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As federal personnel from at least three agencies raided a manufacturing plant in upstate New York in September, a Border Patrol agent spotted a palette of That’s It brand nutrition bars.

“Oh man,” he said. “That’s it, bars? My Costco career is going to be screwed.”

The agent seemed to know what was about to happen. One by one, plant workers were detained and told to sort themselves by citizenship status. Agents then questioned each suspected unauthorized immigrant in a hot, overcapacity break room.

By the end of the raid, agents had used an unusual form of administrative warrant to question and ultimately detain 57 workers (more than a third of the people present that day) on accusations of being unlawfully present in the United States. Many have been expelled from the country; At least one person arrested at the plant was later deported in error, the government acknowledged.

The raid, as another agent said, was “a shit show.”

A federal judge raised a more concrete problem: the US constitution.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Brenda K. Sannes granted an arrested worker’s motion to suppress evidence resulting from her arrest at the plant that day, calling the arrest “unlawful.”

And on Tuesday, Sannes ordered that the worker, a woman named Argentina Juárez-López, be released from pretrial detention. But Juárez López still faces arrest and deportation on civil immigration grounds, all stemming from an illegal arrest.

The plant was raided in part as a result of an administrative order known as a “Blackie order,” in which authorities did not name individual suspects of illegal immigration at the company, but rather raised general suspicions that an unspecified number of unauthorized immigrants were working there.

For untold numbers of undocumented people living quiet lives, raids like the one in Cato could mark a new chapter in the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” efforts.

Illustration: News themezone; Photo: United States District Court for the Northern District of New York

‘Fruit of illegal detention’

Last month, Juárez López filed the motion to suppress all evidence obtained after his arrest in the ongoing criminal immigration case against him, including fingerprints that authorities said revealed he had twice entered the United States without authorization, grounds for a felony charge.

Juárez-López was detained despite doing nothing more than asking for a lawyer, her lawyer alleged.

The government had a different story. Juárez López, authorities claimed, had disobeyed an officer who told her to “stop” after she left her position on the production line when the raid began. And when agents asked people to sort by citizenship, she did not claim to be a citizen: “which means, practically, that she, along with others in her situation, de facto identified herself as being unlawfully present in some way,” federal prosecutors wrote in a filing against Juárez López’s motion to suppress.

After that, he refused to answer questions about where he was from or whether he had documents. Apparently that was enough. “Here,” prosecutors wrote, “defendant’s refusal to produce her immigration documents when requested, where defendant had already disobeyed an officer’s direct order to ‘stop’ and had walked away from that officer, and where she failed to take advantage of opportunities to identify herself as a citizen or legally authorized worker, gave agents probable cause to arrest her without a warrant.”

Sannes, an Obama appointee and chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, was unimpressed. She granted Juárez-López’s request. The evidence, Sannes wrote, was “the fruit of an unlawful arrest” and “the officers subjected it to an unreasonable seizure that violated the Fourth Amendment.”

Through his court-appointed attorney, Paul Tuck, Juárez-López declined to comment on his case.

“The Court’s decision on the motion to suppress sharply criticizes how authorities planned and executed the raid on the NBC factory,” Tuck said in an email Monday, referring to the manufacturer, Nutrition Bar Confectioners.

“Argentina was arrested along with her colleagues without any legal basis and subsequently arrested and detained before the agents knew her name, what country she was from or anything else about her,” he added. “The Court’s determination that Argentina’s seizure was ‘unreasonable’ and that the agents’ conduct was, at best, ‘grossly negligent,’ is a strong rebuke to the tactics employed here and speaks to the growing trend of police overreach in the name of immigration enforcement. The decision will hopefully deter future conduct of the type that occurred here and alter how the federal government engages in immigration law enforcement.”

The Trump administration did not respond to News themezone’s questions about the raid.

Illustration: News themezone; Photo: United States District Court for the Northern District of New York

For now, Juárez-López’s future is uncertain. Sannes ordered Juárez López’s release from criminal pretrial detention at a hearing Tuesday. But she will likely end up in immigration detention and face possible deportation, due to a civil immigration detainer filed after her arrest, Tuck said, all because the administration acted in a way that Sannes believed violated the Constitution.

