This is Street Wars, a weekly series on the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.

Tears filled Blanca Alvarado’s eyes as she described, in Spanish, the events of Aug. 23.

At around 7 p.m., she was cooking and selling tripa mishqui, an Ecuadorean delicacy, on Junction Boulevard in Corona, Queens. Suddenly, she was surrounded by police officers asking for her license and I.D.

She had both, she said, and showed them.

While Alvarado has a street vendor license, she doesn’t have a mobile food permit. A license is for the person making the food and certifies that they’ve taken a food safety course. But a permit, which legalizes the food cart or truck itself, is notoriously hard to get — and there are thousands of people on the waiting list to receive one.

Police officers wrote her several tickets. Then, she said, they said they were going to take her cart and put it on a truck.

She thought her cart would be impounded, or taken to the precinct — so she asked where she could go to pick it up later. But when the truck arrived, she saw it was a garbage truck. Police officers threw Alvarado’s cart into the back.

The city has been cracking down on street vendors this year, with several high-profile incidents.

In April, a group of street vendors protested a flurry of tickets in Brooklyn, claiming they were being unfairly targeted by the police, WPIX reported. One man said he had been fined so often he had lost his home.