ICE Raid That Rocks NY Town Sparks Scrutiny One Year Later

(Bloomberg) — More than 60 federal immigration agents, many masked and dressed in military fatigues, stormed a family’s granola-bar factory in upstate Cato, New York, on the first day of school a year ago this week.

Agents forced their way into the women’s restrooms and peered through the stalls inside the Nutrition Bar Confectionery. They herded pregnant women and young mothers into a sweaty restroom filled with about 160 workers, including some US citizens.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and other federal agencies spent months investigating whether Nutrition Bar Confectioners was a haven for undocumented workers and obtained two search warrants. One gave them permission to seize records and electronics that could prove the company had hired workers illegally; second, to conduct “consensus” employee polling. The workers could not be pressured to speak, and could only be arrested if there was probable cause they were undocumented, according to the warrant and the judge’s ruling.

But when the agents burst through the door, they quickly turned away from their stated purpose and began rounding up the workers, a federal judge found. English speakers were separated from Spanish speakers and no one was allowed to leave the building until they were questioned by agents. Witnesses described a chaotic and poorly organized affair, with one customs official calling the operation a “shitshow,” according to body camera video and a Dec. 18 court ruling.

“The conduct of the agents here was grossly negligent at best … the agents behaved significantly differently from what the government told the magistrate judge,” wrote Brenda K. Sannes, Chief U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of New York, as she suppressed all evidence in a criminal case against one of the detained workers. “Even assuming the warrant complies with the Fourth Amendment — an issue that is far from clear — the agents clearly exceeded its intended scope.”

A year after one of the largest immigration raids in New York’s modern history, many of the claims made at the time by immigration officials, DOJ lawyers and ICE agents have been refuted by court filings, affidavits, surveillance footage and court rulings.

In the charging affidavit, one supervisor documented a confession that “obviously never happened,” Sannes wrote. Other federal agents said they learned at the scene that the person arrested for illegal reentry was from Guatemala and refused to turn over immigration papers, according to the motion to suppress and court exhibits. Instead, agents never asked for immigration documents and didn’t know her legal status until hours after the arrest, according to the motion and Sannes’ ruling.

When they asked for a search warrant, agents wrote that the main purpose of the warrant was to look for employment records. Camera footage and affidavits show agents began searching only after detaining, questioning and arresting dozens of workers, according to a defense motion and court exhibits.

A total of 57 undocumented workers, including some who had valid work permits or were awaiting asylum hearings, were detained and transported to facilities in Texas and Louisiana that day. The mother of three young children, including a U.S. citizen, was swept away and “improperly deported” while awaiting an asylum hearing to be returned when the mistake came to light, a Texas federal judge wrote in a January order.

Agents on the scene told plant managers they were looking for two violent offenders believed to be involved in the murder. Five days after the raid, Acting US Attorney John Sarcone III admitted at a press conference that none of the detainees had a criminal record, except for the five charged with illegal re-entry.

Video: Courtesy of Syracuse.com

While Nutrition Bar’s hiring practices were the cited reason for the raid, no criminal or civil charges were filed against the company, according to federal court records.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York said in a written response to questions that he “cannot comment on this as it is the subject of an ongoing investigation. As for the owner, I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation or pending prosecution.”

The Department of Homeland Security said in an emailed statement that “there are no formal rulings against the search warrant” and that it is complying with all lawful court orders.

The judge’s reprimand, the young mother’s botched deportation and other missteps outlined in court documents in New York and Louisiana ultimately made little difference, records show. Almost all of the 57 workers detained were deported, including one after a judge granted her custody.

“It seems to me like ICE is just experimenting with raids like this, and not just in Cato,” said Jessica Maxwell, executive director of the Workers Center of Central New York. “We’ll see what happens when we go to the workplace, even if the warrant really can’t stand, and we’ll continue to do so until we see if there are any consequences.”

DHS said in a statement that pending asylum applications do not confer legal status and that “the end result will be the same — illegal aliens will not be able to remain in the US.”

Shortly after the raid began at 9:18 a.m., a mother working at the Nutrition Bar called a friend in the Fulton student district with a frantic message: I can’t get home, please take care of my baby.

No one from ICE or law enforcement notified or alerted the district so they could schedule child care, Superintendent Douglas Lawrence said.

“It was pretty chaotic around here. We were doing a guessing game trying to figure out which parents were involved and then trying to find a trusted adult who could help take care of them,” said Lawrence, who was newly admitted and went through his first school.

“We didn’t get into politics, we just focused on making sure the kids had a safe place for the kids, even though we didn’t really know what was going on,” Lawrence said.

In the days that followed, the community came together and donated food and clothing to about a dozen affected families, he said. He said the area has always been supportive of the immigrant community, while acknowledging that many have kept a low profile in the year since the raid.