“It creates this strange possibility of exclusion where there is really no remedy when [ICE] “It detains someone unconstitutionally,” Tuck said in an interview last month. “You can’t really do much about it.”

‘Pull up your pants!’

The September raid was the only confirmed use of the so-called Blackie order, which treats suspected undocumented immigrants as evidence of an administrative violation, during Donald Trump’s second term.

Agents from the Border Patrol, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the IRS arrived at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners facility with a criminal investigation warrant to investigate the business for violations such as employing unauthorized workers and identity theft. Under that order, they collected business records and related material. Nutrition Bar Confectioners did not respond to a request for comment and it is unclear whether the company’s management is currently under investigation.

In addition to that criminal investigation warrant, agents carried a warrant from Blackie, which did not name any individual suspects but was nonetheless used as a basis for accessing the private facility to ultimately question dozens of people at the facility about their immigration status.

Illustration: News themezone; Photo: United States District Court for the Northern District of New York

Blackie’s orders, named after Blackie’s House of Beef in Washington, D.C., which twice sued the government over immigration raids, are useful for immigration authorities who want to search a business they believe has employed undocumented immigrants, but who don’t have enough information about the individual employees.

They also became popular before the modern era of criminalized immigration enforcement, which critics, including at least one federal judge, have said is a fatal flaw for the government’s attempts to use no-knock warrants today.

After warning that “an administrative warrant may not, however, be used as a pretext for gathering evidence for a criminal prosecution,” an ICE manual explains that “the primary advantage of the Blackie warrant is that there is no need to specifically name the wanted aliens. Rather, the Blackie warrant and accompanying affidavit need only establish a plausible basis for believing that there are anonymous illegal aliens present at the location to be searched.”

Video from several officers’ body cameras shows dozens of law enforcement officers swarming Nutrition Bar Confectioners on the morning of September 4.

Initially, male officers entered a women’s bathroom to round up the workers inside.

“Miss, pull up your pants! Get out of the bathroom!” one officer said to a worker sitting on the toilet, after sticking his head over the stall door to see his target. (“She asks to wait, says she needs to pull up her pants,” a Spanish-speaking ICE agent translated for the officer.) “Please hurry, ma’am,” the officer said.

On another camera, a couple of minutes later, based on body camera time stamps, an officer can be heard laughing: “The bathrooms are clean, we checked!”

Finally, agents gathered the workers in a break room, where they methodically sorted them by self-declared citizenship and job. “Are you a US citizen? Are you a manager or supervisor here?” The U.S. citizens were led down a hallway and the noncitizens were lined up on one side of the break room and questioned by immigration agents one by one as they returned to the other side of the room.

At least one agent seemed to recognize the coercive dynamic at play when he asked for help keeping people who would be questioned further about their immigration status separate from those who had not yet been questioned.

“Technically we can’t tell them not to move around the room,” the officer giving instructions said, after lowering his voice. “But we just have to keep track of them, because they’ve already been classified.”

At one point, the footage shows a woman Tuck later identified as Jaurez-Lopez. With her arms crossed, dressed in a black Puma T-shirt and with a polite smile, she asks for a lawyer when an agent begins to question her. She is sent to the other side of the room, along with dozens of others who were eventually arrested.

Illustration: News themezone; Photo: United States District Court for the Northern District of New York

Only later, in custody at the Oswego Customs and Border Protection station, was he forced to give his name, date of birth and fingerprints, information that authorities used to discover his immigration history, which then served as the basis for felony reentry charges. Four days after his arrest, Juárez López appeared in court and learned that she was being accused of a crime. She has pleaded not guilty.

Judge seeks to ‘prevent future conduct’

In his opinion, in granting Juarez-Lopez’s motion to suppress evidence obtained after her arrest, Sannes noted that “no evidence” had been presented to support a striking claim in a DHS arrest record that Juarez-Lopez “freely admitted to being in the United States illegally” when she was initially detained at Nutrition Bar Confectioners.

Beyond that, even if the order itself had been constitutional – “a question that is far from clear,” Sannes noted in his opinion – the officers’ actions far exceeded what they were authorized to do.

