Catalina Rojas got engaged last week and was thrilled to begin planning one of the most exciting moments in her life. Those plans were quickly derailed on Wednesday when her fiancé was detained by immigration authorities during a warehouse raid in Edison, New Jersey. He now faces deportation.
Rojas’ fiancé, an immigrant from Honduras, was swept up with more than two dozen others in an immigration enforcement operation at the package distribution warehouse where he worked.
“It was just so devastating,” Rojas, 22, told NBC News on Thursday. “He’s the type of man that will do anything for his friends, for his family, for me. He’s not a criminal. The only thing he has stolen is my heart.” Rojas asked that her fiancé remain anonymous out of fear of retribution in his case.
The workplace raid is one of the largest federal immigration actions in the region to date and comes as pressure ramps up on officials to deliver on President Donald Trump’s promise to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants a year.
Authorities have so far said little about the operation. The Edison mayor’s office said in a statement that 29 people were taken into custody as part of the raid. The Edison Police Department was informed by the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday that the agency would be conducting an operation in the area, according to the statement.
The mayor’s office also said the building that was targeted is a customs bonded warehouse, a facility where foreign merchandise can be stored without payment of import duties for up to five years.
The Department of Homeland Security, the agency that runs both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, did not respond to requests for comment about the raid in Edison.
Immigration advocates who rushed to the warehouse on Wednesday morning described a chaotic scene with CBP officers and other unidentified law enforcement guarding the facility, which they said was surrounded by unmarked civilian cars and vans with tinted windows, as well as law enforcement vehicles.
The advocates were not able to get into the facility or see how many people were being arrested.
“Family members showed up. They were crying. Some people were trying to bring documentation,” said Amanda Domínguez, a community organizer with New Labor, an advocacy group for immigrant workers.
Officials, she said, “were not being helpful. They wouldn’t tell them where their families were being taken to.”
Domínguez saw a desperate Rojas trying to locate her fiancé among the multiple family members she witnessed at the scene.
Another woman at the scene said she was worried about her husband and had left her small child with a babysitter so she could try to find him, she said.
“She was outside trying to text and call her husband, and she was in tears when he would stop responding through text messages,” Domínguez said.
“We had one very distraught young girl whose father was in there and she believed he had been detained,” said Ellen Whitt, a coordinator with the immigration hotline at the advocacy organization DIRE. The hotline had received calls about the raid and sent a response team to the scene.
Rojas eventually heard from her fiancé that he had been detained and taken to an ICE detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She has not been able to speak with him since.
“I haven’t heard anything. I’ve been checking with his family and our lawyer and nobody has heard anything so far,” she said. She is hoping their attorney can have her fiancé released on bond so he can fight his immigration case from home and not inside a detention center.
The raid in Edison lasted for hours and workers who were able to prove their legal status were given a yellow bracelet and eventually released, Domínguez and Whitt said. Others were taken into unmarked vehicles and sent to ICE custody, they said.
Both advocates called on local officials to take action and condemn the warehouse raid.
“I’m just hearing a lot of silence from the mayor of Edison, a lot of silence from Gov. [Phil] Murphy,” Domínguez said. “What happened to a safe and welcoming New Jersey?”
CBP, in collaboration with ICE, has conducted unannounced inspections of such warehouses before, leading to immigration arrests.
In March, the Trump administration said 19 people were arrested after it conducted an unannounced inspection of a customs bonded warehouse in Newark “to ensure that the facility was adhering to CBP protocols for the importation of cargo entering the United States.”
That operation was conducted “in part to ensure employees working in CBP regulated/bonded facilities are lawfully present and permitted to work in the United States,” CBP said in a statement at the time.
