Catalina Rojas promised last week and was delighted to start planning one of the most exciting moments of her life. Those plans were quickly derailed on Wednesday when their fiance was arrested by immigration authorities during a warehouse raid in Edison, New Jersey. Now he faces deportation.
The fiance of Rojas, an immigrant from Honduras, was swept with more than two dozen of others in an immigration application operation in the package distribution warehouse where he worked.
“He was very devastating,” said Rojas, 22, to NBC News on Thursday. “He is the type of man who will do anything for his friends, for his family, for me. He is not a criminal. The only thing he has stolen is my heart.” Rojas asked that his fiance remains anonymity for fear of compensation in his case.
The workplace raid is one of the largest federal immigration actions in the region to date and occurs as the pressure increases officials to comply with the promise of President Donald Trump to Deporting 1 million undocumented immigrants per year.
Until now, the authorities have said little about the operation. The office of the mayor of Edison said in a statement that 29 people were arrested as part of the raid. The Edison Police Department was informed by the Department of National Security on Wednesday that the agency would carry out an operation in the area, according to the statement.
The mayor’s office also said that the directed building is an customs customs warehouse, an installation where foreign merchandise can be stored without the payment of import tariffs for up to five years.
The National Security Department, the agency that directs the application of immigration and customs and customs and border protection, did not respond to comments on the raid in Edison.
Immigration defenders who rushed the warehouse on Wednesday morning described a chaotic scene with CBP officers and other unidentified police officers who protect the facilities, which they said it was surrounded by unproof cars and civil vans without marking with dyed windows, as well as police vehicles.
The defenders could not enter the installation or see how many people were being arrested.
“Family members appeared. They were crying. Some people were trying to bring documentation,” said Amanda Domínguez, a new work community organizer, a defense group for immigrant workers.
The authorities, she said, “were not being useful. They would not tell them where they took their families.”
Dominguez saw a desperate Rojas trying to locate his fiance among the multiple family members that witnessed the scene.
Another woman on the scene said she was worried about her husband and that she had left her little son with a babysitter to try to find him, he said.
“She was outside trying to send text messages and call her husband, and she was crying when he stopped responding through text messages,” Domínguez said.
“We had a very distressed young woman whose father was there and she believed she had been arrested,” said Ellen Whitt, coordinator of the Direct Immigration Line in the DIRE Defense Organization. The direct line had received calls on the raid and sent a team response team.
Rojas finally listened to his fiance that he had been arrested and taken to an ice detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She has not been able to talk to him since then.
“I have not heard anything. I have been reviewing with his family and our lawyer and nobody has heard anything so far,” he said. She hopes that her lawyer can make her fiance released to fight against her immigration case from her home and not within a detention center.
The raid in Edison lasted hours and the workers who could demonstrate their legal status received a yellow bracelet and finally were released, Dominguez and Whitt said. Others were taken to unmarked vehicles and sent to ice custody, they said.
Both defenders asked local officials to take action and condemn the warehouse raid.
“I am only listening to a lot of silence from the mayor of Edison, a lot of silence of the governor. [Phil] Murphy, “Domínguez said.” What happened to a sure and cozy new sweater? “
CBP, in collaboration with ICE, has carried out unnoticed inspections of such warehouses before, which leads to immigration arrests.
In March, the Trump administration said that 19 people were arrested after making an unnoticed inspection of a customs warehouse in Newark “to ensure that the installation adheres to the CBP protocols for the import of loading that enters the United States.”
This operation was carried out “in part to ensure that employees who work in regulated/linked CBP facilities are legally present and were allowed to work in the United States,” CBP said in a statement at that time.
