As Department of Homeland Security agents on Thursday morning besieged a food production facility in Cato, New York, deputies from the nearby Cayuga and Oswego County Sheriff’s offices performed a more passive role: crowd control.
The sheriffs say their deputies stood guard outside the Nutrition Bar Confectioners facility while agents from various federal agencies — including US Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE Homeland Security Investigations, and IRS Criminal Investigation — reportedly pried doors with crowbars to enter the facility, and ultimately led about 70 workers into vans.
DHS told Central Current that the raid of the food production plant was part of a criminal investigation.
In interviews with Central Current after the raid, Oswego Sheriff Don Hilton and Cayuga Sheriff Brian Schenck echoed a statement from DHS that characterized the arrests of dozens of workers at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners facility as a “criminal investigation.”
So far, however, Hilton, Schenck and DHS have declined to say what crimes they were investigating.
Jessica Maxwell, the executive director of the Workers Center CNY, said the operation looked like an immigration raid to her and other activists who witnessed the scene. Maxwell and other members of Workers Center CNY know 26 of the workers who she said are now detained in the Oswego Border Patrol Station.
“When you have Customs and Border Patrol and HSI and masked agents going in, it looks like you’re doing an immigration raid,” Maxwell said, “and they presented no evidence or no information to the community, so they’re not exactly building trust.”
Hilton, who said he was on vacation at the time of the raid, insisted that ICE — an agency encouraged by Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller to detain more than 3,000 people per day — was prompted by a criminal investigation to detain workers in the Cato facility.
“You’re calling it a raid,” Hilton said to a Central Current reporter. “This is an ongoing criminal investigation. It’s a joint investigation with the feds, with Homeland Security. It’s not an immigration raid. It is for criminal actions.”
Homeland Security and Schenck also declined to provide details on the alleged crime or crimes that prompted the operation, but Schenck repeated crime, not violations of civil immigration law, led to the raid.
“We don’t have the legal authority to enforce civil laws at the federal level, but we certainly have the the ability, and I think that we have the duty, to investigate and address criminal activity that occurs within our jurisdiction, and that’s certainly what we were assisting Homeland Security with today,” Schenck told Central Current Thursday afternoon.
In a Friday afternoon post on Facebook, Schenck said the Cayuga County Sheriff’s Office was asked one month ago to help in Thursday’s raid, which he said was part of an investigation into “felony level crimes”. Federal law enforcement obtained a search warrant prior to entering the food facility, he wrote. Schenck’s post did not clarify who asked the agency to assist.
Along with nine deputies, the Cayuga County Sheriff’s Office also loaned its command vehicle – which U.S. Customs and Border Protection paid for 14 years ago – for “command coordination,” according to Schenck.
Maxwell saw the sheriffs deputies outside the facility, and is not sure if they assisted the raid in a more active role than the “exterior security” that both sheriffs say their deputies performed.
“If there’s a criminal investigation, why can’t they be involved in arrests?” Maxwell said. “If it’s only immigration detentions that are happening, why are they there?”
DHS offers local law enforcement agencies the opportunity to officially partner with ICE and actively support ICE’s deportation operations. ICE’s 287(g) agreements essentially deputize local police officers to enforce immigration law.
Ten New York law enforcement agencies have signed on to formally assist ICE in the federal agency’s deportation operations. Cayuga and Oswego Counties have not signed such pacts – and don’t intend to, according to both counties’ sheriffs.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James has questioned whether NY state law permits state and local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law through such agreements.
“We never went in the facility itself,” Hilton said. “The agreement was that we’re going to provide security at a distance in case of any issues. That’s all our involvement was today.”
Hilton said this was the first time in his tenure that his office has assisted in a federal operation like this. Schenck, the Cayuga County sheriff, said this was the first time this year that his office has performed such a role in a federal law enforcement operation.
Maxwell said some of the dozens of detained workers’ families told Workers Center CNY that federal agents entered from multiple sides of the facility, and herded workers into a breakroom.
Photos and videos emerging from the Cato raids show stark scenes within and without the food production plant. One video, posted to Facebook by an immigrant agriculture labor advocacy group called Rural and Migrant Ministry, Inc., shows agents in bulletproof vests and tactical gear lumbering toward a CBP van, a line of women in tow.
Among the women ICE arrested is a nursing mother, whose 8-month-old child is inconsolable after being separated from her mother, according to Maxwell. Federal agents detained several more parents, Maxwell said, and some children may have returned from school to a parentless home.
“To do this on the second day of school, it makes things particularly chaotic for families who may not have had emergency contacts set up or things like that,” Maxwell said. “This is already a chaotic time for parents and kids, and it’s really, really cruel and unnecessary to be doing an action like this at this particular time.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul, the attorney general, and State Senators Rachel May and Chris Ryan all excoriated the raid in its aftermath. Meanwhile, Workers Center CNY and other advocacy groups have been protesting outside CBP’s offices in Oswego.
“There’s just a complete lack of transparency and accountability in these actions,” Maxwell said. “If they can get that many agencies collaborating and on the scene, I think at the very least they could respect people’s rights when they do it.”
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