Creating fear and panic seemed more the goal of Tuesday’s federal raid on Canal St. than any type of legitimate enforcement action. And in that it succeeded.

For the last few months, New Yorkers have watched militarized federal immigration operations play out in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago to Portland with a mixture of trepidation and relief that they had not come here. But that ended Tuesday as dozens of federal agents — pulled from multiple agencies like the FBI and IRS that should have been using their time and manpower for more productive reasons — fanned out around Canal St. in downtown Manhattan, setting off a maelstrom.

The fact that the Trump administration deployed on a street known for selling knockoff goods like handbags and watches a sizable force of agents in bulletproof vests and masks, including some with long guns and an armored vehicle, all to detain a handful of people — a smaller handful of whom Homeland Security claimed had any sort of criminal record, though its record of constant lies doesn’t give that much credence — is as clear an indication as any of that this was not primarily a law enforcement operation.

The action had little to do with ensuring public safety, instead achieving mostly fear from law-abiding New Yorkers, who have seen how President Donald Trump and Steven Miller’s aggressive tactics played out in other cities across the nation. During the raid, agents were apparently indiscriminately detaining people who fit a certain profile, in this case those who looked like they could be African migrants, maybe sidewalk vendors on the famous stretch.

This blunt approach meant that agents detained multiple people that they subsequently let go because they produced some form of ID showing that they were at the very least legally present in the country.

According to local Rep. Dan Goldman, at least four of those detained were U.S. citizens. We can thank in part Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the rest of the high court majority for signing off on this type of discriminatory enforcement after it had been challenged in California. In that opinion, Kavanaugh glibly said that citizens and others with legal status did not have to worry too much about this approach because they would at most be briefly detained before carrying on with their day. Kavanaugh, who is always accompanied by federal marshals, doesn’t have to worry about that himself.

Anyone who saw the Canal St. arrests knows that this is not a minor inconvenience. Agents aggressively surrounded and questioned people simply trying to walk down the street, and someone who happened to have left their apartment without their wallet could conceivably be carted off to a deplorable holding facility somewhere for hours or days before they could prove their status. Not to mention that constitutional provisions and legal restraints on federal agents exist to protect everyone, including people who may be legitimately detained for some reason or another, because we live in a free society where people should not be subject to summary detention.

Rather than apologizing for a botched operation that brought in dozens of agents to detain a few people including four U.S. citizens with no basis, as one might expect, the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, only doubled down, promising more such arrests in NYC. That is unacceptable. City officials and the NYPD must take steps to ensure New Yorkers’ constitutional and civil rights are protected.

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