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Sex Workers Mobilize in Response to Intensified Police Crackdowns

Sex workers rally against Operation Restore Roosevelt at Corona Plaza in Queens, mid-October. (Credit: Navya Asopa)

Sex workers rally against Operation Restore Roosevelt at Corona Plaza in Queens, mid-October. (Credit: Navya Asopa)

 

New York Mayor Eric Adams has declared a crackdown on prostitution and other “quality of life” issues along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens a success, with police making 985 arrests, including 134 for prostitution-related offenses since it began last October. The campaign, dubbed Operation Restore Roosevelt, has also had an unintended result of catalyzing sex workers to demand rights and mobilize in a push to legalize their trade.

 

“The community spoke and the administration delivered,” Adams said in a statement released by City Hall on Jan. 22. “Our work here is not done – you will continue to see a police presence, as well as other various agencies in the corridor addressing quality-of-life and public safety issues.” 

 

The increased presence of law enforcement in the targeted communities of Elmhurst, North Corona and Jackson Heights has stirred complaints about police harassment by sex workers in those neighborhoods and encouraged them to organize.

 

On an October afternoon, soon after the police operation began, a group of sex workers and street vendors huddled together in Corona Plaza, an open-air market in Queens, under a banner reading: “We Deserve Rights, Not Raids.” Around them were other demonstrators holding placards and taking turns at a microphone. A handful of local non-profit groups brought them together to protest a police crackdown on prostitution along Roosevelt Avenue in the nearby Jackson Heights.

 

Bianey Garcia, a 34-year-old trans woman and former sex worker, now organizes for Make the Road NY. This Queens-based non-profit group mobilizes immigrants and queer organizations, and provides legal assistance for housing and employment. Wearing a blue t-shirt with the group’s logo and holding the mic close to her chin, she addressed the crowd in Spanish.

 

“Many from our community who do sex work are here in it, not because they want to, but because they have to,” she said, looking directly into reporters’ cameras. “The police pursue the workers as if they are criminals.” She said the increased law enforcement deters the workers from reporting violent crimes for fear of being arrested.

 

Like Garcia, many of the sex workers are immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries who have come to New York in search of a job and freedom from persecution.

 

The number of sex workers on Roosevelt Avenue had doubled in the few months prior to the demonstration, according to residents, with mostly Latino, Black and Asian women plying the trade. Earlier in October, about 200 community members demonstrated along the busy thoroughfare to protest against the rampant sex work in the area. New York Mayor Eric Adams responded by launching “Operation Restore Roosevelt,” deploying nearly 200 police officers at the outset.

 

 

On most days, Roosevelt Avenue is packed with crowds sifting through shops and sidewalk stands. On one corner, five police officers stand while fashionably dressed women walk close to one another. The air fills with the smell of meat smoking on barbeque grills and the sound of pop music pumping from bars.

 

Sex workers stand along Roosevelt from the afternoon until after  midnight, hoping to earn about $40 to $50 for a half-hour sex act. One worker, wearing a pink crop top and a cloth mask, stood right below the noise of the E train. “I’m trying to make money here,” she said, declining to give her name out of fear of legal repercussions. “Life is hard.” As an immigrant from China with a family to feed, she said this was the only employment that she could find that paid her bills.

 

Another worker, in her early 30s, stood beside her, also resented the police presence. “It’s a free street,” she said in Spanish. “I can stand wherever I want to and do whatever I want to. What are the accusations for?” She declined to give her name because her family doesn’t know about her work.

 

Shopna, a 20-year-old Queens native who asked that only her first name be used, said she doesn’t mind the women working the street. “I’m fine with them as long as they’re not grabbing kids or teenagers,” she said. “There’s lots of sex workers at Roosevelt Avenue, but they were always there.” 

 

 

Decriminalizing prostitution in New York State has been a hotly contested issue for decades.  The most recent attempt came in 2021, when an archaic anti-loitering law, commonly called the “walking while trans ban,” which prohibited “loitering to engage in prostitution,” was repealed. 

 

Two bills aimed at protecting sex workers were pending in the state Senate in 2023. Democratic State Sen. Liz Krueger, who represents a district in Manhattan, proposed one of these bills, the Sex Trade Survivors Justice and Equality Act in 2023-24, which would investigate “sexual acts disguised as massage therapy by potential victims of human trafficking.”

