ICE raids Woodbridge warehouse, taking dozens of workers into custody

In a scene that has become chillingly familiar, federal agents descended upon a warehouse in Woodbridge, New Jersey, this week, taking dozens of workers into custody.

Their hands bound behind their backs, these individuals were loaded into vans, their futures suddenly and violently suspended at Savino Del Bene, an international shipping and logistics provider located at 34 Engelhard Ave, in the Avenel section of Woodbridge Township.

This operation, conducted by Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security, is the latest manifestation of a brutal immigration crackdown, a theater of enforcement where the human cost is an afterthought.

The human damage of such operations is immediate and devastating. The immediate consequences are not abstract. They are children returning from school to an empty house.

“Kids are going to come home today to an empty house,” warned one advocate, articulating the quiet domestic catastrophe that follows these enforcement actions.

They are parents like Sandra Suero, whose 18-year-old son, Jhonatan Bello Cabrera, a student with a work permit and an immigration case in process, now finds himself in a Newark detention center.

His stepfather, a United States citizen, expressed the shock of many, stating he had never seen anything like it.

Suero said her son was among those taken into custody, although he has a work permit and is in the process of becoming a citizen of the United States.

This is the reality of a policy that operates with a sweeping disregard for individual circumstances, tearing families apart under the blanket justification of law and order.

The tactics employed raise grave concerns. Activists report that this raid exploited a “bonded warehouse’s” existing contract with Customs and Border Patrol, allowing agents to enter without a judicial warrant. This represents a disturbing escalation, turning routine commercial oversight into a Trojan horse for domestic enforcement actions.

These actions are echoed and enabled by a disturbing rhetoric that has poisoned our civic discourse.

The vitriolic language from local leaders like Edison Mayor Sam Joshi, who declared migrants “illegal” and promised to bus them “straight back to the other side of the border,” provides a veneer of legitimacy to such operations.

Joshi, a Democrat and the son of immigrants, stunned advocates in January by vowing to charter buses to send migrants “straight back to the other side of the border.”

Joshi declared the immigrants used in a political stunt by Texas Governor Greg Abbott were, “not welcome here, they are illegal,” wielding a language of exclusion that betrays the very spirit of a nation built by immigrants and mocks the complex, hopeful journeys of those seeking a better life.

This, from the son of immigrants in a city nearly half foreign-born, demonstrates how fear and ignorance can eclipse both reason and humanity.

The human toll of this machinery is immense.

We have witnessed stories of U.S. citizens, often Latino, detained and mistreated by immigration agents.

We have seen a man released from detention 40 pounds lighter, his family shattered by his three-month absence, now struggling to survive under release conditions that prevent him from working.

And we have watched as a tyrannical Republican president relishes a process that seems designed to break the human spirit.

This is not merely a debate over policy. It is a question of what kind of country we choose to be.

Do Americans accept a system where enforcement is untethered from judicial oversight, where families are collateral damage, and where the rhetoric of exclusion justifies the erosion of our fundamental values?

The events in Woodbridge are not an anomaly; they are a deliberate and brutal feature of a strategy that is reshaping American life, one warehouse, one family, one shackled individual at a time.

The indictment of Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and five others for conspiring to impede a federal agent outside a Chicago-area immigration facility represents more than a legal proceeding; it is a stark portrait of a political movement whose tactics have strayed from disciplined resistance into counterproductive confrontation.

Tragically, this federal aggression finds a disturbing echo in the rhetoric of some local leaders.

This official posture of rejection enables a system whose brutality is often hidden from public view.

Kathy O’Leary of the Christian activist group Pax Christi New Jersey recently bore witness to this hidden world, recounting the story of one man released from the Delaney Hall detention center after three months.

He emerged, she reported, 40 pounds lighter, his body diminished by the stress and poor nutrition of his confinement. While his family struggled to survive in his absence, his only solace was hearing the honks of support from trucks passing by—a faint reminder of a community that had not wholly forgotten him.

His release, however, is not a clean liberation. The conditions of his monitoring make it difficult for him to work, perpetuating the instability that the detention began.

For every one like him, O’Leary notes, many others give up, accepting voluntary departure. She described a recent caravan of over 160 people, shackled and hidden behind the tinted windows of buses, being transported to the airport, likely for deportation.

The Woodbridge raid is not an isolated event.

It is a single, public flare-up of a sustained and grinding campaign being waged in our name—a campaign that separates parents from children, breaks the health of those it detains, and justifies itself with a rhetoric of fear.

It is a choice to wield power without proportionality and to enforce the letter of the law at the expense of its spirit. When we allow the story of a nation to be written in the language of raids and shackles, we must ask what, in the end, we are so desperately protecting.