(NewsNation) — Federal immigration agents raided a roofing company in Washington state this week, according to local media reports.
There were 37 workers detained at Mt. Baker Roofing’s warehouse in Bellingham on Wednesday, the Cascadia Daily News reported.
Officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit and Customs and Border Protection arrived there around 7:30 a.m.
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Tomas Fuerte, an employee at Mt. Baker Roofing for 12 years, told the Cascadia Daily News law enforcement came “wielding their guns like they were going to shoot us, like we were criminals.”
According to The Seattle Times, immigration lawyers and advocates say this appears to be the first full-scale workplace raid in Washington since President Donald Trump took office for his second term. One issue Trump campaigned on in the 2024 election was mass deportations.
ICE spokesperson David Yost said in a statement that the officers executed a federal search warrant “based on an ongoing criminal investigation into the unlawful employment of aliens without legal work authorization in violation of federal law.”
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Those arrested, Yost said, are accused of fraudulently representing their immigration status.
Mt. Baker Roofing CEO Mark Kuske said in a statement to the Cascadia Daily News that those detained for ICE worked for the company for years as “tax-paying employees.”
“Looking beyond the personal impact, we cannot ignore the larger implications of today’s events,” Kuske said in the statement. “Policies like the enforcement action carried out today directly harm small businesses like ours, making it increasingly difficult to operate and further inflating the prices paid by consumers.”
Edgar Franks, the political director of local farmworker union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, said in an interview with the Cascadia Daily News that these raids are creating an “even more tense situation for workers.”
“It seems like just regular, everyday people who are at work are the ones being targeted,” Franks said. “It’s not just adults that were affected, there are kids involved that will be without mom or dad or one of their parents.”
