Agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agencies raided a warehouse in Edison on Wednesday.
Edison Mayor Samip Joshi told The New York Times that 29 people were arrested and that his office and the Edison Police Department were aware of the raid in advance.
People employed at the warehouse said workers were lined up inside the facility and all those without documentation were detained.
The warehouse receives foreign goods, which U.S. Customs and Border Protection has said gives it the authority to conduct surprise inspections like the one in Edison.
Immigration advocates on Thursday were trying to determine who was detained and where, so they could inform the families of those detained.
“We were able to identify one place, which is what we call the black site of ICE on Frelinghuysen Avenue in Newark. And as of today, we still don’t know if they’ve been transferred from Frelinghuysen to Delaney Hall or the Elizabeth Detention Center,” said Carlos Castaneda, a community organizer with the pro-immigrant group Cosecha-NJ.
In a statement issued Thursday, Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Andy Kim (D-NJ), said, “Yesterday’s chaotic raid on a shipping warehouse in Edison, which resulted in multiple injuries, serves as yet another stark reminder that, despite Trump’s pledge to go after the so-called ‘worst of the worst,’ his administration is instead just terrorizing workers and immigrant communities.”
In a separate ICE operation in Trenton on Thursday, Border Patrol agents approached day laborers, one of whom was detained; two others ran away.
“They fled, we’re not sure [of] their whereabouts. But there were no search warrants, there’s no judicial warrants. So we definitely know that it was not somebody targeted. There’s no criminal activity here,” said Ana Paola, executive director of Resistencia en Acción NJ.
Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora, in a statement, said, “Trenton is a city that values and protects all of its residents. Our police department will continue to uphold the New Jersey Attorney General’s Immigrant Trust Directive. That means TPD does not question people about immigration status, does not enforce civil immigration law, and does not assist ICE in carrying out raids simply because someone may be undocumented. The role of TPD this morning was limited to maintaining public safety and preventing escalation … Trenton is not in the business of aiding immigration raids.”
