Federal immigration agents on Wednesday arrested 37 workers during a raid in a roof business in North Washington. US immigration and customs enforcement (ICE), Homeland security check, and customs and border security officials Mount baker roofWarehouse warehouse at Belingham near Canadai border, around 7.30 am.
Eyewitnesses described a dramatic scene as armed officials brought a storm at the workplace. “They arrived while hitting their guns as if they were going to shoot us, as we were criminals,” Tomas Fuerte said, talking to Cascadia Daily News.
“He turned us into a room in a room behind the building,” quoted the news agency AP.
Fuerte, who has worked in Mount Baker Roofing for 12 years, said he had never seen anything before. He claimed that the arrested workers were taken into two buses.
ICE spokesman David Yost said in a statement that the raid was done as part of a criminal investigation in an illegal employment under an federal discovery warrant Unspecified laborHe said that the detained people “represented their immigration status with fraud and presented fraud documents and/or information to seek employment.”
Mount Baker Roofing replied that it was “cooperating fully with the authorities, while it also ensures that our employees are treated properly and respectfully under the law.”
Immigration enforcement in the United States has been a politically charged issue. Ice arrested 32,809 people in the first 50 days of Donald Trump’s presidential president, an average of 656 per day, more than double at the rate seen in the first year. However, while these figures are more than the Biden administration, they are still far from large -scale exile, Trump once promised. Unlike its first term, where the factory and office raids were more common, recently enforcement actions have been small in the scale.
Although businesses that hire unspecified workers often face fine, criminal allegations against employers remain rare.
