The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, said an immigration raid in the city was done without a warrant, and led to the detainment of undocumented residents as well as citizens.
Ras Baraka said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) had raided a local establishment. “Newark will not stand by idly while people are being unlawfully terrorized,” he wrote in a statement.
The raid came as 1,500 troops arrived at the US-Mexico border on Thursday night. The deployment is part of the “shock and awe” flurry of anti-immigration announcements from Donald Trump since his swearing-in on Monday, including declaring a national emergency at the border as a trigger to send troops, despite unauthorized entries being at a low point in recent months.
In New Jersey, the mayor’s announcement came as major cities across the US braced for Ice raids, as promised by Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who has said the federal government will uphold Trump’s promise of “mass deportations”. Homan has signaled that so-called sanctuary cities – localities that have refused to hand over immigrants to federal authorities – would be early targets for raids.
Ice announced it had made a total of 538 arrests in a Thursday update. The agency did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s query about when and where in the US the arrests were made.
Trump’s press secretary later said in a post on X that 538 “illegal immigrant criminals” had been arrested and that “hundreds” had been deported by military aircraft.
“The largest massive deportation operation in history is well underway. Promises made. Promises kept,” Karoline Leavitt said.
The numbers are not necessarily exceptional – the agency averaged more than 450 arrests a day in 2023, when Joe Biden was president, for instance. But the agency’s movements have drawn particular focus amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Since taking office on Monday, the president has unleashed a barrage of immigration orders and policy changes, including guidance that immigration officers will be allowed to conduct enforcement at sensitive locations such as schools and churches.
Ice declined to provide details about the date and location of its raid in New Jersey.
But it later emerged that the federal raid took place at a seafood wholesalers, the Ocean Seafood Depot in Newark’s Ironbound section.
The business’s owner, Luis Janota, told local ABC7 that Ice agents asked for documentation for three workers and detained them when they could not show the relevant papers.
“I feel like we have to be a country of law, but we have to go after bad people, not working people. These are family people. These are people who show up to work every day,” he told the TV station.
Baraka said that among the people detained was a US military veteran, “who suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned” by officers.
“This egregious act is in plain violation of the fourth amendment of the US constitution, which guarantees ‘the right of the people be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures’,” the mayor said.
Ice has said the agency “may encounter US citizens while conducting field work and may request identification to establish an individual’s identity as was the case during a targeted enforcement operation at a worksite today in Newark”.
The raids, and its effect on people with and without citizenship have drawn outrage and condemnation from several New Jersey lawmakers, including the US representative Bonnie Watson Coleman. “This is a disgrace,” she wrote in a statement. “This is what we expect from two-bit dictators in banana republics.”
LaMonica McIver, another representative, wrote: “Already, Trump’s attacks on immigrant communities are hitting home and we will not back down.”
The New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice has urged residents to attend “know your rights” workshops it is arranging, to help residents understand their legal rights when they encounter immigration enforcement agents.
Advocates and local leaders in cities across the US have been similarly preparing for raids. In Chicago – where more than 50,000 people, mostly from Venezuela, have arrived in the past two years – the mayor, Brandon Johnson, said he had been working with community groups to educate residents about their rights.
Meanwhile, late on Thursday, the first troops in a cohort of 1,500 freshly ordered to the US-Mexico border by the Trump administration arrived in two locations, south of San Diego, California, and El Paso, west Texas.
The troops are directed to support border agents and not get specifically involved with law enforcement. But a big show was made late on Thursday when, among the 1,500, about 500 US Marines were flown south in Osprey aircraft from Camp Pendleton in California to reach the border.
Joanna Walters contributed reporting
