NEW YORK — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swooped down on Canal Street in lower Manhattan Tuesday afternoon in a surprise raid and detained a number of individuals, police sources said.

ICE agents rounded up people along several blocks of Canal St., from Church St. to Lafayette St., on the borders of Soho, Tribeca and Chinatown, shutting down the area as they conducted a raid targeting illegal street vendors, according to a witness and ABC 7.

Bobbie Baro, a longtime vendor originally from Mauritania, who was selling knockoff Beats headphones, said when the agents showed up, “Everybody started running.” He said he didn’t run because, “I have ID.”

“ICE, they do what they want to do. They target our community,” Baro said. “They asked random people for ID, they didn’t have it and they took them down.”

“It’s a violation of a law, I never seen anything like this,” he said. “I been in the country 25 years and Americans were never like this.”

A crowd of people gathered to protest the masked agents as dozens of ICE officers were seen detaining people. It was unclear how many people were detained in the raid, but Baro said he saw at least seven individuals taken into custody.

A witness who did not give his name said there was a “spontaneous” resistance by passersby when the ICE agents started questioning people and making arrests. He added that, along with the vendors, some “white kids” who were sticking up for them were also taken into custody.

“The crowd erupted, it was spontaneous,” he said. “They surrounded their vehicles, they weren’t letting them leave. And then they arrested some Americans.”

The witness showed the Daily News video of the arrests, saying the detainees were taken down to 26 Federal Plaza.

Sean Sweeney of the SoHo Alliance, a local community group, said the raid didn’t come as a surprise because residents have been concerned about the vendors increasingly taking up space on the sidewalk and selling counterfeit goods.

“The guys who were selling the counterfeit merchandise, it was centered on Canal and Broadway and they were there for quite a few years,” Sweeney said. “People complained, but it was contained and it didn’t spread. For the last six months, for some reason, it has spread east all the way to Mulberry St.”

Another witness, Islam Iubel Muhammed, told the Daily News that the agents arrested men who were selling “weed and fake bags.” Canal St. is a well-known spot to buy knockoff designer handbags from sidewalk vendors.

“You can see their vehicles down the street with flashing lights. They grabbed a bunch of guys one over there, another over there, at least five by Church St. and they kept moving,” Muhammed said.

Christopher Marte, the area’s Democratic Councilman, condemned the raid, calling it a “horrifying display of federal overreach.”

“ICE has no place in New York City, especially not in the heart of Chinatown, terrorizing our immigrant neighbors with military vehicles and masked agents,” he said. “This kind of escalation is unnecessary, unacceptable and antithetical to our city’s values as a sanctuary for all people. The challenges around vending on Canal St. are real and must be addressed,” Marte said, “but federal agents storming our streets and targeting community members is not the solution.”

Marte said his office has called for local enforcement to handle the issue of illegal vending, in order to protect both vendors and small businesses.

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