On live TV, guardian angels tackle man Sliwa who has been wrongly identified as a migrant

Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa was being interviewed live from Times Square by Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night when their exchange took a surprising turn.

The topic was what both men seemed to agree on: a migrant-fueled wave of crime and chaos that they said had engulfed New York, amid a surge of arrivals from the southern border into the city over the past two years.

Suddenly, Mr. Sliwa had a prime-time example. As he spoke, the six angels in red jackets flanking him slipped out of frame.

“Our guys just took down one of the migrant men here at the corner of 42nd and Seventh where this is all happening,” Mr. Sliwa said, pointing away from the camera.

“Can you pan the camera?” Mr. Hannity asked his cameraman.

The cameraman turned and captured the angels confront a slightly built man in a hooded sweatshirt, throw him to the ground and put him in a headlock.

“He's out of control,” Mr. Sliwa said as the camera turned away and Mr. Hannity switched to criticizing President Biden over his administration's border policies.

However, on Wednesday, police said the man was not a migrant, but a Bronx resident. They also said he was issued a summons for disorderly conduct after trying to disrupt the interview and for being “noisy, disorderly and threatening on a busy sidewalk.” He was not charged with shoplifting, as Mr Sliwa had suggested on air.

The episode came in the wake of two high-profile criminal cases that have provided fodder for those critical of the migrants' effect on the city: the arrests of about a half-dozen people during a robbery and an attack on two police officers in the city. a brawl in Times Square.

While Mr. Adams and other administration officials have been clear in saying that the vast majority of migrants coming to New York are law-abiding, the mayor has also repeatedly said the influx will “destroy” the city, and Police Commissioner Edward A. Caban said in announcing the arrests that “a wave of migrant crime has swept our city.”

Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said Wednesday that rhetoric from the mayor and others had emboldened a “vigilante” like Mr. Sliwa to take the law into his own hands in a way that threatened all new citizens. Yorkers.

“This is what happens when Eric Adams and Republicans go to great lengths to scapegoat immigrants for every problem they have failed to solve,” Mr. Awawdeh said.

“It has to stop,” he added.

A spokesman for Mr. Adams declined to comment on the episode involving Mr. Sliwa, saying New York City had provided shelter and care to more than 175,000 migrants while Republicans in Congress continued to block comprehensive immigration reform.

Asked about the live broadcast of the confrontation on Mr. Hannity's show — and Mr. Sliwa's claim, without evidence, that the man being detained was a migrant — Fox News said in a statement that “the situation occurred during a live television broadcast” and that the network had “updated its audience as more information became available from the NYPD”

The Guardian Angels have been present in New York since the late 1970s, when Mr. Sliwa founded the group to patrol the streets and subways in an era of rampant crime. Mr. Sliwa admitted years ago that he fabricated some of the group's early crime-fighting efforts to gain publicity and raise its profile.

After distancing himself from the confrontation on Tuesday evening, Mr. Hannity returns to Mr. later in the broadcast. Sliwa for an explanation of what the public had seen.

“He had shoplifted first, the Guardian Angels saw him and stopped him – he resisted and let's say we gave him a little pain relief,” Mr Sliwa said. “His mother in Venezuela felt the tremors.”

He added, “We have to take back 42nd Street, Sean. These illegal immigrants think this street is theirs. They think they control the night. This is our country.”

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Sliwa, who as a Republican candidate lost the 2021 election to Mr. Adams, said he had merely repeated what he had heard from people in the crowd.

He also said the Guardian Angels confronted the man after he attacked a female member of the group. It was after the initial encounter, he said, that people gathered nearby said the man had stolen items from area stores. A backpack found by police, Mr Sliwa said, contained about 10 items of children's clothing that still had anti-theft tags.

When asked why he would tell Mr Hannity with such certainty what the man's background was, Mr Sliwa again said he had simply passed on what he had been told.

“Is it possible he wasn't a migrant?” he said. “Naturally.”