The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on Canal Street was not a pretty sight.

If President Trump wants to ensure Zohran Mamdani’s election so he can “take over” the city, as he’s warned, he couldn’t come up with a spectacle more certain to drive liberal New Yorkers into Mamdani’s camp than a squad of masked ICE agents, accompanied by an armored vehicle, descending on unlicensed street vendors in broad daylight to bust a whopping dozen or so for peddling counterfeit goods.

But unlike agitators who screamed “Fascist!” at the agents, our emotions should be nuanced. With City Hall unable or unwilling to protect legitimate Canal Street businesses and the public from the scourge of unlicensed sidewalk merchants, somebody had to do the job or at least begin to — even if the optics were terrible and the results minuscule.

I celebrate and honor the Big Apple’s diversity and singularly colorful street life. But Canal Street’s western portion is a civic disgrace. The cheap wooden animals, “I ❤️ New York” caps and bogus Gucci and Cartier products — and the guys who sell them — have Canal in a stranglehold. The abandonment to sidewalk anarchy stalled a nascent revival that was on the point of making the run-down boulevard worthy of its potentially........

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