‘They Opened the Door and Pulled Us Out’: How ICE Descended on a Town

It was a typical summer morning at a Mexican supermarket in New Jersey.

Hispanic workers stocked shelves at El Oaxaqueño with chiles and condiments from Latin America. Regulars ate steak-stuffed tacos on freshly made tortillas in the adjacent cantina. Day laborers idled in the drab parking lot, hoping to score informal work in landscaping or construction.

Suddenly, more than half a dozen S.U.V.s swarmed the lot and federal immigration officers leaped out, according to accounts from people at the scene. Laborers scrambled, and officers chased at least one man into the supermarket, past the colorful piñatas hanging by the entrance, workers in the market said.

Customers and workers tried to hide — upstairs, in the bathroom, behind crates of produce in the walk-in refrigerator. But immigration agents found them and, one by one, zip-tied their hands and whisked them out the back door.

The raid, on June 24, which has not previously been reported by the news media, appears to be among the largest sweeps in the region since the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency quietly revamped its operations this summer.

“They opened the door and pulled us out,” Bernarda Hernandez, 32, a Mexican worker, said in Spanish. She had locked herself in the bathroom with another female worker and said she pleaded in vain, telling the officers that she had a 2-year-old daughter. “I was traumatized.”

In just about an hour, ICE arrested Ms. Hernandez and 17 other people without legal status after descending on the parking lot because of “a reliable tip that a criminal illegal alien, with charges for theft and forgery, was at that location,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

The agency said that some people fled into the supermarket, “forcing officers to initiate a pursuit.” The agency did not specify how many people it arrested inside, but most of those detained appeared to be “collateral arrests” — bystanders without legal status who were not the original targets of ICE.

Witnesses said in interviews that the officers detained 10 people inside El Oaxaqueño, including six workers, from shelf stockers to the butcher. A handful of day laborers were detained outside.

The new ICE activity, more discreet and dexterous than the highly visible raids in large cities last year, has surprised towns, suburbs and cities across the United States. Agents have fanned out under orders to make 2,000 immigration arrests a day — roughly double the pace from this spring.

The Trump administration launched the surge with little showmanship after shaking up the leadership at the Homeland Security Department, promising to avoid the large raids that led to political blowback after agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.

The crackdown has gained steam with less than three months before the midterm elections, as Republicans seek to retain control of Congress. The more nimble approach appears to come in response to polling that has shown that the hard-line aspects of President Trump’s immigration agenda are a vulnerability for the party.

In New Jersey, ICE arrested more 2,100 people in July, the most in one month since Mr. Trump returned to power and more than double the roughly 850 to 950 people that the agency was arresting on a monthly basis from February to May, according to ICE data released on Monday by Deportation Data Project, an academic group.

That’s more people than ICE arrested in nearby New York, a larger state with a bigger immigrant population where arrests also spiked to more than 1,500 in July, according to the data.

“ICE operations in our communities do not make New Jersey any safer,” said Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat who has opposed new ICE detention centers in New Jersey and sought to ban agents from wearing masks.

The spike in arrests has come into focus in New Jersey through bursts of early morning arrests largely out of the limelight.

Plainclothes agents in masks have resurfaced in towns and neighborhoods with large Hispanic populations, arresting immigrants at bus stops, construction sites and gas stations, according to court records.

ICE has pulled over immigrants driving to work and detained entire crews on their way to landscaping jobs, immigration lawyers said.

Scenes of agents chasing immigrants on foot have rattled immigrant-rich towns like Lakewood, where the Mexican supermarket was raided, keeping residents off the streets and forcing businesses to lock their doors for hours at a time. Those arrested have been sent to immigration detention centers including Delaney Hall in Newark, a 1,000-bed facility that has been plagued by complaints of unsanitary living conditions.

The overall surge in arrests has appeared to operate largely out of public view, insulated by more targeted operations and limited media attention.

Reuben Kerber, an immigration lawyer, said he had been flooded with hundreds of calls since June, not just from the relatives of people detained by ICE, which is typical, but by employers trying to free workers who had been picked up.

“I’ve had people in all sorts of businesses — restaurants, small bodegas, small hardware stores, people that have landscaping businesses,” Mr. Kerber said. “It’s very different from Minnesota. If I wasn’t in this work, I wouldn’t know it’s happening.”

