Inside a Lawless ICE Raid That Tore Families Apart

On September 4, 2025, as workers went about their normal morning activities, sixty armed and masked federal agents – supported by two local law enforcement agencies – stormed the Nutrition Bar Confectioners factory in Cato, New York. Officers grabbed and detained more than 100 workers. They used crowbars to open doors and even barged into a bathroom stall where one woman was using the toilet.

“Suddenly I saw military men entering with guns and balaclavas and bulletproof vests. I didn’t know what to do or what to say,” Argentina Juárez-López, one of the workers seized that day and a plaintiff in our lawsuit, told the NYCLU in Spanish. The vision of the agents descending on the factory brought her back to the memory of guerilla soldiers entering her Guatemalan village, when she and the other children would hide.

“It was the same,” she said. “They had us surrounded. They were on the roof, they were outside.”

Agents herded workers – including U.S. citizens – into a break room where they first commanded the U.S. citizens in the room to identify themselves. The U.S. citizens who identified themselves were not released; instead, they were taken to another room where workers – such as plaintiff Pedro Rojas, a U.S. citizen born in Puerto Rico – were required to show ID and give their contact information before agents would allow them to be escorted out of the factory. The workers remaining in the break room were then forcibly interrogated about their immigration status. And agents arrested workers such as Argentina just for asking to speak with a lawyer. Officers did not know her name, let alone her immigration status, when they arrested her.

While the raid took place, a body camera recorded a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent’s chilling remarks comparing immigrant children to animals. Other officers listened without objection, revealing the racist underpinning of the operation.

Federal agents arrested at least 57 workers. Many were denied opportunities to talk to lawyers or their families before agents rushed them to out-of-state detention facilities as far away as Louisiana. On the first day of the new school year, agents separated over 20 workers from their children, and immediately deported some workers without due process.

“I saw many people crying for their children,” Argentina said.

Eddie, another plaintiff in the case, was deported to Guatemala after just 72 hours – despite having a work permit. He had lived in the U.S. for twenty years. Now, his wife struggles to care for their two boys alone, working overtime to try to keep the family afloat while coping with her grief over the sudden, forced separation.

“She’s got a lot of depression,” Eddie told the NYCLU.

ICE agents also forcibly separated M., who prefers to use her first initial, from her two-year-old U.S.-citizen child, sent her to a detention facility in Texas, and deported her to Guatemala even though she had a pending appeal in her asylum case.

“I showed them my work permit, my [social] security, and a pending asylum case I had,” M. told the NYCLU in Spanish. “They sent me to line up where other people were going and they took me to a van,” she continued. “After that, they took me to detention.”

The raid shattered families and communities. Officers acted lawlessly, flagrantly violating people’s constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. And the agents did so in opposition to what they told a Magistrate Judge they were going to do that morning.

Last year, the NYCLU successfully fought to unseal the applications for the two warrants used to justify the raid, revealing that the warrants the government claimed authorized the immigration sweep did not give agents authority to seize any individual, and the government didn’t even ask the court for the authority to do so. Instead, the government only asked for authority to conduct “consensual questioning” of workers at NBC. In other words, the agents seized, separated, interrogated, and arrested workers without any justification.

That’s why, on behalf of Pedro, Argentina, Eddie, M., and their fellow workers, the NYCLU and Worker Justice Center of New York are suing a group of ICE and CBP agents, as well as the two county sheriffs that worked with them, for violating workers’ constitutional rights, including by targeting Latinx workers based on their ethnicity.

Our lawsuit argues that agents engaged in a bias-based conspiracy to seize a huge number of people even though they didn’t suspect any specific individuals of crimes. This was all in the service of meeting Trump’s goal of carrying out the largest mass deportations in U.S. history.

DHS has mounted similar dragnet operations targeted at Latinx people across the country, including in Minnesota, South Carolina, Oregon, Idaho, and more.

Our lawsuit includes some of the first civil rights claims under the New York State Bivens Act, a state law enacted this year that allows people to sue public officers, including federal officers, for violating their rights under the United States Constitution. And finally, our lawsuit seeks to allow Eddie to return to the United States so that he can be reunited with his family and continue to pursue his immigration case.

“What ICE is doing right now is an injustice against Hispanic people, all Hispanic people, to the point that it doesn’t matter if you’re Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Puerto Rican,” Pedro told the NYCLU in Spanish.

“Once they hear you speaking Spanish, they’re discriminating against you and mistreating you.”