ICE raided the CNY plant where Big Eddie works. His family is still trying to find him.

Fulton, N.Y. -- Thursday was Little Eddie’s first day of high school. He was nervous. His mom, Elizabeth Ramirez-Abrams, was worried.

But Big Eddie, his dad, did the thing he always does: He looked at his wife and told her everything would be okay. When we get back from work at the end of the day, Little Eddie will tell us how great it was, he assured her.

But Big Eddie never came home to Martville in northern Cayuga County, a town 30 miles west of Syracuse. His family cannot find him.

Big Eddie – Hediberto Ramirez-Perez – was one of 70 people taken during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid Thursday at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners Factory in Cato. At least 70 workers were detained, loaded into vans and taken somewhere.

But no one is saying where.

The raid Thursday in rural Central New York hit like a tornado, leaving families, school children, advocates and lawyers across the region trying to track down dozens of loved ones who vanished without any trace. It left the factory owners shocked and stunned, worried about how their family-owned company would be able to keep running and continue paying the hundreds of people they’ve employed for years.

A few lucky — with newborn babies or easily retrievable immigration documents — were able to go home from work on Thursday.

But for so many more, like Big Eddie’s family, it is a paralyzing wait. Those left behind are parked in front of computer screens, hitting refresh on websites and calling every immigration number they can find to try to discover where their family members are. They’re knocking on the doors of the Border Patrol station in Oswego. They have not been able to get anything.

Husbands cannot find their wives. Wives have lost their husbands. And at least a dozen children have lost both parents or their only parent, orphaned by ICE.

A spokeswoman for ICE did not respond to questions from syracuse.com. Cayuga County Sheriff Brian Schenck and Oswego County Sheriff Don Hilton, whose departments helped with the raid, have provided no information about where people were taken. They have not answered questions from syracuse.com, instead issuing statements defending their role, saying they were helping with “criminal” investigations. They provided no information about what the crimes were.

Big Eddie was no criminal, his wife said. He was a 46-year-old father of two teen boys who could not say “no” to anyone. This past weekend, he was digging up a nest of ground bees for his sister-in-law. Before that, he was cutting down trees for his father-in-law. If he wasn’t working, he was helping someone.

The raid shattered generations of families, U.S.-born and immigrant, alike. The workers all lived in and around Fulton, in Oswego County.

Henrry Ramirez-Gomez, 26, watched several of his family members taken away during the raid Thursday morning. They all worked at the factory with him. He was allowed to go home but his wife, his sister, his brother, his uncle and his cousin all were taken away.

Ramirez-Gomez came to the U.S. eight years ago from Guatemala, but he has since become a U.S. citizen. That is what saved him Thursday, he said.

Since then, his 5-year-old niece and his 12-year-old nephew are staying with him. Their dad is gone and their mom has a new baby to take care of. Ramirez-Gomez has been unable to find out anything about where his family was taken. No one shows up on the list at the Immigration Detention Center in Batavia. He’s been refreshing the website, knocking on doors and calling wherever he can. It’s all dead ends.

For now, he’s taking care of the children they left behind.

ICE agents rushed into the building Thursday, cracking the doors open with crowbars, workers said. They flooded the hallways, pushing Spanish-speaking workers into the break room. The plant makes nutrition bars and employs 220 people in the northern part of rural Cayuga County. It’s in a town that voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump last year.

The owners said Friday they were surprised by the raid. Lenny Schmidt said his workers are scared. The factory reopened, but many people were too shaken to return. The Schmidts aren’t sure what they’ll do next, with so much of their workforce gone.

Sylvia Valacios, 50, was going to the bathroom on her break at the factory when an ICE agent forced the door open and started screaming at her, she said. She had her pants down and he was yelling at her to come with him.

“I was terrified,” she said. She is from El Salvador, but has been in the U.S. for a decade. Her youngest child is a U.S. citizen.

The agent kept telling her that she had to come with him. He spoke in Spanish and wore a mask, she said. Valacios said that when the agents descended upon the factory, all of those who spoke Spanish were wearing masks to conceal their faces.

They barked orders and pushed them, herding all of the Spanish-speaking workers into the break room, workers said.

