The New York City Police Department (NYPD) conducted a raid on a street in the borough of Queens, just 48 hours prior to the beginning of Ramadan, targeting Bangladeshi Muslim street vendors who crowd the sidewalks selling Halal food and Islamic merchandise, but refusing to say what triggered the raid before the busiest Muslim selling season of the year.
TheCity (h/t Logan’s Warning) For the past two decades, Bangladeshi Muslim street vendors in Jackson Heights, Queens, have looked to Ramadan as prime time for selling and connecting with the local Muslim community.
But the busy strip where about a dozen of them usually sell Islamic items on 37th Avenue, between 73rd and 74th streets, was unusually void of crates and tables full of religious texts, prayer mats and hijabs on Thursday after police officers ordered them to leave on March 8 — just two days before the beginning of the holy month.
Street vendor Mohammad Ashraful Biswas, referring to the moment when police officers rounded up vendors on the block last Friday night and issued him a $250 ticket for unlicensed street vending: “He told us, ‘If you sell again, we’ll pick up all your business stuff.’”
The roughly dozen Muslim vendors who usually sell Islamic goods on the block gathered near “Bangladesh Street” Thursday after an early afternoon prayer in a nearby mosque, and said they have been afraid to return. Many have since lost their incomes entirely, and are struggling to pay for rent and groceries.
“My biggest fear is that I’ll get arrested for working without a license,” MD Nasir Uddin, who supports his family of five including his three younger siblings, told THE CITY in Bengali through an interpreter from the nonprofit Street Vendor Project. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help my family or provide for them anymore — that’s my biggest fear.”
Uddin, 40, said he has been unable to enter the waitlist for a merchandise vendor license because applications for them are often closed, with more than 11,920 already stuck on an immovable queue. He called for the city to increase license issuance for product merchants like himself, which has for decades been capped at 853 citywide for non-veteran sellers.
MD Ali, 63, chimed in in Bengali, saying he has missed bargaining with fellow Bangladeshis and Indians and Pakistanis in the neighborhood. During Ramadan, he said, he usually gives in at some point in the expected, endless haggling as a gesture of good faith.
“Customers keep asking us why we’re not open — and keep asking us to open regardless of the ticketing situation,” he said.
The NYPD, which is supposed to play a secondary role to the Department of Sanitation in vendor enforcement, did not respond to a specific question about what prompted the police sweep in Jackson Heights. A department spokesperson, who did not give their name, said that “police officers use discretion and sensitivity when addressing vendor conditions, issuing warnings as a first response, where appropriate and consistent with public safety.”
The NYPD sent street sellers to criminal court nearly six times as frequently in 2023 as it did in pre-pandemic 2019, with a total of 1,244 criminal summonses issued last year.
TheCity Former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021 reassigned street vending enforcement from the NYPD to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which boasted an “education first” approach. Last April, amid complaints from business owners and others about vendors creating “a sense of lawlessness,” Mayor Adams transferred that task to the Department of Sanitation.
But that did not stop the police from sending more street vendors to criminal court as local business associations blamed the roadside sellers for neighborhood crimes, trash, and other “quality-of-life” concerns.
The 1,244 criminal tickets the NYPD issued to street vendors in 2023 is almost triple the 459 criminal tickets it had given out the year before — and almost six times the 208 it gave vendors in 2019 before the pandemic, when NYPD was still the primary enforcement agency.
A man, identified as Stuart Seldowitz, a former national security advisor to President Obama, who also worked at the US State Department expressing extreme anti-Islamic sentiments towards Muslim man running a halal food cart in New York City.
Az gal says
Just deport them & be done with it.
sixlittlerabbits says
Seldowitz is on target. This illegal vendor who doesn’t speak English should go back to Egypt!
Ramez Fekry says
As an Egyptian non-Koranimal, I attest to the fact that ALL Egyptian Moslems, above 5 years of age, wholeheartedly support the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram, and the Islamic State, given that there are hundreds of millions of Moslems who are of Egyptian partial or complete lineage in the West and Eastern Europe (including the Balkans and Russia)!
Steve says
Bangladeshis and Bengalis always look miserable to me. I don’t know what it is but clearly they do something to make God hate them. It’s probably some kind of weird idolatry.
Christopher Logan says
I’ve walked through a Bangladeshi neighborhood in Jamaica Queens. Like zombies.
jarmanray says
Who in their right mind would purchase food from someone on the street? I have asked and I am still awaiting an answer as to where do they wash their hands and who ensures that the products are safe for the public to consume. It will be a cold in Haite when I buy anything from a street vendor, much less from a Muslim.
dani says
I lived for many years in Astoria Queens, which was chock full of moslems. I remember how several of their businesses closed after 9/11/
Ziggysue says
Shame they didn’t all shut permanently.
Christopher Logan says
Little Egypt.