The New York police and the Manhattan district attorney said on Thursday that they were investigating a fracas in Times Square that broke out after members of an anti-crime organization accosted a man their leader had incorrectly identified as a migrant.
Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, was being interviewed live on Fox News when members of his group standing behind him moved out of view.
“Our guys have just taken down one of the migrant guys,” Mr. Sliwa told the host, Sean Hannity. The camera panned to show several Guardian Angels surrounding a man, then pulling him to the ground. Mr. Sliwa then accused the man of shoplifting — wrongly, according to the police.
“We gave him a little pain compliance,” Mr. Sliwa said. “His mother back in Venezuela felt the vibrations.”
The man, who has not been named, turned out to be a Bronx resident. The incident has set off fears of vigilantism against immigrants — or anyone who might be identified as one — in New York.
Officials including District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul have been under intense pressure from all sides of the immigration debate. The violence televised on Fox came after video emerged showing a Jan. 27 assault in which several men, later identified by a law enforcement official as migrants, kicked and punched a police officer and lieutenant in Times Square.
Republican politicians and their allies have claimed that the attack on the officers shows that New York is being besieged by migrant criminals, but organizations that support immigrants have said that Republicans are seizing on an isolated incident to demonize people seeking better lives.
Ms. Hochul had criticized prosecutors for not reacting more forcefully to the assault on the officers. After the actions of the Guardian Angels, she said that meting out justice was not a task for civilians.
“I reject the premise that anyone can take the law into their own hands,” Ms. Hochul said Thursday on CNN. “Then we have chaos. This is not the Wild West. This is New York State.”
As migration has surged in the past two years, Mr. Adams has said that the steady stream of arrivals to New York would “destroy” the city. On Monday, he put on a bulletproof vest with a Fendi scarf to join a police raid on a robbery ring in which many participants were believed to be recent migrants.
On Thursday, however, Mr. Adams took a more measured tone at a news conference where he and Mr. Bragg announced the indictments against seven men who were arrested after the Jan. 27 assault on the police officers.
Mr. Adams said the police “don’t have the luxury to do what we saw Curtis Sliwa do.”
“See someone on the corner and, based on their ethnicity, automatically identify them as a migrant, asylum seeker and not a longtime Bronx resident: That is not what we can do,” the mayor said. “We have to get it right.”
The man the Guardian Angels accosted and pinned has not been identified. The police said officers responding to a 911 call gave him a summons for disorderly conduct after he tried to disrupt the Fox News interview and for being “loud, disorderly and threatening on a crowded sidewalk.”
Investigators were examining videos of the incident to build a timeline of what happened, including the decision to issue the man a summons, said a law enforcement official on Thursday, who asked not to be named to discuss the details of an ongoing investigation.
Mr. Sliwa, a former mayoral candidate whose red-bereted followers have walked the city for decades, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Mr. Sliwa and Mr. Hannity had been discussing the supposed migrant-fueled crime wave when the violence broke out. When the camera swung around, it captured the Angels confronting a slightly built man in a hooded sweatshirt, throwing him to the ground and putting him in a headlock.
Mr. Bragg said that he had watched footage of the incident and that what he saw was “disturbing.” He said his office would follow the facts.
“We don’t make assumptions,” Mr. Bragg said.
On Thursday, a coalition of left-leaning organizations pinned some of the blame for what they said was a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment on Mr. Adams, a Democrat who has vacillated between emphasizing New York’s history as a beacon for immigrants and contending that the crisis threatens the city.
On Monday, the same day the mayor accompanied the police raid, his police commissioner, Edward A. Caban, said that “a wave of migrant crime has washed over our city.”
Both men emphasized that most immigrants come for a better life and not to break laws. On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Adams sounded a similar note.
“The overwhelming number of migrants and asylum seekers are law-abiding and they are pursuing the American dream,” he said.
But critics said some of Mr. Adams’s language has reinforced Republican arguments.
“Mayor Adams’s amplification of the far right’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and reckless fearmongering is fueling violence against our neighbors,” said the coalition, which included New York Communities for Change, Make the Road New York and the Working Families Party.
Mr. Bragg, who is also a Democrat, faced a different kind of pressure from conservatives and from members of his own party, including Ms. Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James, after Manhattan prosecutors chose not to ask for bail for many of the men arrested in the Jan. 27 assault on the police.
In response to the criticism, Mr. Bragg suggested he had been concerned that the wrong men had been implicated in the attack.
On Thursday, however, he said he was more confident in the identifications and spoke forcefully about the assault, saying it had “sickened me and outraged me.”
“As a lifelong New Yorker, I do not tolerate attacks on our police officers and certainly I do not as Manhattan district attorney,” Mr. Bragg said while standing alongside the mayor.
Mr. Adams praised Mr. Bragg for pursuing the indictment and reiterated his statements that only “a small minority” of migrants were breaking laws.
“We are going to pursue anyone who commits a crime, if they are longstanding New Yorkers or if they are new arrivals,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing.”
Jonah E. Bromwich and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.
