Police have arrested at least 11 people after a number of anti-Donald Trump protesters have clashed with members of a group called “Jews for Trump,” in New York.
The incident occurred on Sunday when a convoy of Trump supporters ran into anti-Trump demonstrators from Brooklyn at Times Square, the New York Times reported.
The two groups brawled and exchanged words such as “fascists” and “anarchists” before police officers broke them up.
According to reports, former New York City mayor and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani was also involved in the incident.
The anti-Trump protesters confronted Giuliani while he was driving down 5th Avenue.
In a video posted on Twitter, Giuliani can be seen in the passenger seat of a car with the windows down while demonstrators went up to his vehicle and abused him.
“Look at all the animals here,” he said referring to the protesters. “They can only say two words ‘F-you. F-you.’ Must be a breakdown in education. Extremely inarticulate young people.”
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— DataInput (@datainput) October 25, 2020
Rudy Giuliani in car pic.twitter.com/XQp5BEw4S0
Giuliani said the incident took place after he had recorded his radio show.
According to reports, police expect more confrontations to take place in the city as Election Day gets closer.
The violent encounter occurred on the on second day of early voting in New York state, with people jamming polling places in long line for hours to cast ballots nine days ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election.
New Yorkers, in the reliably Democratic state, joined a flood of more than 60 million Americans across the country who have cast early ballots at a record-setting pace. Early in-person voting will continue in the state until Nov. 1.
Early voting in the 2020 US election has surpassed all the pre-election ballots from four years earlier, an independent vote monitor said Sunday.
Millions of Americans, intensely interested in the contest between Trump and Biden, are smashing records for casting ballots, whether by mail or in person amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump for months has been claiming, without evidence, that mail-in ballots lead to fraud.
The rush to vote early is a sign of Americans’ concerns about avoiding crowded polling places on Election Day and reducing the risk of exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 225,000 Americans.
New York’s violent clashes came as the FBI warned last month of “combustible violence” on US streets ahead of the November presidential election as tensions had increased between anti-racial protesters and far-right extremists during nationwide demonstrations that followed the police killing of African American George Floyd.