ICE arrests Canal St. vendor in 'targeted operation' right after NYPD raids
Published in News & Features
NEW YORK — Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided Canal St. in lower Manhattan Saturday afternoon again, arresting a West African migrant street vendor allegedly selling counterfeit goods.
The arrest, at Canal St. near Broadway around noon, came only about 15 minutes after the New York Police Department had completed its own vendor enforcement action on the bustling strip — known as the go-to spot for fake Louis Vuitton and Gucci handbags and Beats headphones.
Sending vendors fleeing, NYPD officers hit the location twice — starting at 11 a.m., making one arrest about a half hour later — in the hour right before the ICE arrest. But the NYPD had no interaction with the federal agents and the ICE investigation was unrelated to the NYPD, according to police sources.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s umbrella agency, said the agents were specifically looking to arrest the man they grabbed.
“On Nov. 22, ICE conducted a targeted operation in lower Manhattan to arrest Abdou Tall, an illegal alien from Senegal and criminal with multiple arrests relating to trafficking counterfeit merchandise,” she said.
Tall fled from agents, running several blocks before tripping, falling and resisting arrest before being apprehended, McLaughlin added.
She accused the NYPD of failing to turn Tall over to ICE last month when he was arrested for trademark counterfeiting.
“This entire incident could have been prevented had the NYPD simply honored our ICE detainer after they arrested Tall on Oct. 7 for felony trademark counterfeiting,” McLaughlin said. “But instead of turning him over to ICE custody, they released this criminal illegal alien back into the community, where he immediately resumed his criminal activity, leading to a second NYPD arrest for felony trademark counterfeiting on Oct. 11. This time he was released by NYPD before ICE could even lodge a detainer.”
New York City generally does not honor ICE detainers unless the individual has been convicted of a serious or violent crime or is on a terrorist watch list and ICE has a judicial warrant.
District 1 City Councilman Christopher Marte condemned Saturday’s ICE arrest, and urged civilians to “distract” the agents to prevent them from grabbing people.
“ICE was out on Canal Street again,” Marte said on social media. “We can’t be bystanders when we see illegal and racist kidnappings terrorizing our communities. If you see agents, make noise, try to distract them, and contact ICE watch organizations.”
Saturday evening around 9 p.m., a halal cart vendor who sells food by the intersection of Broadway and Lafayette St. said he saw three or four ICE agents chase an “African” man heading east down Canal St. He said he recognized them as ICE agents because they were in green and wore masks.
“It was fast,” he said, noting he didn’t see much.
A vendor selling wallets said the arrested man, who everyone knew as Abdou, was his friend.
“First time ICE coming, they took nine person,” he said, referring to a larger raid last month. “Today, the second time, they take one person.”
Another vendor said Tall sold handbags.
“To be honest, we’re not safe here,” he said. “They take all our stuff,” he added of the NYPD vendor enforcement sweeps.
“If we got something else, we not gonna do this,” he said of toiling as an unlicensed street vendor. “We have to pay the rent, we have to pay everything. We don’t wanna be in a shelter.”
After a day full of raids, the vendors were extra-vigilant — bordering on paranoid. Every few minutes, as a cop car would roll by or if they spotted someone they feared might be an undercover, they would hoist up their merchandise and get ready to bolt. Their goods are laid out on tarps, easy to grab up quickly in a bundle, if needed.
Just after 11 a.m., NYPD officers conducted a “routine vendor enforcement” search on Canal St. at Broadway, in which they seized counterfeit products filling more than 25 evidence bags, cops said. Vendors fled the scene as the cops closed in, a source said.
Police did a second round of enforcement around 11:45 a.m., during which they confiscated additional knockoff products and arrested Diop Youssou, 47, a block away near the corner of Broadway and Lispenard St., charging him with trademark counterfeiting.
Youssou lives in the Melrose section of the Bronx, cops said.
Tall’s arrest by ICE comes exactly one month after ICE agents swooped down on Canal St. in a surprise raid targeting illegal street vendors. The action stretched along Canal St., from Church St. to Lafayette St., between Chinatown, Soho and Tribeca.
As dozens of ICE agents detained a total of nine allegedly undocumented vendors at the Oct. 21 enforcement action, a crowd of people gathered to protest, then followed the agents down to 26 Federal Plaza — ICE’s Manhattan processing and detention center — where a larger protest took place.
“ICE, they do what they want to do. They target our community,” Bobbie Baro, a longtime vendor originally from Mauritania, told The New York Daily News after last month’s Canal St. raid. “They asked random people for ID — they didn’t have it, and they took them down.”
Earlier this month, the Daily News reported that NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch received advance notice from the Trump administration last month that ICE agents were hours later going to conduct an immigration enforcement raid along Canal St. In response, sources say Tisch directed NYPD officers to stay away from the ICE agents as they arrested vendors along the busy shopping street.
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