Two NYC street vendors have aimed a class-action lawsuit against New York City, claiming hundreds like them have had their civil rights trampled on when city workers destroyed their pushcarts without warning.
Sanwar Ahmed, who sells a puffed rice snack in Queens, and Ana Beustan, a flavored ice vendor from Brooklyn, say they had their pushcarts seized and then destroyed over alleged health violations without the requisite hearing required for the government to destroy personal property.
Beustan said the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene even let her fork over a $1,0000 fine they had imposed on her — only to tell her after they had taken her money that her flavored ice pushcart had been demolished.
Ahmed, an 86-year old immigrant from Bangladesh, said he can’t even recover the food containers and the table that were taken from him when two police officers and two health inspectors seized his pushcart and placed in it a truck in June 2016.
The food vendors’ Urban Justice League lawyers are seeking class-action status, arguing that there are “hundreds of other licensed street vendors in NYC” who have suffered similar experiences.
The lawyers claims a violation of the Fifth Amended because neither Ahmed nor Beustan were provided a deprivation hearing before their personal possessions were destroyed, the lawsuit alleged.
“The city’s departments of law and health will review these allegations,” a spokesman for the city’s Law Department said. ​