NEW YORK \u2014 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swooped down on Canal Street in lower Manhattan Tuesday afternoon in a surprise raid and detained a number of individuals, police sources said.<\/p>\n
ICE agents rounded up people along several blocks of Canal St., from Church St. to Lafayette St., on the borders of Soho, Tribeca and Chinatown, shutting down the area as they conducted a raid targeting illegal street vendors, according to a witness and ABC 7<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bobbie Baro, a longtime vendor originally from Mauritania, who was selling knockoff Beats headphones, said when the agents showed up, \u201cEverybody started running.\u201d He said he didn\u2019t run because, \u201cI have ID.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cICE, they do what they want to do. They target our community,\u201d Baro said. \u201cThey asked random people for ID, they didn\u2019t have it and they took them down.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a violation of a law, I never seen anything like this,\u201d he said. \u201cI been in the country 25 years and Americans were never like this.\u201d<\/p>\n A crowd of people gathered to protest the masked agents<\/a> as dozens of ICE officers were seen<\/a> detaining people. It was unclear how many people were detained in the raid, but Baro said he saw at least seven individuals taken into custody.<\/p>\n A witness who did not give his name said there was a \u201cspontaneous\u201d resistance by passersby when the ICE agents started questioning people and making arrests. He added that, along with the vendors, some \u201cwhite kids\u201d who were sticking up for them were also taken into custody.<\/p>\n \u201cThe crowd erupted, it was spontaneous,\u201d he said. \u201cThey surrounded their vehicles, they weren\u2019t letting them leave. And then they arrested some Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n The witness showed the Daily News video of the arrests, saying the detainees were taken down to 26 Federal Plaza.<\/p>\n Sean Sweeney of the SoHo Alliance, a local community group, said the raid didn\u2019t come as a surprise because residents have been concerned about the vendors increasingly taking up space on the sidewalk and selling counterfeit goods.<\/p>\n \u201cThe guys who were selling the counterfeit merchandise, it was centered on Canal and Broadway and they were there for quite a few years,\u201d Sweeney said. \u201cPeople complained, but it was contained and it didn\u2019t spread. For the last six months, for some reason, it has spread east all the way to Mulberry St.\u201d<\/p>\n Another witness, Islam Iubel Muhammed, told the Daily News that the agents arrested men who were selling \u201cweed and fake bags.\u201d Canal St. is a well-known spot to buy knockoff designer handbags from sidewalk vendors.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can see their vehicles down the street with flashing lights. They grabbed a bunch of guys one over there, another over there, at least five by Church St. and they kept moving,\u201d Muhammed said.<\/p>\n Christopher Marte, the area\u2019s Democratic Councilman, condemned the raid, calling it a \u201chorrifying display of federal overreach.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cICE has no place in New York City, especially not in the heart of Chinatown, terrorizing our immigrant neighbors with military vehicles and masked agents,\u201d he said. \u201cThis kind of escalation is unnecessary, unacceptable and antithetical to our city\u2019s values as a sanctuary for all people. The challenges around vending on Canal St. are real and must be addressed,\u201d Marte said, \u201cbut federal agents storming our streets and targeting community members is not the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n Marte said his office has called for local enforcement to handle the issue of illegal vending, in order to protect both vendors and small businesses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swooped down on Canal Street in lower Manhattan Tuesday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11733,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[9357,9256,9355,3125,75,84,83,9,24,63,9356],"class_list":["post-11732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-baro","tag-canal-street","tag-church-st-to-lafayette","tag-ice-agents","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-sean-sweeney"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11732\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}