ICE Wielded An Unusual — And Possibly Unlawful — Tactic To Detain Dozens Of People

As federal law enforcement personnel from at least three agencies swarmed a manufacturing facility in upstate New York in September, a Border Patrol agent spotted a pallet of nutrition bars from the brand That’s It.

“Oh man,” he said. “That’s It bars? My Costco run is going to be fucked.”

The agent seemed to know what was about to happen. One by one, workers in the plant were rounded up and told to sort themselves by citizenship status. Agents then questioned each suspected unauthorized immigrant in a hot, over-capacity break room.

By the end of the raid, agents had used an unusual form of administrative warrant to question, and ultimately detain, 57 workers — over one-third of the people present that day — on allegations of being illegally present in the United States. Many have now been removed from the country; at least one person arrested at the plant was later deported by mistake, the government acknowledged.

The raid, as another agent put it, was “a shitshow.”

A federal judge raised a more concrete problem: the U.S. constitution.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Brenda K. Sannes granted one arrested worker’s motion to suppress evidence that resulted from her arrest at the plant that day, calling the arrest “unlawful.”

And on Tuesday, Sannes ordered the worker, a woman named Argentina Juarez-Lopez, to be released from pretrial criminal detention. But Juarez-Lopez still faces arrest and deportation on civil immigration grounds ― all stemming from an unlawful arrest.

The plant was raided in part as a result of an administrative warrant known as a “Blackie’s warrant,” in which law enforcement named no individual suspects of illegal immigration at the company but rather laid out general suspicions that an unspecified number of unauthorized migrants were working there.

For untold numbers of undocumented people leading otherwise quiet lives, raids like the one in Cato could mark a new chapter for the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” efforts.

Last month, Juarez-Lopez filed the motion to suppress all evidence obtained after her arrest in the ongoing criminal immigration case against her, including the fingerprints that authorities say revealed she had twice entered the United States without authorization, grounds for a felony charge.

Juarez-Lopez was taken into custody despite doing nothing aside from asking for a lawyer, her attorney alleged.

The government had a different story. Juarez-Lopez, authorities asserted, had disobeyed an officer who said “stop” after she left her post on the production line when the raid started. And when officers asked people to sort by citizenship, she did not claim to be a citizen: “meaning, practically, that she ― along with others in her situation ― de facto self-identified as present illegally in some manner,” federal prosecutors wrote in a filing against Juarez-Lopez’s motion to suppress.

After that, she declined to answer questions about where she was from, or whether she had documents. That was apparently enough. “Here,” prosecutors wrote, “the defendant’s refusal to produce her immigration documents upon request, where the defendant had already disobeyed a direct command of an officer to ‘stop’ and had walked away from that officer and where she did not avail herself of opportunities to identify herself as a citizen or legally authorized worker, gave the agents probable cause to arrest her without a warrant.”

Sannes, an Obama appointee and chief judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York, was not impressed. She granted Juarez-Lopez’s request. The evidence, Sannes wrote, was “the fruit of an unlawful arrest” and “agents subjected her to an unreasonable seizure violative of the Fourth Amendment.”

Through her court-appointed attorney, Paul Tuck, Juarez-Lopez declined to comment on her case.

“The Court’s decision on the motion to suppress harshly criticizes how law enforcement planned and executed the raid at the NBC factory,” Tuck said in an email Monday, referring to the manufacturer, Nutrition Bar Confectioners.

“Argentina was rounded up with her colleagues without any legal basis and thereafter arrested and detained before agents knew her name, what country she was from, or anything else about her,” he added. “The Court’s determination that Argentina’s seizure was ‘unreasonable’ and that the agents’ conduct was at best, ‘grossly negligent,’ is a strong rebuke to the tactics employed here and speaks to the growing trend of police overreach in the name of immigration enforcement. Hopefully the decision will deter future conduct of the type that happened here and alter how the federal government engages in immigration enforcement.”

The Trump administration did not respond to HuffPost’s questions about the raid.

