Military-Style Immigration Sweep Hits NYC

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Chaos erupted in Lower Manhattan on 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. Authorities sent an armored vehicle to patrol streets and agents with tactical weapons to confront New Yorkers as the protests grew. 

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request from THE CITY for comment. But in statements sent to other outlets, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said agents were “focused on criminal activity relating to selling counterfeit goods,” declining to say how many vendors were arrested.

She said agents arrested at least one person for assaulting an officer. “During this law enforcement operation, rioters who were shouting obscenities, became violent and obstructed law enforcement duties including blocking vehicles and assaulting law enforcement.”

THE CITY watched one street vendor being detained on the corner of Canal and Church streets. Several witnesses 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 to let him 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 emigrated from Cuba seeking a better life, she said. “It’s not right.” 

As the operation continued, 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 toward 26 Federal Plaza, where federal law enforcement has offices and a holding area where arrested immigrants are frequently detained. 

As they did, more federal agents joined them, along with an armored vehicle and agents with assault rifles on Lafayette, a striking scene of a kind that has become common for President Donald 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 the area’s City Council representative, 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.

Tuesday’s raid on Canal Street took place two days after right-wing influencer Savanah Hernandez posted a video of herself on Canal Street complaining of “at least 20-30 illegals in the area conducting business” and tagging ICE to “go check this corner out.”

It also followed a sustained, yearlong 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 knockoffs of designer handbags. That included a weeklong operation in March that led to the confiscation of what the New York Police Department 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 NYPD’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 police department, 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 have been arrested and fingerprinted in the course of that yearlong 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 to 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 on Tuesday, 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 including City Comptroller Brad Lander, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and several members of the City Council, gathered in Foley Square 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 encounters with federal agents. 

 “What we saw tonight, unfortunately, is probably a foreshadowing of what we may be coming up against.”