Immigration authorities raided a warehouse last Wednesday in Edison, New Jersey, arresting 29 undocumented workers and injuring three.
Both Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) participated in the raid. At 10 a.m., about 20 masked and armed agents stormed Smart Logistics, a CBP-bonded facility that serves Amazon, UPS, and FedEx, while others blocked the exits.
Workers described chaos as people scrambled to escape. ICE deployed drones inside the cavernous building to hunt those who fled into the rafters. Witnesses said one worker was slammed to the floor and cuffed, another left bleeding, and a third was injured after falling from a stairwell.
Family members, alerted by activists, gathered outside in anguish as ICE interrogated every employee. Those with documentation were forced to wear yellow wristbands before being released from a holding area inside the warehouse.
Amanda Dominguez of the worker advocacy group New Labor, who witnessed the Edison raid, said: “It was extremely violent yesterday. I just really want to highlight how violent this was and that this isn’t just an attack on an immigrant community but on working-class people.”
Smart Logistics’ CBP-bonded status provided the legal cover. Such facilities allow CBP to enter at any time for “inspection,” which ICE exploits to stage raids without judicial warrants. New Jersey and New York City host about 80 of these bonded warehouses, all of them potential targets for similar operations. In July, ICE raided another bonded facility in Edison, Alba Wines and Spirits, arresting roughly 20 workers.
The Edison raid is part of a systematic state policy aimed at overriding constitutional protections and establishing a presidential dictatorship. ICE and CBP’s lawless behavior is central to Trump’s strategy of placing the state above the law, instilling fear, normalizing extrajudicial power, and eroding democratic rights.
This drive was codified in March 2025 in Trump’s order “Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens,” which baldly asserted that “Federal supremacy with respect to immigration, national security, and foreign policy is axiomatic.”
