New Jersey officials and immigrant rights advocates blasted federal immigration authorities for conducting a workplace raid on a small business in the city of Newark without a warrant.
In a news conference Friday morning, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said several agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered the back of the business, arrested three undocumented workers, and detained and questioned employees who are U.S. citizens.
“People were fingerprinted. Pictures of their IDs and faces were taken there,” the Democratic mayor said. “I was appalled, upset, angry that this would happen here in this state, in this country, that this would be allowed.”
While ICE confirmed it conducted “a targeted enforcement operation at a worksite” in Newark, it did not say how many people were taken into custody following the raid, saying, “This is an active investigation and, per ICE policy, we cannot discuss ongoing investigations.”
Baraka’s remarks came a day after ICE arrests spiked Thursday, signaling that President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and his promises to carry out “the largest deportation program in American history” are starting to materialize.
ICE confirmed to NBC News that the agency arrested 538 people nationwide just on Thursday, doubling its daily arrests average. The news comes as reports of suspected immigration raids have emerged in cities like Boston.
The Newark raid happened at Ocean Seafood Depot, a seafood wholesaler in the city. A witness who spoke with WNJU, Telemundo’s TV station in New Jersey, said he saw armed officers wearing uniforms with ICE’s initials arrive a little before noon Thursday.
Immigration officers are generally allowed to enter the public areas of a business, even in sanctuary states like New Jersey, but require a valid warrant or the owner’s permission to access nonpublic areas. Sanctuary cities and states have local policies that limit their cooperation with immigration authorities for enforcement purposes.
An employee who was at Ocean Seafood Depot when the raid happened told NBC New York that the three colleagues ICE arrested had been working there for a few years.
“Everybody’s afraid because we don’t know if this is normal,” said the employee, who only identified herself by her first name, Eugenia.
Baraka also accused ICE of detaining both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens.
One of the detainees was a U.S. military veteran “who suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned,” Baraka said in a statement. “Newark will not stand by idly while people are being unlawfully terrorized.”
In response, ICE said, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may encounter U.S. citizens while conducting field work and may request identification to establish an individual’s identity.” The agency added that this was the case during the Newark raid.
This raid marks a shift on immigration enforcement in the U.S., as the previous administration, of President Joe Biden, largely stayed away from conducting workplace raids.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump promised to prioritize the deportations of immigrants who have committed serious crimes. However, workplace raids mostly result in the arrests of working individuals who happen to be undocumented.
“None of these people were rapists or murderers or criminals,” Baraka said about the people picked up in the Newark raid.
New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin reacted to the raid in a statement saying his office regularly works with the federal government “to remove violent criminals from our communities and we will continue to do so. However, President Trump’s stated desire to deport millions of people clearly goes beyond removing dangerous criminals.”
“Some of the tactics could very well make us less safe, for instance, by making people in our communities fearful of coming forward and reporting crimes,” Platkin said. According to his office, no local or state law enforcement officials were involved in the Newark raid.
Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said members of her organization arrived at the small business after the ICE officers had already left.
They arrived with attorneys, bilingual documents and interpreters to assist the affected workers, Torres said during the news conference. She said that most of the employees did not return to work that day.
According to the employees who stayed behind, ICE agents were “heavily armed” and entered the business with no prior announcement, blocking off entrances, exits and delivery ramps, Torres said. “They were banging down bathroom doors to make sure no one was hiding inside. And most importantly, as the mayor said, they did all of this without being able to produce a single name or a single warrant.”
Torres added: “ICE has overreached beyond what should be constitutionally allowed. That is allowing them to profile our communities while also making everyone else guilty by association.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an X post Thursday night that the 538 people arrested by ICE so far across the nation are “illegal immigrant criminals including a suspected terrorist, four members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and several illegals convicted of sex crimes against minors.”
Leavitt also said that the Trump administration “also deported hundreds of illegal immigrant criminals via military aircraft.”
“The largest massive deportation operation in history is well underway,” she added.
At least one deportation flight landed in Guatemala on Thursday morning, according to the Guatemalan vice president’s office, which posted a video on its Instagram story. The plane in the video transported migrants who were deported from the U.S.
“Accompanying returned compatriots with humanitarian support and the assistance they need, from the national immigration authority,” the Instagram story’s caption read in Spanish.
The Guatemalan Migration Institute, a government office of the Central American nation, wrote in a news release that 80 Guatemalans returned, all of whom were adults, including 31 women, 48 men and an unaccompanied minor.
