicensed knock-offs of designer handbags. That included a week-long operation in March that led to the confiscation of what the NYPD claimed to be $23 million worth of goods “that blocked up city sidewalks.”
Deputy mayor of public safety Kaz Daughtry — who as the police department’s Deputy Commissioner of Operations last year flaunted the department’s efforts to address “the ongoing issue of unlicensed vendors littering the area with bootleg merchandise” — posted a video three weeks ago noting a joint operation between the NYPD, the Department of Sanitation, the Sheriff’s Office and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. Daughtry said the mission was to continue to be on Canal Street “every single day doing this operation.”
A number of vendors on Canal Street had been arrested and fingerprinted in the course of that year-long effort, said Mohamed Attia, managing director of the nonprofit advocacy group Street Vendor Project — opening a pathway for federal immigration authorities to step in without cooperation from local law enforcement once the arrest is logged on the FBI’s national database and cross-referenced with ICE’s database of immigrants.
“This whole mess is basically a mess of [the city’s] own making,” said Attia, referring to a restrictive cap that has limited access to merchandise vending permits to 853 people for nearly five decades, contributing a growing number of criminal summonses and some arrests that have left vendors on Canal Street vulnerable.
“Everyone now is very skeptical and very terrified to go to work after this incident,” Attia said.
As agents made their way inside 26 Federal Plaza, members of the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group guarded the perimeter, clearing way for the federal agents. A small crowd of onlookers remained outside Federal Plaza, chanting and demanding the release of the protesters and immigrants detained.
As news spread of the raid Tuesday evening, local elected officials gathered in Foley Square including City Comptroller Brad Lander and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and several members of the City Council, to denounce it.
“Street vendors are not a national security threat,” said Lander, who called on the NYPD to clarify what it will do going forward. “Are they going to help make sure the laws are enforced in New York City, that people can’t be kidnapped without due process by masked agents who don’t identify themselves or present any lawful reasons for taking people off the streets?”
Williams urged New Yorkers not to escalate in encounters with federal agents.
“What we saw tonight, unfortunately, is probably a foreshadowing of what we may be coming up against.”
