When Lenny Schmidt arrived at his family-run nutrition bar manufacturing business in upstate New York Thursday morning, federal immigration agents were already there.
“The agents were swarming the plant,” he said. “There were probably over 100 of these agents, on four-wheelers, on foot, they had dogs.”
“They had surrounded the facility and forced their way through into the plant … using, I think, crowbars,” Schmidt, the company’s co-owner and vice president, told CNN’s Laura Coates on Friday.
By the end of the hourslong raid at Nutrition Bar Confectioners in Cato, a rural community about 30 miles northwest of Syracuse, dozens of employees had been detained.
The raid in Cato coincided with a similar operation in Ellabell, Georgia, where federal agents detained 475 workers, mostly Korean nationals suspected of living or working in the US illegally. It marked the largest sweep yet in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown at worksites, which has increasingly targeted industries like manufacturing and agriculture that often depend on immigrant labor.
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