The sprawling snack-food factory in upstate New York appeared to be closed when a small army of immigration officers arrived after 9 a.m. Following a brief discussion of whether to force their way inside, a manager opened the front door.
Over the next several hours, body cameras were running as federal authorities from several agencies made 57 arrests, debated which files to seize and when to release employees who were U.S. citizens. They also searched for anyone in hiding.
The footage from September 2025 shows the raid at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners plant in Cato, N.Y., town of 2,500 people east of Syracuse, and offers a rare glimpse inside a workplace immigration sweep. The Associated Press analyzed the video, which was part of a lawsuit filed Thursday that accuses authorities of overstepping their search warrants.
The officers ordered a manager to announce their presence over loudspeakers while they entered the building and caught employees on the production line, in the warehouse and a few in the bathroom. Officers covered all exits while others swept the interior, including homing in on locked doors.
Male officers encountered a locked bathroom and began shouting instructions in broken Spanish at female employees through the door, demanding that they come out. After about 10 seconds, officers broke through the door.
One woman was outside of a stall and another in the stall. A male officer peered through a locked stall door, and his body cam video revealed a woman sitting on the toilet.
“Miss, pull up your pants. Come out of the bathroom,” he told her.
“You have to wait. I can’t come out like this, naked!” she replied.
Investigators interviewed the general manager and said they were looking into hiring practices and potential fraudulent documents. Inside and outside the building, officers checked every office, storage room and hallway for anyone who was hiding.
Employees were lined up and separated into groups of U.S. citizens and potential noncitizens. Officers asked for their immigration status, requested documents and posed questions about their entry into the U.S. Some employees were pregnant.
Some were parents and expressed concern for their children at home. Others said they would not answer questions without first speaking to their attorneys, and officers told them they would be arrested.
One employee refused to answer questions. “Will you let me talk to my attorney?” she asked the officer. He raised his voice and continued asking about her immigration status.
U.S. citizens were asked for personal information, including their phone numbers and addresses before they were allowed to leave.
A Border Patrol agent who spoke to another official wearing a camera used disparaging language about children from other countries when recounting his experience working at a South Texas immigrant detention center. He said President Biden’s administration allowed millions of people to enter the United States from countries where children are treated “differently” than they are by American parents.
“In other countries, kids are more of a commodity or it’s more of like, I’m going to put it in those terms. It’s more like an animal, right? It’s not prized the way that we do it,” he said.
“There’s countries like Brazil and other places where they’re literal street rats at a very young age who commit crimes, and then they come here. I don’t know if you have kids, but they’ll eat our kids for breakfast.”
The Homeland Security Department said Friday that it executed a criminal search warrant at the plant as part of an investigation that is still open. Its statement did not address the contents of the video or the merits of the lawsuit.
Not all officers wore body cameras, but those who did often indicated to other officers that they were recording before they initiated a conversation.
ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit is responsible for workplace raids, which have been relatively few and low-key compared with ICE’s removal unit, which arrests people in the street, at homes and in public and also manages detention centers. The Trump administration’s largest workplace raid was last year at a Hyundai electric vehicle plant in Georgia. It resulted in nearly 500 arrests and fueled diplomatic tension with South Korea.
The lawsuit against Homeland Security claims federal officers exceeded the authority of their warrants and violated workers’ constitutional rights against unlawful search and seizure.
“There were no arrest warrants,” said Perry Grossman, a supervising attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit with the Worker Justice Center of New York.
“There was no suspicion that individual workers had committed crimes. And they seized easily 100 people for nonconsensual questioning. They arrested 57. Out of those 57 people, criminal charges were brought against only five. And the most serious charge was unlawful reentry.”
Grossman said one employee got her charges dismissed after contending in a lawsuit that her 4th Amendment rights were violated. He said he was not aware of any charges or indictments against the employers.
Officers detained about 60 people and deported some employees, including two plaintiffs who are part of Thursday’s lawsuit. One plaintiff has since been allowed to reenter the country. Attorneys for the second deported plaintiff are seeking his return.
Law enforcement agencies have come under criticism for not using body cameras and for refusing to release footage when they do. ICE, in particular, has been scrutinized after a $75-billion infusion from Congress and an expanding street presence that has led to three fatal shootings this year.
ICE’s own rules on releasing video are unclear. Its policy calls for expedited release of footage after a serious injury or death in custody when doing so is determined to be in the “ best interests of the agency.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly promised to equip ICE field agents with body cameras, as required by Congress. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said last week that the agency was “on track” to do so by the end of September.
Gonzalez and Vancleave write for the Associated Press.