Trump officials have emphasized that the surge is more targeted, focusing on criminals or people with existing deportation orders, but that anyone in the country illegally may be apprehended.

The New York Times found that ICE has continued to cast a wide net to arrest anyone in the United States unlawfully, according to a review of videos, court records and interviews with more than a dozen lawyers, employers and immigrants detained in New Jersey and their relatives.

Arturo Garcia, 40, a Guatemalan butcher at the supermarket, said that ICE did not present a warrant to enter the business and did not ask for his name, doblockents or legal status before tying his hands as he was arriving for his morning shift.

“I told them they weren’t authorized to enter the store, but they told me they didn’t care,” Mr. Garcia said in Spanish. He said that he entered the United States illegally about 20 years ago and settled in Lakewood because he had cousins there. “I never thought this would happen to me,” he added.

Fermin Velez, 52, was eating pig’s feet with rice and beans for breakfast at the market’s cantina when he said agents barged in and arrested him, also without asking for his name or papers. He did not have a deportation order, and ICE agents did not have a warrant for his arrest, according to court records.

Mr. Velez, who said he migrated illegally from Mexico about 18 years ago, said that he was surprised, but at peace.

“They’re in their country here in the United States, and we’re here illegally from Mexico,” Mr. Velez said in Spanish. He was released from detention with help from a lawyer while his deportation case is heard in the immigration courts.

ICE said that some of the 18 people it had detained had previous charges for trespblocking, obstruction of law enforcement and traffic offenses, but did not specify exactly how many had criminal records.

El Oaxaqueño is one of many Hispanic-owned businesses in Lakewood that cater to the area’s growing Latino population. Many of the immigrants work as landscapers and housekeepers for Lakewood’s large Orthodox Jewish community. The downtown is dotted with a mix of Hebrew signs and Mexican flags.

The supermarket’s longtime owners, who are Mexican immigrants, helped find lawyers to secure the release of most of their workers from ICE detention. One of the owners, Vicky Santiago, declined to be interviewed, saying she did not want to draw more scrutiny to her business.

But in a video published on the supermarket’s TikTok page a few days after the raid, Ms. Santiago vowed to stand up for her workers and described the raid as an unfortunate reality that is affecting other Latino-owned businesses in New Jersey.

“All of my employees are like a family,” Ms. Santiago said in Spanish in the video, adding that many of her workers had been at the supermarket for years. “We’re a team.”

In Lakewood, the owners of El Mercado, a smaller Mexican grocery, began driving their workers to and from the store to keep them off the streets after a Honduran employee was detained by ICE while he was walking to work in November 2025. He was deported shortly after.

“He always arrived at 8:30 a.m., and it was already 10 a.m. and we were looking for him, calling his house,” Juan Carlos Perez, the store’s manager, said in Spanish. “At like 12 p.m., we saw a video of his arrest posted on Facebook. They had taken him, and we couldn’t find him again.”

Some of the store’s longtime customers have also been detained, Mr. Perez said, and sales plummet when ICE is spotted. The store’s security cameras have recorded ICE officers chasing people in downtown Lakewood, forcing the market to lock its doors for several hours as a precaution.

The store has been emptier than usual in recent weeks. Instead, workers hear from customers who prefer to call in their orders.

The ICE activity has prompted modest, but frequent, protests organized by a group of U.S.-born teenagers who are on summer break and whose parents are immigrants. They have become a regular presence in the town square — often joined by older American residents — where they raise “ICE Out” signs to the honking approval of some drivers.

Moises Mendez, 17, one of the organizers, was compelled to start protesting by what he witnessed on the streets. “I started seeing people taken in front of me, and they were being chased like animals,” he said.

His parents, who are from Guatemala, run a knickknacks shop in Lakewood that has struggled amid the crackdown.

Fewer immigrants are sending money to their home countries, so the remittance services that the shop offers have dried up. Immigrant families have held off on large parties for weddings and quinceañeras, so the Mexican clay jugs and woven baskets often used for celebrations that they sell have remained on the shelves gathering dust.

Mr. Mendez’s family owes the storefront’s landlord $25,000 in rent.

“I already did the calculations, and I’m not going to be able to pay it,” Mr. Mendez’s father, also Moises Mendez, 54, said in Spanish, adding that the landlord had so far been understanding.

Seth Berkman and Albert Sun contributed reporting.