Several protesters were arrested on Saturday amid scuffles with police officers outside the entrance of a parking garage in Lower Manhattan where dozens of federal agents had appeared to be gathering for an immigration raid nearby, according to the police and witnesses.
The confrontation, which appeared to foil the raid, underscored the numerous challenges the federal government faces in trying to stage raids in a dense city like New York, where pushback from protesters in a largely liberal city appears inevitable.
The standoff began just after 11 a.m., when a handful of protesters gathered outside a garage on the edge of Chinatown, on Centre and Hester Streets, where agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security had been arriving.
As the agents moved to exit their vehicles, protesters blocked them, forming a barricade at the mouth of the garage with their bodies and piling mounds of garbage bags beside them. The standoff continued for the better part of an hour as more and more protesters arrived.
By the early afternoon, nearly 200 people had gathered outside the garage, chanting and yelling at the agents, who peered out from inside the garage.
Police officers soon arrived on the scene, arresting a handful of protesters and placing metal barricades between the agents and the group outside. But the presence of local law enforcement did little to ease tensions.
Just after 1:15 p.m., the confrontation erupted into chaos when agents burst from the garage in their vehicles and protesters chased them down Canal Street, hurling planters and trash cans after them. At one point, a protester ran in front of one of the moving vehicles and a masked agent sprayed something at protesters from the open windows.
On the street, police officers and protesters continued to clash, shoving each other in the middle of incoming traffic while the vehicles sped away.
The Police Department confirmed that officers had made arrests during the altercation, but did not confirm how many. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request to confirm whether a raid had been planned.
The parking garage, which was part of a government building, is just blocks away from the scene of a large-scale immigration raid in Lower Manhattan last month.
During that raid, more than 50 federal agents swept through the area near Canal Street, arresting nine people, mostly men from West Africa, on a stretch of sidewalk long known as a marketplace for counterfeit goods.
The raid in October, which had been expected to include more than 100 federal agents but was scaled back at the last minute, led passers-by to confront the agents.
A spontaneous crowd of protesters chased many of the agents down Lafayette Street as the agents returned to the ICE offices at 26 Federal Plaza. The commotion led to the deployment of even more agents in tactical gear, along with an armored vehicle, resulting in a similarly chaotic scene as agents pushed back protesters. The Police Department also got involved to provide crowd-control assistance.
On Saturday, the confrontation took place as New York leaders have been preparing for an escalation in ICE activity after the mayoral election of Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat and democratic socialist who has vowed to fight back against President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Mr. Trump and Mr. Mamdani held an apparently friendly meeting at the White House earlier this month, seemingly lowering the possibility that Mr. Trump would deploy federal troops to New York, as he has in other cities.
But ICE and other federal agencies have nonetheless carried on with their immigration enforcement operations in the city. They have continued to arrest migrants showing up at the city’s immigration courts and, recently, began to escalate arrests in immigrant-rich neighborhoods, including Corona in Queens and Sunset Park in Brooklyn.
After the tumult on Saturday afternoon, the mood on Canal Street was somber and angry, while some protesters headed home and others lingered, recovering from the effects of an irritant sprayed at them.
Many of them said they were furious not only at the presence of federal agents in their neighborhood but also at the police officers who had helped manage the crowd.
The Police Department is barred by the city’s so-called sanctuary laws from assisting the federal government in conducting immigration arrests. But police officers in New York and other sanctuary cities have been typically called on to provide crowd-control assistance.
“It’s really despicable,” said Christopher Marte, a New York City Council member whose district covers Lower Manhattan and who was at the protest since it began Saturday morning.
“It seems like the N.Y.P.D., specifically the S.R.G., is working to clear the way for ICE agents to go out in our city to do arrests and put people in the process of deportation,” he added, referring to the department’s Strategic Response Group, a unit of several hundred officers often deployed to protests.
By midafternoon, the remnants of the morning’s chaos remained. Broken slats of wood, garbage bags and trampled flower bouquets were strewed along the street. But the agents were gone, having driven off in the direction of the Holland Tunnel and toward New Jersey.
Maia Coleman is a reporter for The Times covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York area.
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