 

The second piece of legislation, introduced by Democratic State Sen. Julia Salazar – who represents Ridgewood, Queens, and parts of Brooklyn – would decriminalize sex work between consenting adults, while keeping prohibitions relating to minors and trafficking.

 

Both bills were referred to the Codes Committee and will have to be reintroduced in the new session that began in January.

 

State Sen. Jessica Ramos, a Jackson Heights resident and mayoral candidate who co-sponsored Salazar’s bill, has expressed her concern for the workers.

 

“The vast majority of sex workers in this particular corner of the city are immigrants who do not have access to the formal economy, typically because of their immigration status,” a spokesperson for Ramos wrote in an email. “It’s a complicated issue that nobody wants to hear about because of the stigma.” 

 

Some people at the Corona Plaza protest said that former sex workers also continue to face arrests and police harassment.

 

Perla, a 42-year-old trans woman who arrived from Mexico three years ago and now organizes for Make the Road NY, said she turned to prostitution because she could not find a job because of her gender and immigration status. This year, Perla, who is known by her first name, found work at a local Panera Bread restaurant. Her eyes brightened and her voice firmed up when she spoke about her new job.

 

Still, police continue to target her for her trans identity. “I am afraid of walking on my own street, even though I don’t do sex work anymore,” Perla said. She prefers using taxis to avoid the police patrolling Roosevelt Avenue. “They can assume you are a sex worker,” Perla said. “I’m scared, I can’t afford to get arrested.” 

 

Jared Trujillo, an associate professor at City University of New York School of Law, said sex workers are often preyed on by law enforcement. “The legal precariousness of sex work emboldens officers to weaponize their badges to extort sexual contact under the threat of arrest or worse,” he said.

 

Trujillo said this pattern of abuse is not new and dates back at least to the Mullen Commission in 1972, when the city found that police assigned to combat sex work frequently abuse their power.  In 2019,  police officer Michael Golden used his badge to extort sex from workers. In 2017, several NYPD vice officers were indicted for running a trafficking ring. Song Yang, a 38-year-old Chinese immigrant in Flushing, Queens, who had twice been arrested for prostitution, suffered a tragic fate in 2017. As police were at her apartment door to make another arrest, she jumped or fell to her death from a fourth floor balcony, according to The New York Times. 

 

Garcia, the speaker at the rally, said she experienced the same kind of threats Perla had received. In 2008, when Garcia was a teenage sex worker in the city she reached out to a police car for help after a fight broke out on her street. “I was standing in a corner with a friend and this man just started saying slurs to her, then he started beating her. So she defended herself,” Garcia said. That’s when Garcia stopped a police car and asked the officers to calm the situation.

 

Instead, she said she was arrested and charged with prostitution, a Class B misdemeanor, a crime she said she did not commit that night. Garcia ended up spending 18 months in the Queens 115th Precinct jail.

 

“I’m still afraid of what the police will assume about me,” she said. “That fear never goes away.”

 

Now, as an advocate with the nonprofit’s TGNCIQ (transgender, gender non-conforming, intersex and queer) Justice group, Garcia helps trans sex workers navigate criminal charges and court pleas. The legal process is dehumanizing at every stage, she said. Once a worker is arrested, officers ask her to remove her makeup, wigs, and heels. At trial, defense lawyers persuade them to plead guilty if they wish to return home as soon as possible, she explained.

 

Some of Garcia’s friends have been deported to Mexico after being arrested for prostitution. Yet, despite the ever-looming fear of meeting the same fate, she continues to work for the community through Decrim NY, a coalition of 20 sex workers and allied organizations in New York City.  The group traveled to Albany to lobby for decriminalization last May.

 

Trujillo, who is also a member of Decrim NY, said the coalition was “a leading voice in passing the Walking While Trans Ban repeal in 2021, which granted relief to tens of thousands of New Yorkers that were profiled for merely having the audacity to exist in public spaces.”

 

The group plans to focus on housing and employment for the trans community, and the decriminalization of sex work in the city, according to Garcia.

 

“People call the police on us but they never ask how we are doing, why we do this work,” she said. “I believe sex work is survival work… That’s why we are advocating.”

About the author(s)

Navya Asopa, originally from India, is a Stabile investigative fellow at Columbia Journalism School. Her reporting focuses on labor, immigration, and gender.