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In the News: More ICE on Canal Street
Hell Gate reported on Saturday that the dozens of NYPD officers cleared a path for federal ICE agents on Saturday around Canal Street, but were thwarted by demonstrators who got there first. Still, police and ICE officers arrested and pepper-sprayed demonstrators — even managing to pepper spray fellow officers (see second video on IG here) — as unmarked vans of federal agents drove west past West Broadway and Canal.
(The image above is from the raids in October on the counterfeit vendors nearby.)
The Times reported that the incident started at 11a at the entrance to a garage on Centre and Hester, as federal agents arrived on foot. When their vans started to pull out of the garage, protestors blocked them with their bodies and mounds of garbage (easily accessible on the streets!).
The NYPD arrived after that, clearing the entrance to the garage by confronting the protestors.
The Times had a anonymous source that said Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch called Ricky Patel, the special agent in charge of New York’s Homeland Security Investigations office, to say that the raid was “’unacceptable’” and that such shows of force had put New Yorkers, federal agents and her officers in harm’s way.”
“It’s really despicable,” Councilman Christopher Marte told The Times. “It seems like the N.Y.P.D., specifically the Strategic Response Group, 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.”
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Thankfully someone is out there enforcing our laws
This publication has deleted my previous comment even though it was far from inflammatory and was indicating support for what ICe is doing. Is this perspective no longer welcome? Is this no longer a publication and now a moderated chat?
All comments here are moderated as comments are at all media sites.
Hopefully we will see a lot more ICE around here.
Crazy to see this in nyc but I guess I understand given how bad canal street has become
So who ordered this? Ricky Patel?
I hear there will be many more in the coming months.
To be honest Canal Street needs this, and it also needs a lot more cleaning up than just what ICE can do. The NYPD needs to step up and enforce our laws.
Let’s be clear about terms here. Many say they want to “clean up” Canal Street. Having lived in the neighborhood since the mid-70s I’m all in on that. To me that means clear, clean, safe streets. I think that’s the job of municipal law enforcement and sanitation.
ICE represents neither of those things. As currently deployed, ICE is — again, let’s be clear about terminology — a secret police force; shock troops that sweep in, masked, and pull people off the street, handcuff, and detain them, without a hint of due process.
ICE equals terror troops, such as those deployed by tyrants in many lands in many eras. It seems to me that that is what some people are saying is acceptable to “clean up” Canal street. I could go on and offer my opinion that human beings are not objects to be “cleaned up”, but that’s an argument so fundamental it’s embarrassing to have to engage in it. We’ve seen shock terror troops deployed before in history, and civilized people understand what that represents. It’s unacceptable in civil society.
Well written mulciber. I couldn’t agree more.
Mulciber thank you. Sanitation is a rationale often used to justify fascist strategies. Witness the attacks on “cartels” in the Caribbean by Pete Hegseth with no proof of guilt whatsoever.
Control the situation on Canal Street? Yes please! But don’t do it in a way that would have previously been called un-American!
Whatever happened, the illegal bazaar is alive and well as of fifteen minutes ago, couldn’t even squeeze through the crowds to get home.
As we all know this is beyond the reach of NYPD and no elected officials after Bloomberg ever went near the problem. We are left to our own devices and the ideology du jour.
Shame, ‘the greatest city in the world’??!!
It’s embarrassing and shameful that the city allows this chaos to happen on a daily basis. The sellers leave the streets trashed as well. I also blame the buyers. I am always tempted to say to them something like “Thank you for bringing crime into our neighborhood.”
As long as NYC fails to enforce its own laws and allows the city to continue in a state of permissive lawlessness, we can expect to see more of this outside enforcement.
We can only hope.
If you yell “ice, ice, ice” on canal street, they will often run, and you can grab some of their “products”
NYC has been ignoring this issue for decades. I don’t want to hear any complaining from people saying they don’t like how this is being handled when their previous solutions were just to do nothing.
I am a long-time critic of the counterfeit, illegal street vendor mess on Broadway from White to Canal. ICE arresting select vendors is a temporary and purely topical solution. Wherever one is in the ICE actions, the supply and demand of these products has demonstrated for years that topical solutions are always temporary. I appreciate that this editorial team moderates all discussions so that all Tribecans can share in a productive and informative discussion. As such, I implore my neighbors to keep working with Marte’s office and the NYC police to eradicate the problem. This is a local issue, under local purview. A federal agency like ICE would be better served focusing their energy on Federal issues. While I find the blocking of the streets and sidewalks a hindrance and minor danger to pedestrians, I could not argue that these are dangerous felons (based on the information provided on the crimes and backgrounds of those arrested last month).