loading . . . “Border czar” Tom Homan is facing a backlash in his own hometown of Sackets Harbor, New York, after an immigration raid swept up a mother and her three school-aged children.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection took the family and three others into custody on March 27 in an early-morning raid on a dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, a small hamlet on the shores of Lake Ontario, on the western edge of New York’s North Country region. Within days, the mother and her children had been whisked away to Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, a privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas that accommodates families, according to people familiar with the family’s case.
Jefferson County, which includes Sackets Harbor and nearby West Carthage, where Homan grew up, is a deep-red bastion of support for President Donald Trump. Homan has been a prominent and enthusiastic face of Trump’s hard-line border policies, which he kicked off in January with an edict commanding immigration-enforcement agencies like CBP and ICE to ramp up deportations. But now, with that enforcement landing close to home, locals are organizing a rally in support of the family and are planning to march past Homan’s house in Sackets Harbor, according to Corey DeCillis, who chairs the Jefferson County chapter of the New York State Democratic Party.
“People are upset about this,” DeCillis told The Intercept Wednesday. “This is the United States of America, and there’s no kid — or anybody for that matter — that should be treated the way those kids are treated.”
With three students enrolled at the local K-12 school suddenly taken by law enforcement, news of the raid spread rapidly, according to Jennifer Gaffney, superintendent of the Sackets Harbor Central School District.
“The reaction of our students is that they have been traumatized by this,” Gaffney told The Intercept. “Three of their classmates were taken, and they don’t know where they are and they don’t know if they’re going to come back.”
“We’re talking about elementary school, middle school, and high school kids who are all impacted by the absence of their classmates who are detained,” she said.
Gaffney said she learned of the detention of the three students and their mother early on the morning of March 27 and immediately began reaching out to local elected officials to try and locate them, but for several days their whereabouts were uncertain. It was not until Sunday that it emerged that they had been moved to a detention center in Texas that accommodates families.
“It’s been a very, very difficult few days for teachers and staff and students,” Gaffney said. “We’re trying to remain hopeful, but it remains to be seen at this point.”
Neither Gaffney nor CBP provided the names of the family members, citing privacy concerns.
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According to a CBP spokesperson, the family was not the target of the raid, which the spokesperson said was an interagency effort to apprehend a South African national living in Sackets Harbor and suspected of trafficking in child sexual abuse materials. The others — including the family — were detained incidentally.
> “These individuals were not part of the original investigation.”
“These individuals were not part of the original investigation … but were taken into custody, processed and subsequently turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
“All individuals have since been transferred out of New York State and are currently awaiting removal proceedings.”
Based on CBP statements, the raid fit the profile of a tactic known as collateral detention, in which a warrant targeting specific individuals is used as a pretext to sweep up any undocumented people the agents can find. In an unrelated incident last week, ICE agents arrived at a home in Texas looking for one man, but instead took into custody a 50-year-old mom who had been in the country for nearly four decades, according to Newsweek.
With pressure from Washington bearing down on immigration officials to ramp up deportations, collateral detention appears to be on the rise as agents scramble to meet the demands of the Trump administration, according to Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition.
> “They go in allegedly looking for someone else and then they’ll take whoever they can find just so they can meet their quota numbers that Donald Trump has put in place.”
“What we have been seeing is ICE at random detaining people who are not the people they’re looking for,” Awawdeh said. “They go in allegedly looking for someone else and then they’ll take whoever they can find just so they can meet their quota numbers that Donald Trump has put in place.”
Awawdeh, whose organization has been coordinating with the family to help bring them home, told The Intercept that despite being in the country without documentation, the mother had been awaiting a scheduled hearing on her immigration status and that of her children, which typically should have made them not subject to deportation. But that didn’t stop her removal.
“They were actually following the process, right, so that’s why we’re saying they were unjustly detained and demanding that they be returned to their community,” Awawdeh said.
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Speaking for the first time about the incident on Wednesday, Homan told a local news outlet in western New York that the mom and her kids had indeed been taken into custody and flown across the country, but that it was done for their own good, citing the alleged crimes of the man agents had been sent to apprehend.
“During investigations like that, we have to ensure that any children within that area are safe,” Homan told WWNY–7News. “Once that’s done, then the ICE agents will make a decision [of] what’s the best course of action in the future.”
Homan said a decision could be made in the next few days on whether the family will remain in deportation proceedings or be returned home to Jefferson County.
DeCillis, the county Democratic Party chair, said he will be more than happy to cancel the rally if the family is home before Saturday.
“I’m hopeful that before Saturday we can have a totally different conversation — that these kids are on their way back home,” he said. “That’s our ultimate goal.”
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