For example, the judge noted that when authorities requested the order, they said it would involve “consensual interrogation of the employees” and that they would “approach and question” the employees about their status. In reality, the agents’ actions “differed drastically from these representations,” the judge said, and involved briefly detaining all employees present at the plant, ordering them to answer questions about their citizenship, and then telling those who did not identify themselves as citizens to approach the agents for even more information. questions, the opposite of how the government said it would work.

The judge also noted the officers’ instruction that people self-classify by citizenship status.

“The Government does not cite any case law establishing the authority of officers to participate in the employee selection that occurred during detention,” he wrote.

And prosecutors’ claims that Juárez López’s actions served as the basis for the arrest also did not hold up. There was no evidence that the arresting officers knew that the defendant had allegedly “fled” during the raid, Sannes wrote.

The other two grounds for suspicion similarly failed before the judge.

“The agent [who briefly questioned Juarez-Lopez] He did not know the defendant’s name, where she was born, or any other biographical information. All I knew before the interview was that she did not identify herself as a U.S. citizen or authorized worker; In other words, he had remained silent. “The defendant’s answers to the agent’s questions provided no additional information, only that he wanted an attorney,” Sannes wrote.

“In short,” he added, “no evidence reflects that the arresting officers knew the facts that the Government says established probable cause. And if the officers had known those facts, defendant’s silence and request for counsel, even in response to a question about her ‘documents,’ was in any event insufficient.”

The seizure violated the Fourth Amendment. And the judge granted the motion to suppress evidence collected after Juárez López’s arrest, in part to discourage this type of federal police behavior in the future.

“There are good reasons to discourage future conduct such as what occurred here,” Sannes wrote.

Illustration: News themezone; Photo: United States District Court for the Northern District of New York

It is unclear whether more Blackie warrants have been used during Trump’s second term. Businesses raided by ICE, especially those where management faces potential charges, are in no rush to make news of the event.

Still, a few days after the raid, John A. Sarcone III, then and now acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, warned that similar enforcement actions would continue.

“You can expect to see federal law enforcement in more workplaces in the future,” Sarcone said.

‘Large scale application’

Large immigration raids were not a feature of Trump’s first term, but they are now. That’s by design.

“You would have to move to indiscriminate or large-scale enforcement activities, basically going to any place where there are no congregations of illegals and holding everyone there, determining who is there illegally and then taking the people who are there illegally into federal detention,” said Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and by far the loudest voice in Trump’s ear on immigration enforcement. saying in 2023.

That approach has become part of Trump’s mass deportation agenda. And if Blackie’s warrants were standardized (as the authors of Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a second Trump term, recommended), they would open the door for the Trump administration to enter workplaces to question employees, even if officials only have a general idea that undocumented people can work there.

But Sannes’ decision on Friday adds to a groundswell of judicial resistance to the orders.

Illustration: News themezone; Photo: United States District Court for the Northern District of New York

In May, a judge in the Southern District of Texas flatly denied the Trump administration’s request for a Blackie order in that district, writing“People are not documents or security hazards.”

Magistrate Judge Andrew Edison noted that a few years after the appeals court case that gave its name to Blackie’s orders, Ronald Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which criminalized the knowing hiring of undocumented people without work authorization. At that point, he said, it was possible for the government to use Blackie’s administrative warrants, which are easier to obtain than criminal warrants, to gather evidence for a criminal investigation.

“That simply cannot be right,” the judge wrote.

In any case, the government argument in the Northern District of New York that the decision of the magistrate in the Southern District of Texas “was not binding and had no precedent.” And they can say the same about Sannes’s decision to suppress evidence obtained after what is now considered an illegal detention.

The September raid at the Cato plant “appears to be the hot center of a huge web of constitutional issues,” Perry Grossman, supervising attorney for the New York Civil Liberties Union, told News themezone. The NYCLU assisted in Juárez-López’s motion to suppress evidence collected after his arrest.

Grossman compared Blackie’s warrant used in the search to the so-called “general orders” used by British King George III, which ultimately inspired the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“My hope,” he said, “is that the Fourth Amendment still protects people against the things we fought for in a damn revolution.”