For now, Juarez-Lopez’s future is uncertain. Sannes ordered Juarez-Lopez released from pretrial criminal detention at a hearing Tuesday. But she will likely still end up in immigration detention, and face possible deportation, due to a civil immigration detainer filed after her arrest, Tuck said, all because the administration acted in a way Sannes has ruled violated the Constitution.

“It creates this weird potential carve-out where there really is no remedy when [ICE] seizes someone unconstitutionally,” Tuck said in an interview last month. “You can’t really do much about it.”

The raid in September was the only confirmed use of a so-called Blackie’s warrant, which treats suspected undocumented immigrants as evidence of an administrative violation, during Donald Trump’s second term.

Agents from Border Patrol, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the IRS arrived at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners facility with a criminal investigative warrant to look into the business for violations like employing unauthorized workers and identity theft. Under that warrant, they collected business records and related material. Nutrition Bar Confectioners did not respond to a request for comment, and it’s unclear if management at the company is currently under investigation.

In addition to that criminal investigative warrant, agents carried a Blackie’s warrant, which named no individual suspects but was nonetheless used as the grounds to access the private facility in order to, ultimately, question dozens of people at the facility about their immigration status.

Blackie’s warrants ― which get their name from Blackie’s House of Beef in Washington, D.C., which twice sued the government over immigration raids ― are useful for immigration authorities who want to search a business they think has employed undocumented immigrants, but who don’t have sufficient information about individual employees.

They were also popularized before the modern era of criminalized immigration enforcement, which critics, including at least one federal judge, have said is a fatal flaw for the government’s attempts to use the warrants today.

After warning that “an administrative warrant may not be used, however, as a pretext to gather evidence for a criminal prosecution,” an ICE handbook explains that “the major advantage of the Blackie’s warrant is that there is no need to specifically name the aliens being sought. Rather, the Blackie’s warrant and accompanying affidavit need only set forth a plausible basis for believing that there are unnamed illegal aliens present at the location to be searched.”

Video from various agents’ body cameras shows dozens of law enforcement personnel swarming Nutrition Bar Confectioners on the morning of Sept. 4.

Early on, male agents pushed into a women’s bathroom to round up workers inside.

“Miss, pull up your pants! Come out of the bathroom!” one officer told a worker sitting on the toilet, after pulling his head over the stall door to see his target. (“She’s asking to wait, says she needs to move her pants up,” one Spanish-speaking ICE agent translated for the officer.) “Please hurry, ma’am,” the officer said.

On another camera a couple of minutes later, according to the body cameras’ time stamps, an agent is heard laughing, “Bathrooms are clear ― we checked!”

Eventually, the agents gathered the workers in a break room, where they methodically sorted them by self-declared citizenship and job. “Are you a U.S. citizen? Are you a manager or supervisor here?” U.S. citizens were led down a hallway, and noncitizens were lined up on one side of the break room and questioned one by one by immigration agents as they filtered back to the other side of the room.

At least one agent seemed to acknowledge the coercive dynamics at play when he asked for help keeping people who would be questioned further about their immigration status separate from those who hadn’t yet been questioned.

“Technically we can’t tell them not to” move across the room, the agent giving instructions said, after lowering his voice. “But, we just need to keep track of them, because they’ve already been sorted.”

At one point, the footage shows a woman who Tuck later identified as Jaurez-Lopez. Arms crossed, wearing a black Puma T-shirt and a polite smile, she asks for a lawyer when an agent begins questioning her. She’s sent to the other side of the room, alongside dozens of others who were eventually arrested.

Only later, in custody at the Oswego Customs and Border Protection station, was she made to give her name, birthday and fingerprint ― information authorities used to find out her immigration history, which then served as the basis of felony reentry charges. Four days after she was arrested, Juarez-Lopez appeared in court and learned she was being charged with a crime. She has pleaded not guilty.

In her opinion, granting Juarez-Lopez’s motion to suppress evidence obtained after her arrest, Sannes noted that there had been “no evidence presented” to support one striking claim in a DHS arrest record, which said Juarez-Lopez “freely admitted to being in the United States illegally” when she was initially detained at Nutrition Bar Confectioners.

Beyond that, even if the warrant itself had been constitutional ― “an issue which is far from clear cut,” Sannes noted in her opinion ― the agents’ actions far exceeded what they were authorized to do.

