Trump’s mass deportation hots up, Nigerians panic, as Mayor accuses ICE of arresting U.S. military veteran

A mayor claims Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested a U.S. citizen who served in the military during a raid just days into President Donald Trump’s promised mass deportation operation.

 

Many Nigerians in the U.S. are also worried that they could be caught in the mass deportation effort of Trump.

 

The ICE officers also didn’t have a warrant during the raid in Newark, New Jersey in “plain violation” of the Fourth Amendment, Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka said in a statement.

 

About 10 or 12 ICE agents raided a seafood wholesaler and restaurant on Thursday and arrested three people, including the Puerto Rican warehouse manager, Ocean Food Depot owner Luis Janota told PIX11 news. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.

 

“I asked [the agents] what documentation they were looking for, and they said it was a license or a passport. I thought, who walks around with a passport?” Janota told PIX11, noting that the agents didn’t ask him for his white workers’ documentation.

 

“One of the guys was a military veteran, and the way he looked to me was because he was Hispanic. He is Puerto Rican and the manager of our warehouse,” he said. “It looked to me like they were specifically going after certain kinds of people—not every kind, because they did not ask me for documentation or my American workers, Portuguese workers, or white workers.”

 

Mayor Baraka slammed the operation as “egregious” in his own statement.

 

“One of the detainees is a U.S. military veteran who suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned,” he said. “Newark will not stand by idly while people are being unlawfully terrorized.”

 

Contacted by Axios, an ICE spokesperson declined to go into detail about the raid but defended the agency’s actions.

 

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may encounter U.S. citizens while conducting field work and may request identification to establish an individual’s identity, as was the case during a targeted enforcement operation at a worksite today in Newark, New Jersey,” the spokesperson said.

 

In a statement on the social media platform X, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said he was “deeply concerned” about the reports. He and Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver, whose district includes Newark, both said they had reached out the Department of Homeland Security for answers.

 

 

Like all law enforcement, the courts have held that ICE officers are bound by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.

 

ICE officers cannot enter private property—including employee-only areas in businesses—without a valid search warrant signed by a judge, and they must have probable cause to arrest, according to the ACLU.

 

ICE’s own website says everyone is entitled to due process, and that it focuses on removing criminals and public safety threats.

 

It wasn’t immediately clear if the ICE officers stayed in the public part of Ocean Food Depot or also searched the employee-only areas.

 

Throughout his re-election campaign, Trump vowed repeatedly to deport up to 10 million undocumented immigrants. On his first day in office, he declared a national emergency in a bid to mobilize the military to assist with deportations.

 

On Thursday night the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security signed a memo giving ICE officials the power to deport about 1.4 million people who were allowed to enter the country temporarily and thought they were in the U.S. legally, the New York Times reported.

 

The move shows Trump isn’t just targeting people who snuck across the border, but who came to the U.S. via official, authorized pathways, according to the Times. Critics have said the ICE memo is legally questionable and a “betrayal” of the people who followed the rules.

 

On Thursday, ICE wrote on the social media site X that it had made 538 arrests and lodged 373 detainers, meaning it identified 373 people already in police custody who might not be citizens. Local law enforcement is then asked to notify ICE before releasing the detainee from custody.

 

At that rate it will take ICE about 51 years to arrest the 10 million undocumented immigrants Trump has promised to deport, not counting all the U.S. citizens that accidentally get swept up in the raids.