Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers are now arresting illegal migrants in a series of small-scale workplace pickups directed by border czar Tom Homan.
ICE has begun appearing at a number of workplaces checking the immigration status of workers as it branches out from the known criminals in jails across the country. ICE has shown at bakeries, farms, contractors and more, and pulling sometimes only a few illegal migrants at a time.
A Texas Bakery, for instance, was one of the most recent smaller venues to become the focus of an ICE raid, Fox News reported last week.
ICE agents appeared at Abby’s Bakery in Los Fresnos, Texas, and served the company’s owners with a complaint of knowingly hiring illegal aliens.
The federal complaint cites some of the bakery’s own employees testifying that the company’s owners knew they were hiring illegal workers.
ICE also detained several workers who were illegal aliens.
“The apprehension of the aliens was the result of a worksite enforcement action,” the complaint reads. “Post event, the facts of the event were presented to the duty AUSA, who agreed there was sufficient cause for a complaint for harboring and accepted prosecution.”
The charges against Abby’s Bakery marks a new direction for ICE because federal authorities have in the past rarely gone after employers for hiring illegals and rarely gone to the extent of charging the company for hiring them.
Texas is not the only state to see smaller workplace raids.
Gulf Coast Prestress Partners of Pass Christian, Mississippi, also discovered that it would have to redouble its efforts to make sure third-party services it relies upon to staff its business are hiring legal workers after the arrest of 16 workers this month, the Sun Herald reported.
Steven Hofer, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s New Orleans division, also noted that his office has been assisting ICE in raids across Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
RELATED: It’s Happening! ICE Makes Raid in Chicago Area
Democrat officials in Newark, New Jersey, have also been raising the alarm about raids in the Garden State, NBC News reported.
“People were fingerprinted. Pictures of their IDs and faces were taken there,” Democrat Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said. “I was appalled, upset, angry that this would happen here in this state, in this country, that this would be allowed.”
According to the Daily Mail, the Trump administration has topped 50,000 removals including some fugitives and convicts that have eluded deportation for 20 years as the Trump administration continues to move to fulfill one off the president’s key campaign promises.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, X at WTHuston, or Truth Social at @WarnerToddHuston.