For example, the judge noted that when authorities applied for the warrant, they said it would entail “consensual questioning of employees,” and that they would “approach and question” employees about their status. In reality, officers’ actions “differed drastically from these representations,” the judge said, and involved briefly seizing every employee present at the plant, directing them to answer questions about their citizenship, and then telling those who did not identify as citizens to approach the officers for even more questions ― the opposite of how the government said it would work.

The judge also flagged agents’ direction that people self-sort by citizenship status.

“The Government cites no caselaw establishing agents’ authority to engage in the employee sorting which occurred during the detention,” she wrote.

And prosecutors’ claims about Juarez-Lopez’s actions providing the basis for arrest also didn’t hold up. There was no evidence that arresting officers knew the defendant had supposedly “fled” during the sweep, Sannes wrote.

The other two bases for suspicion fell similarly flat with the judge.

“The agent [who briefly questioned Juarez-Lopez] did not know Defendant’s name, where she was born, or any other biographical information. All he knew before the interview was that she did not self-identify as a U.S. citizen or authorized worker—in other words, that she had remained silent. Defendant’s responses to the agent’s questions provided no additional information, only that she wanted a lawyer,” Sannes wrote.

“In sum,” she added, “no evidence reflects that the arresting agents knew of the facts the Government says established probable cause. And had agents known those facts, Defendant’s silence and request for counsel — even in response to a question concerning her ‘documents’ — was in any event insufficient.”

The seizure violated the Fourth Amendment. And the judge granted the motion to suppress evidence collected after Juarez-Lopez’s arrest in part to discourage this type of federal law enforcement behavior in the future.

“Good reason exists to deter future conduct of the type that happened here,” Sannes wrote.

It’s not clear whether any more Blackie’s warrants have been used in Trump’s second term. Businesses raided by ICE, especially those where management faces potential charges themselves, aren’t in a hurry to make news of the event.

Still, a few days after the raid, John A. Sarcone III, then and now the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, warned that similar enforcement actions would continue.

“You can expect to see federal law enforcement at more worksites going forward,” Sarcone said.

Large immigration raids were not a feature of Trump’s first term in office, but they are now. That’s by design.

“You would need to switch to indiscriminate, or large scale, enforcement activities, basically going into any place where there’s no congregations of illegals and holding everybody on site, determining who’s there illegally, and then taking people who are there illegally into federal detention,” Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and by far the loudest voice in Trump’s ear on immigration enforcement, said in 2023.

That approach has become part of Trump’s mass deportation agenda. And should Blackie’s warrants become normalized ― as the authors of Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a second Trump term, recommended ― they would open the door for the Trump administration to enter workplaces to question employees, even if officials only have a general idea that undocumented people may work there.

But Sannes’ decision Friday adds to a swell of judicial resistance to the warrants.

In May, a magistrate judge in the Southern District of Texas flatly denied the Trump administration’s application for a Blackie’s warrant in that district, writing, “People are not documents or safety hazards.”

Magistrate Judge Andrew Edison noted that a few years after the appeals court case that gave Blackie’s warrants their name, Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 into law, which criminalized knowingly hiring undocumented people without work authorization. At that point, he said, it became possible for the government to use administrative Blackie’s warrants, which are easier to get than criminal warrants, to collect evidence for a criminal investigation.

“That simply cannot be right,” the judge wrote.

Nonetheless, the government argued in New York’s North District that the magistrate’s decision in Texas’s Southern District was “not binding or precedential.” And they may say the same about Sannes’ decision to suppress the evidence gained after what has now been deemed as an unlawful arrest.

The September raid at the Cato plant “appears to be the white hot center of a massive web of constitutional questions,” Perry Grossman, a supervising attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, told HuffPost. The NYCLU assisted in Juarez-Lopez’s motion to suppress the evidence gathered after her arrest.

Grossman compared the Blackie’s warrant used in the search to the so-called “general warrants” used by British King George III, which ultimately inspired the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

“My hope,” he said, “is that the Fourth Amendment still protects people against the things we fought a goddamn revolution over.”