Valacios said everyone scrambled to find their documents. She had a valid work permit and showed that to the agent, she said. That wasn’t enough, he told her. Then she called her lawyer, who sent her a copy of her pending immigration case. She showed that to the agent and that was enough to escape.

Others who had proper papers and pending immigration cases, who legally should have been allowed to stay, were still detained, their families, advocates and lawyers said. They described an arbitrary and chaotic process. Pregnant women were being pushed and denied the opportunity to go to the bathroom, even when they begged, workers who were there said. Some vomited.

Valacios’s 20-year-old niece, who also has a pending immigration case, was taken.

The family has been trying to find her since the raid. Valacios’s mother, Maria Canales, went to Border Patrol to ask them if the girl was there.

They would not tell her, she said. They held up a picture of her niece’s paperwork with her picture on it when workers cracked open the door. They closed the door.

Ramirez-Abrams, a Cato native, was on her break in the gazebo outside the factory when she saw what could have been from a movie. At first, a sheriff’s deputy car pulled in. She watched, thinking it was going to turn around. But then, from all sides, there were ICE agents and deputies on ATVs, motorcycles, in SUVs, vans and even in the sky in a helicopter. She and others said there were more than 50 agents and other deputies.

She watched as they used crowbars to get into the building.

“They traumatized everybody. All of us,” she said.

Ramirez-Abrams began having a panic attack, she said. She was consumed with worry for her husband.

She and others said ICE agents separated the workers into two groups: Hispanic and non-Hispanic. The Hispanic group was herded into the break room. The non-Hispanic group was ordered to leave.

Ramirez-Abrams said the agents asked her no questions about her citizenship and told her she had to get out. She said she had something she had to get inside because she wanted to see her husband.

She saw him through the glass in the break room. I am Okay, don’t worry, he mouthed to her. She slumped onto a nearby bench, she said.

All the while, she said, agents were yelling at her to leave. She finally did, driving the 6 minutes home.

“We never worried something would happen here,” she said. Their lives are all within six minutes: her home, her sisters and her work at the factory.

Her whole family lives along the same road just outside of Cato in Cayuga County.

It is dotted with “Make America Great” banners.

The idea of immigration reform made sense maybe, but not here. Not like this, they said.

Whose jobs are they taking, Big Eddie’s sister-in-law asked of no one.

Big Eddie’s lawyer, Jose Perez, said he was one of six clients who have pending cases that should have kept them from being detained. But it didn’t seem to matter, Perez said.

It is a new level: “They are shooting first, asking questions later,” he said.

Some of his clients were later released, but not Big Eddie.

ICE agents told five new mothers who were breastfeeding their babies that they could go home from the factory on Thursday, but they would have to report to immigration next week. An immigration advocate sat with one mother at her home Friday, trying to help her figure out what to do next. The baby’s cries mixed with the advocate’s.

Children any older than that were not considered.

It was the first day of school in Fulton, where some of the workers’ children go to school.

The district found that a dozen students had at least one, if not both, parents caught in the raid, Superintendent Douglas Lawrence said. They were spread across all schools: elementary, middle and high school.

Help came from other corners of the county. The region’s BOCES school, where students train for careers, pitched in. So did the county’s Department of Social Services, according to Lawrence. The adults gathered food and clothing.

Nobody wanted a kid heading out to an empty home.

Little Eddie came home to an unexpectedly full one. Usually, he and his brother get home before his parents are done with work. But on Thursday, his mom’s car and his aunt’s were in the driveway.

When Little Eddie came in, he told his mom exactly what Big Eddie said he would: High school was just fine.

Then they told him and his brother to sit down. Big Eddie isn’t coming home, they tried to explain. The boys cried. They didn’t go to school Friday. One was hiding under the covers.

In the yard, Ramirez-Abrams’s sister was looking up Big Eddie in the ICE detention system, refreshing it for the 50th time. They were trying to decide who to call next.

Ramirez-Abrams was crying: “What am I going to do?”

No one answered.

Marnie Eisenstadt writes about people and public affairs in Central New York. Reach her at email| 315-470-2246.

Elany Romero Cruz contributed translation and reporting to this story.

Elizabeth Doran contributed to this story.