In addition to the woman who was mistakenly deported, among the detained workers was the mother of three US citizen children – ages 16, 9 and 6 – who had been in the US for more than 20 years. Also swept up were several men who had spent years working and raising families in the U.S., at least two pregnant women and others awaiting asylum hearings, and many with valid work permits, worker advocates said at the time.

Another employee, Argentina Juarez-Lopez, 50, clearly asked to speak with an attorney and refused to speak with agents, according to transcripts from the cameras and the judge’s ruling. But in an arrest affidavit, one agent wrote that Juarez-Lopez “freely” admitted she was in the country illegally and did not ask for a lawyer.

Unlike most of the workers, Juarez-Lopez was charged with the crime of illegally re-entering the country. That gave her the right to discovery, including search warrants, body camera footage and affidavits from federal agents. Her attorney, Paul Tuck, used the information to argue that the evidence obtained during the raid should be thrown out.

Sannes, the district court judge, acknowledged that suppressing the evidence likely would have killed the case, but said the government’s actions had left her no choice.

“There is good reason to deter future conduct of the type that occurred here. The agents arrested the defendant following a mass seizure conducted in a manner substantially different from what the government represented to the magistrate judge,” Sannes wrote.

Sannes ruled that agents considered acts such as asking for a lawyer, speaking Spanish or showing fear of armed undercover agents as probable cause to arrest.

Juarez-Lopez remained incarcerated in an immigration detainer and was deported shortly after the case was dismissed.

Most of the 160 workers at the site were detained only briefly, while another 57 were taken into ICE custody that morning, according to a review of court documents and habeas petitions.

That included the mother of three American students in the school system, Juana Castillo Avelar, her attorney wrote in a February petition for her release from a Louisiana detention center.

A federal judge released her on $9,000 bail, but ICE has not released her, according to the petition. ICE also said in court documents that Avelar and her attorneys were served an electronic notice of appeal to keep her in custody.

“That statement is false,” Baton Rouge attorney David Rozas wrote in the February habeas petition, noting that Avelar has not yet had an attorney or access to any electronic filings.

Avelar’s family filed a bond again, but she was deported before she could be released.

In June, a federal judge ruled that Avelar had no legal recourse because the deportation gave her what she was looking for — to be released from ICE custody.

“(The petition) is denied and dismissed without prejudice because petitioners’ claims are moot. It sought only a release from custody,” U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty wrote in a one-page order.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, with the help of local sheriffs, spent six months building a case that Nutrition Bar Confectioners employed hundreds of undocumented workers and did not participate in the federal E-Verify system, which allows employers to check the legal status of applicants and workers based on a search warrant application.

In late February 2025, Oswego County deputies pulled over a car they said ran over a “dangerous road marking.” A few weeks later, the police stopped another car that they said did not use a turn signal.

In each case, deputies called CBP, searched the cars and found papers, fake or borrowed IDs and other documentation that showed they worked at Nutrition Bar and were not in the country legally, according to ICE’s application to search the factory.

This pattern continued for months, with local sheriff’s deputies stopping cars and alerting the Border Patrol, which gathered information about the Nutrition Bar while deporting other workers.

Investigators found that in the first quarter of 2025 alone, 134 of the company’s 225 employees used Social Security numbers that belonged to someone else, were assigned to dead people or were made up, according to the search warrant request. Acting U.S. Attorney John Sarcone said at a news conference days after the crackdown that while he didn’t catch “the worst of the worst,” he sent a message to a company that flagrantly violated immigration laws.

But a year later, the family business continues to do business as it has for the past five decades, while prosecutors won’t comment on whether they’re still building a case.

Confectioners Nutrition Bars did not respond to calls seeking comment. At the time, it issued a statement saying it had thoroughly vetted all employees and created a diverse, welcoming culture.

“We have never broken the law,” co-owner and vice president Lenny Schmidt told Syracuse.com at the time. “We always follow the law to the ‘T’ to the best of our ability. We will cooperate with anyone, with any authority, we will work to make it right.”

The company acknowledged in another statement that the workers would not be returning. “We are saddened and heartbroken for the families who wanted a better life in America, worked hard and are now being separated,” the statement said.

Maxwell of the Worker’s Center, which provided legal services to many of the detainees, said the lack of action against the employer suggested traffic was coming to a halt and the manhunt was about hunting workers.

“We haven’t seen a raid of this magnitude before or since, and I think it’s because of public backlash, not because of the legal ramifications for ICE,” Maxwell said. “Two years ago, you would never have seen them detaining, deporting people with valid work permits. Now everything has changed.”

To contact the reporter for this story: John Holland at jholland1@bloombergindustry.com

Contact editors responsible for this story: Bernie Kohn at bkohn@bloomberglaw.com; Gary Harki at gharki@bloombergindustry.com

(Update with DHS response beginning in paragraph 13)

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