When ICE shows up at a factory, what can a governor do?
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 17 hours ago
- 4 min read
By GRACE ASHFORD
Sitting across a table from the Schmidt family in Cato, New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul found herself in an unfamiliar, and not altogether comfortable, position.
Nearly two weeks earlier, immigration officials had raided the family’s company, Nutrition Bar Confectioners, which manufactures snack bars, and arrested 57 people. The raid — one of the largest in the state since President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown began — had hobbled the company’s operations.
News of the raid prompted an outcry from immigrant advocates and from Hochul, the state’s Democratic governor, who last week flew to Cato — a small town in rural Cayuga County, where voters chose Trump by a 39-point margin in last year’s election — to hear the Schmidt family’s stories, and offer what support she could.
It was not as much as she would have liked.
Mark Schmidt, 70, who founded the company with his late father in 1978, told Hochul how deeply the raid had shaken the family. “These people have been part of our community for 10, 20, 30 years. We know them,” he said. “I mean, these families have been pulled apart.”
The governor listened carefully as the Schmidts told their stories. She told them how she had called Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, to demand that the families be reunited — particularly nursing mothers with babies. She was still waiting.
“I’m used to being able to solve problems, to say: ‘That’s not OK, we’re going to fix it,’” Hochul said, shaking her head.
Helplessness, she said, was “an emotion I’m not accustomed to.”
The unusual admission underscored the limits of state power and the challenge for Hochul, who has announced her plans to seek reelection next year against the backdrop of midterm elections.
A moderate Democrat from Buffalo, New York, Hochul has forged her own path in a party long dominated by downstate liberals. In Albany, she has gained a reputation as an iron fist in a velvet glove, winning signature agenda items — including a ban on phones in schools and repeated stiffening of the state bail laws — with stubborn determination.
She has been more willing than some in her party to deal with the president, hashing out sometimes surprising agreements on infrastructure projects and offering to help with criminal investigations. But she also has been firm in denouncing Trump’s aggressive tactics, particularly the deportation of migrants who don’t have criminal records.
At the table, Hochul listened as Schmidt’s eldest son, Lenny Schmidt, described how federal agents had stopped him the morning of the Sept. 4 raid as he was coming to work. He said he arrived to find roughly 75 law enforcement agents bearing machine guns, and coming with dogs, trucks, vans and dune buggies — what the elder Schmidt described as “a massive military-style assault.”
Schmidt’s sons recalled a frightening story that they said law enforcement shared with them: Two killers were inside the facility and the officials were there to pick them up.
“They said they don’t want to be here any longer than they need to be,” Lenny Schmidt, 49, recalled. “I said: ‘Please, do what you’ve got to do. We’ll sit tight.’”
They waited for hours, then watched as dozens of their employees, many of them women, were loaded onto a bus not to be seen again. At least three of those who were deported were mothers with babies under the age of 1, state officials said.
Videos and photos taken inside the plant during the raid, as well as reporting afterward, revealed that masked agents sorted workers based on their race, demanding documentation from those who appeared Hispanic.
In the days that followed, Syracuse.com reported that officials did not have a criminal search warrant to search the plant, instead using an administrative warrant. No killers ever materialized.
The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency did not respond to a request for additional details about the supposed killers, or the impetus for the raid. The agency previously told The New York Times that some of the 57 people it detained had convictions or pending charges, including child endangerment, driving while impaired and entering the country illegally.
Neither Schmidt nor his sons have any idea how the company ended up in the crosshairs of immigration authorities. The family maintains that they were shown documentation indicating that all the company’s employees were citizens, permanent residents or authorized to work in the country, though forgeries are not uncommon.
In the days since the raid, the town of Cato, with a population of 2,445, has been divided. The debate raged across the comments section of Facebook, where some people grieved the loss of community members, and others seemed to revel in the misfortune of the Schmidt family and their employees.
In the village, four men eating pizza at a lunch spot said that raids such as the one at the confectionary plant were necessary to “clean up” the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies.
While they didn’t have anything bad to say about the Schmidts, they also were not especially sympathetic to their plight.
In a way, the elder Schmidt understands. He voted for Trump and donated to his 2024 campaign. He said he believed Trump would go after “the worst of the worst,” as he said on the campaign trail, rather than hardworking longtime residents.
The reality is more dispiriting, he said.
“If you were looking at this objectively from outside, and you saw the magnitude of this, you would think, ‘Well, there must be something there, right?’” he said, sadly. “They wouldn’t do this for nothing.”