On a normal day, Canal Street in Lower Manhattan brims with licensed and unlicensed street vendors peddling purses, watches, sweatshirts and all manner of tchotchkes.
Wednesday was not a normal day. The strip had turned quiet. Most of the vendors were gone. Tourists had been asking where they were, some shopkeepers said.
A day earlier, more than 50 federal agents had descended on a stretch of the street that is famous for the African men and Chinese women who illegally sell bootleg luxury merchandise to tourists.
The Department of Homeland Security said on Wednesday that its agents had arrested nine men accused of living in the United States illegally. The men, mostly from West Africa and some with prior arrests, were targeted in an operation “focused on criminal activity relating to selling counterfeit goods,” the department said. The agents also arrested four protesters.
People across New York City appeared on edge after the raid, seemingly bracing for the activation of President Trump’s threat to deploy military personnel and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to New York City, which he often casts as lawless and dangerous. Mr. Trump has already moved to send troops to other Democratic-led cities — Chicago, Washington, Memphis, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore.
On Wednesday evening, the depth of the anger over the raid was evident as several hundred demonstrators rallied at 26 Federal Plaza, the New York City headquarters of ICE. Lifting placards and their voices, the demonstrators chanted, “Vendor power!”
The demonstrators marched north from Foley Square to Canal Street, filling about five blocks as they walked, before turning onto Broadway. One woman climbed on a police car in front of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse.
“It’s important to be here,” said Philip Clay, 45, an English tutor and visual artist from Queens who was demonstrating. “No ICE.”
Earlier, Bethany Li, the executive director of a civil rights organization, said that many people in and around Chinatown felt afraid but ready to resist. Her organization, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, is blocks from where the raid took place.
“People have been scared by the fact that the federal government is coming in and harming and threatening residents in immigrant neighborhoods,” Ms. Li said. “But then I think there’s also this mood of defiance. It’s like: ‘No, ICE can’t come in and terrorize our communities in this way. Not in New York.’”
Some vendors who lingered on Wednesday condemned the raid as demeaning and racist.
“How many white people pass here?” said Mohamed Touré, 46. “All of them have papers? No.”
Mr. Touré said he was stopped by federal officers on Tuesday afternoon and asked for his papers. “We need a little bit of respect, too,” he said, adding that agents were going up only to Black vendors.
The Department of Homeland Security sent a tweet Wednesday hailing the raid. “Everyone does not, in fact, like counterfeit products being sold. Nor do they like violent illegal aliens,” the agency’s tweet said.
Earlier in the day, Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, had defended the raid during an interview on Fox News and promised an increase in arrests.
In New York City, elected officials and human rights advocates denounced Tuesday’s sweep.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, announced that she had launched an online portal to collect photos and videos of ICE officials to determine whether they were breaking the law during enforcement actions.
For generations, Canal Street has been a gathering point for merchants of Asian descent, especially those from China. But when migrants began to arrive in New York City by the tens of thousands three years ago under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., West African vendors flocked to the area to sell their wares.
Andrew B. Wolf, an assistant professor of global labor and work at Cornell University who researches street vending, said that it is common for ethnic groups to specialize in certain industries after the first arrivals gain a foothold and begin to channel in newcomers.
“There’s the one person actually making money in the community, and then the other people come,” Mr. Wolf said.
He noted that the Police Department regularly conducts operations in the neighborhood, arresting vendors and confiscating their property. He said that the city’s real estate, retail and restaurant groups had lobbied to make it difficult for vendors to get licenses, making them a frequent target of law enforcement.
Police officers raided the Canal Street area in August 2023, focusing on Wooster and Lispenard Streets. They arrested eight vendors, seizing millions of dollars in merchandise. In January, they conducted another sting, arresting several vendors and recovering suitcases and black trash bags filled with watches and other goods.
Residents said that they were used to seeing police officers — not federal agents — arresting vendors.
“This is definitely not normal,” said Barrett Maguire, 64, a building superintendent in TriBeCa. Mr. Maguire has walked down Canal Street since the 1980s, encountering sellers hawking fake designer bags and sunglasses.
Jean-Claude and Aurore Csont, visiting New York on their honeymoon from Toulouse, France, were in a double-decker tourist bus that had rumbled along Canal Street days before the raid. They saw the street teeming with vendors, their wares displayed on sheets and in little carts.
“They have to live, you know,” Mr. Csont said. “They’re not really bothering anyone.”
Ms. Csont said that they had seen vendors like them in Rome and Paris, and she viewed them as “part of the charm.”
Jack Tchen, a historian who studies New York’s Chinatown, said that the raid had paralyzed activity in a part of the city where Chinese immigrants had worked for decades to build a home. Mr. Tchen said that the raid followed a pattern of discrimination against people of Chinese descent in America.
“Anti-Chinese attitudes have been in this country for a long time,” said Mr. Tchen, whose work focuses on what he describes as antiracist and anti-colonialist stories. “Whereas, oftentimes Chinese-made goods were very welcomed. The elites — you know, porcelain, silks, furniture — and cheap stuff — fortune cookies. Everything has been has been readily consumed in the American commercial culture.”
Though street vendors have sometimes irritated shopkeepers because they block doorsteps and create a crowded environment, they also can bring in more business. Some competitors lamented their absence.
“There’s nobody out here,” said Awa Ngam, who has been selling sweatshirts and T-shirts with a license at Canal and Lafayette Streets for more than a decade and who has seen West African vendors there for years. “I don’t like it today.”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
Ana Ley is a Times reporter covering immigration in New York City.
The post Fear and Anger Fill New York’s Canal Street After Immigration Raid appeared first on New York Times.
