Speed, confusion, no courts: ICE ships Upstate NY factory workers to Central America in 72 hours

Workers detained in a massive immigration raid of a Cato protein bar factory last week have already been deported to Guatemala. It took less than 72 hours for as many as a dozen of those workers to go from a factory floor in Upstate New York to a landing strip in Central America.

Advocates and families trying to get in touch with the roughly 70 people who were taken described breathlessly fast movement by federal authorities on a trip that herded the workers through as many as three different Border Patrol stations and immigration detention centers in two days.

Several volunteer lawyers rushed to the Batavia Immigration Center Saturday morning to try to help. By the time they got there they were told the workers were already gone, said Jessica Maxwell, director of the Workers Center of Central New York.

She is troubled by how fast the process moved, and by how little access the workers had to any kind of help. As long as they are kept in Border Patrol stations, they are not allowed to see or speak to anyone outside, not even a lawyer, Maxwell said.

“That’s a huge human rights violation,” she said.

The raid Thursday at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners factory by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, aided by local law enforcement from Oswego and Cayuga counties, was the first of its kind in Upstate New York. More than 50 officers swarmed the plant. They opened doors with crowbars, according to people inside. They wore masks to cover their faces.

The sheriffs of both counties have said they were assisting with an ongoing criminal investigation. But the only people who appear to have been detained are largely mothers and fathers who were working to support their families. Many of them have U.S. citizen children. As of Friday, no charges had been filed in federal court.

Maxwell has a spreadsheet of more than 40 of the workers and has been trying to track where they are and send help. But on Sunday morning, some of the workers called their loved ones to say it was too late. They had already been deported.

At least one of those deported had a pending appeal in immigration court. That should have kept him from being detained and deported, his lawyer, Jose Perez said.

Hediberto Ramirez-Perez, known to friends as Big Eddie, had been in the U.S. more than 20 years. He was never in trouble with the law, and spent his time helping his family and raising his two teen sons, his wife, Elizabeth Ramirez-Abrams, said. Ramirez-Perez called his wife Sunday from Guatemala to say he had been deported.

Maxwell said some women who were still breastfeeding infants were released after being detained. But at least one breastfeeding mother is still being detained at the Wellsley Island Border Patrol station, which concerns Maxwell.

Another mother who was detained there on immigration charges in the spring said the operation was not equipped to deal with mothers. In an interview with syracuse.com, the woman said she was taken and kept from her infant for three days. They gave her maxipads to put in her bra because they had nothing else for the leaking milk, she said. When she became painfully engorged, they took her to a hospital but they had no maternity ward or breast pump. They also had no bed for her the first night and she had to sleep on a rubber mat with no blanket near the toilet.

The woman, who is bilingual, said there was no one there to translate if she had needed it. She was detained for illegal entry, she said. There were no criminal charges against her. She has four U.S. citizen children and has been in the country for more than 20 years.

A mother disappears

Leidy Barrios’s family isn’t sure where she is, which is better than knowing she has already been deported.

Every morning, the 39-year-old texted her family during her break at the protein bar factory where she worked in Cato.

She wanted to know how her husband was. He had a stroke recently and a host of complications. She wanted to know how her son, Christofer, was doing during his first weeks of college. He is studying to be a music teacher. And it was her younger daughter and son’s first day of school. She’d want to know how that was.

But her texts Sept. 4 were frantic. ICE was at the factory, she told her husband.

Then she called him, crying. Immigration officers were inside the factory, storming it, herding anyone who spoke Spanish into the breakroom. She hung up.

She texted her children, too. She told them she loved them.

Margarito Rodriguez, Barrios’s husband, sat at his kitchen table with his three children Sunday, just three days later. He has called everyone he can think of. He has been to the Oswego Border Patrol station twice, once sitting in the car for hours.

Officials told her he was there, but nothing more. He left.

By Friday night, his wife was already in Texas. She called her husband.

“I didn’t know what to tell her,” Rodriguez says. So he told her it was going to be all right.

Shouldn’t she get to go before a judge, argue her case, before they can deport her, he asks. In another time, that would be the expectation, but it’s hard to tell now. The people who were working with her, who were deported, did not appear before a judge.

Leidy called again Saturday night. Rodriguez tried to reassure her, tried to reassure himself, in the few minutes that he had.

Rodriguez has always worked as a delivery person, but since his stroke, he’s been unable to drive and he’s had trouble with his eyes. So Leidy was the sole breadwinner for her family.

She worked, she cooked, she checked up on them.

In pictures with her children, she smiles widely and hugs them. There’s one at Kayla’s quinceanera. Another with Christofer at senior day with his soccer team.

As the children scroll through photos for a reporter, a confusing text message comes in. Kayla, the daughter, makes a call. There’s frantic Spanish on the other end. A woman who worked with Rodriguez was deported. Lots of workers from the plant were on the plane. Leidy might have been among them.

Kayla hangs up the phone. There is silence. Then, another text from someone else who was on the plane: Leidy is still in Texas.

There is still hope.

But what will they do if she is deported?

Margarito cries quietly, wiping his face with a paper towel. He looks at his children, all U.S. citizens. A cello player going to one of the best music schools in the country, a high-schooler already taking college classes, a little boy who still has baby cheeks.

“I don’t know,” he says. He puts his head in his hands.

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