Canal Street, typically bustling with street vendors, was quiet on Thursday morning.
Photo: Matthew Sedacca
On Canal Street on Thursday morning, lost tourists tripped over commuters hustling out of the subway, the grates on the souvenir stores went up, but most of the street vendors were still missing. The familiar card tables and tarps, the whispers of Chanel, Chanel — gone. Or at least mostly. A man named Edwin, a Brooklyn native who was among the vendors caught up in Tuesday’s raid, had been cut loose by federal agents and was back on the block, waving around a laminated brochure with photos of Goyard handbags. “It’s a good day to get back to the money,” he tells me. “I got bills to pay, kids to feed. Donald Trump don’t pay my bills.”
In an unprecedented scene, dozens of largely masked federal agents descended on the block on Tuesday and arrested nine men, nearly all of them West African. Witnesses stood in shock as an armored military-style truck rolled down Lafayette, and protesters chased federal agents to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices at 26 Federal Plaza where there were five more arrests. The Department of Homeland Security claims the migrants arrested had “violent rap sheets,” though witnesses say the arrests seemed far less calculated than anything like that — “there’s no due process going on,” one witness to the scene on Tuesday told the New York Times. “It’s just straight to the back of a van if you’re African on Canal.” ICE took a victory lap anyway: Todd Lyons, the acting director of the agency, told Fox News on Wednesday that more raids would be coming. “You will see an increase in ICE arrests because there are so many criminal illegal aliens that have been released in New York specifically,” he said.
Federal agents also arrested five people on Tuesday who were protesting the Canal Street raids.
Photo: Nigro/Pacific Press/Shutterstock
While the presence of federal agents on Tuesday was unusual, what happened was also familiar. Largely immigrant vendors have been selling counterfeit goods on Canal for decades, and so for decades police have responded with crack downs and theatrical raids. Under Giuliani, the NYPD rounded up illegal firework vendors along Canal and across Chinatown (“the unofficial pyrotechnics district,” per Newsday at the time). Michael Bloomberg ramped up raids on designer fakes with investigators infamously shuttering 32 stores along Canal Street and other stretches of the neighborhood’s so-called Counterfeit Triangle. After the busts, Bloomberg held a press conference in front of the seized knockoffs and flashed an orange sign reading “Closed.” Eric Adams offered more of the same enforcement strategy, with the NYPD launching Operation Bag Guys in 2022 after locals claimed vending had gotten out of control. That time, police made five arrests and seized what they said was $2 million worth of knockoffs. Again and again, though, sellers have returned, knowing customers would be back, too.
But at least for now, it’s pretty quiet. “It’s eerie,” said a worker at a clothing store on the block, scanning the corner of Church and Canal. On a typical day, he says he would see 15 or so men with tarps displaying fake Gucci, Louis, Fendi, and Prada. For now, they stayed gone. “They were hitting L.A., Portland,” he said. “Now they’re hitting us.”