ICE and Border Patrol Are Picking Off These Tomato Plant Workers

“They were like alligators. They swooped in and devoured them,” said one of the plant workers.

Area residents say the arrests are part of the largest wave of immigration enforcement activity they’ve seen in recent memory. For workers, driving is now a gamble. Even the five-minute trip from the plant to their motel has become risky.

Similar arrests have transformed life for agricultural laborers across western New York. Agents have ramped up operations in the region as Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently increased its national arrest target to 2,000 per day. They have searched farms, arrested dairy workers leaving Latin American grocery stores, and pulled over vans of roofers, in one case sending several men fleeing into the woods. Fear has prompted workers to either leave the area or go into hiding.

At the tomato plant, the most recent arrest took place on July 8, when Border Patrol agents trailed two cars of laborers to the motel after they left work. The occupants got out and fled, but agents arrested one of them, a Venezuelan man. A spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection said he had been ordered deported in 2023 and had a “criminal record” but declined to share additional details.

Marialice Rodriguez, who was riding in one of the cars, said that after she got out, an agent pointed a pistol at her chest. “I said, ‘Please don’t shoot me, I am an American,’” she said.

The spokesperson confirmed that the agent pointed a gun at Rodriguez. “Once the individual was identified as a U.S. citizen and posed no threat, the agent lowered their weapon,” he said.

After the arrest, workers staying at the motel spent the rest of the night trying to figure out what to do. Some bought bus tickets out of Rochester. The next morning, the motel’s owner, Chandrakanth Patel, told New York Focus that most of the workers staying there had fled. Fewer than half of the plant’s roughly 120 workers showed up for their shift that day, said one employee, who asked to be identified as J to avoid retaliation by immigration authorities.

“They are targeting anyone,” he said.

An ICE spokesperson said in a statement that its enforcement at workplaces targets “illegal employment networks that undermine American workers” and “remains a cornerstone of ICE’s efforts to protect public safety, national security, and economic stability.”

The targeted workers say authorities are harassing the lifeblood of the region’s agricultural economy. Many of those who remain are indignant.

“The engine of this company is the immigrant,” said a tomato plant worker in her 60s who said she has a work permit. “They make money for this country.”

The day after the most recent arrest, those who hadn’t fled worked from 5 am until 6 pm, praying they’d make it home at the end of their shifts. The tomato vines in the greenhouse had to be pruned. The newly ripe fruit had to be examined for blemishes and packaged into plastic containers labeled “FLAVOR BOMBS.” The containers had to be loaded onto trucks for distribution to Tops and Wal-Mart stores. If the work stopped, the tomatoes would rot.

To reach the tomato plant, turn off Route 104 and wind through a quiet industrial park, past a sheet metal manufacturer and a trucking depot where a Charlie Kirk memorial emblazoned on a big rig declares, “Legends Never Die.” At the end of the road, translucent, gabled greenhouses loom behind scrubby trees.

A company called Intergrow built the facility nearly a decade ago, and in 2023, Mastronardi Produce, the biggest greenhouse produce grower in the country, acquired it. Workers at the plant estimated that half or more of the employees are Latino immigrants from Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, and elsewhere. Many are hired through labor contractors that also coordinate their housing in local hotels or apartments.

Some tend the hydroponic plants in the greenhouse, harvesting cherry and beefsteak tomatoes in hot temperatures. Others work in the packhouse, preparing the tomatoes for delivery to grocery stores. They wear hairnets and thick black rubber gloves to shield their hands from chemicals. They weigh the tomatoes and set them on trays to be vacuum sealed, with the vines still attached to signal their freshness to supermarket browsers.

J, who has worked at the plant for about five years, said he couldn’t recall ICE arresting its workers before this year. Then, in mid-June, agents arrested a man as he was heading home from work for the day. They soon arrested two other workers nearby.

Supervisors at the plant assured the workers that ICE was only targeting those three laborers and wouldn’t return, a former worker named Nando told New York Focus. So Nando kept going to work, though he didn’t have legal authorization to do so. During his 15 months at the company, he had moved up from working as a packer to handling a machine that unloaded boxes of tomatoes from the greenhouse. He liked the work because he did it mostly on his own, and his machine ran at a set speed, so no one could tell him to hurry up.

About a week after the first arrests, Nando finished his shift and got in his car to head home with his wife and another couple. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he noticed unmarked vehicles idling near the exit. He suspected it was ICE. He drove the speed limit, he said, trying to stay calm as they followed him. When they flashed their lights, he pulled to the side of the road. A man in civilian clothes came up to the driver’s window.

“Just getting off work?” the agent asked in Mexican-accented Spanish, Nando recalled. “Yep, just fighting to make a living as always,” he replied. Then the agent asked: “Do you have permission to be here?”

Nando offered his New York driver’s license, but the agent said it was no good and told him to get out of the car. When he hesitated, the agent threatened to break the glass, Nando said. The agents arrested him and the other man and let their partners leave in the car.

ICE took Nando to the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, then to a detention center in Louisiana, before deporting him and the other man to Guatemala in early July.

Now home with his parents in a rural area without cell service, Nando is trying to keep in touch with his wife and figure out what to do next. His WhatsApp profile picture still shows him smiling in front of a fountain in Rochester.

“I’m trying to adjust,” he said. “I haven’t managed to find a way to make a living here yet. I don’t feel that great, but I’m trying to find a way to adapt, since this is my country.”

The quiet operations have stoked anxiety among immigrants and volunteers, who try to warn one another about potential ICE activity. They now see any vehicles, especially US-made SUVs and pickup trucks, as potential threats.

“They’re afraid to leave here,” one tomato plant worker said on a recent evening as he waited near the facility’s glass doors. He gestured across the parking lot toward the road, where ICE had pulled over and arrested several of his fellow workers.

The worker was waiting for Anthony Rosas, who works for a labor contractor and gives workers rides to and from the plant. He used to pick them up in a large white van, but immigration agents began targeting white vans, he said, so he swapped it out for a more discreet passenger vehicle. Rosas said he now keeps an eye out for cars with tinted windows. He makes extra turns if another car follows behind him for too long.

“It’s literally like Jason Bourne-type mode,” he said. “You gotta be on the lookout.”

As Rosas pulled up to the tomato plant, about 10 workers rushed toward him, all hoping to claim a seat. The new vehicle didn’t have enough room for everyone, so four workers trudged back across the parking lot, clutching backpacks and lunch boxes, some still wearing their hairnets. They sat down at picnic tables in the late June evening sun and settled in for the hour it would take for Rosas to return.

One woman whose brother was recently detained as he left a Latin grocery store in Cayuga County insisted that the men who arrested him were not federal agents but bounty hunters. From detention, he told her that the men followed him in his car, then flashed their lights to get him to pull over. When he did, they asked for his ID and social security card. He was reluctant to give them his driver’s license, because they didn’t look like law enforcement.

ICE told New York Focus that “all immigration arrests are made by sworn federal law enforcement,” not private contractors. The spokesperson said agents always wear a badge and verbally identify themselves as law enforcement, even when wearing civilian clothes.

The ICE activity has led many immigrants in the region to limit their travel as much as possible. Volunteers are dropping off groceries and escorting people to medical appointments

“Workers don’t really leave much anymore,” said Jessica Maxwell, executive director of the Workers’ Center of Central New York, a nonprofit that organizes low-wage, mostly immigrant workers. Some farm owners have even asked their employees not to leave the property, she said.

At the Hernandez Mexican Store in Sodus, about 20 minutes east of the tomato plant, an employee named Melissa said there had been days recently when almost no one came to shop. She pulled up a video on her phone showing several men frantically sprinting out of a white van and across a grassy slope toward a forest, federal agents in green chasing behind them.

“It was all over social media,” she said. That same day, June 23, she heard about arrests at a farm, along Highway 88, and at the tomato plant.

Wayne County Sheriff Robert Milby said that ICE told him they arrested at least four people in the county that day. Milby said the agency gives him a heads-up when they plan to work in the county.

What happened to the men who ran into the forest is unclear. ICE told New York Focus it would need more information about the incident to provide a response. Milby said he had received no information from ICE that any of them were detained.