On Friday morning at around 9:30 a.m., federal agents in unmarked cars and bearing no agency insignia pulled over a bus in Albion, New York, about 35 miles west of Rochester, and took 14 people of Lynn-Ette & Sons Farms into custody. All of the detainees, who hailed from Mexico and Guatemala, were year-round employees of Lynn-Ette & Sons Farms, a family-owned business in nearby Kent, New York, which has been locked in a multiyear battle to prevent workers from unionizing.

The company is one of five agricultural businesses that, together with a state growers’ association, have tried for years to overturn or chip away at New York’s 2019 farm labor law. The law enshrined protections for the right of farmworkers — whether seasonal or year-round — to seek union representation.

The raid did not appear to be a broad sweep but rather a targeted enforcement aimed at specific people, according to sources who have been in contact with the families and spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity to candidly discuss a sensitive legal situation.

“At first we thought they were enforcing a deportation order, that they had one person that they’re looking for and then everyone else got dragged in — that’s kind of standard,” said one of the people with knowledge of the raid. “But this was strange because they actually had a list of most of the workers on the bus.”

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    Illegally

    At some point, a system is what it does. Complaining that the police are acting illegally is meaningless when they’re never the ones who see the back side of a prosecutor or the inside of a jail cell.

    These arrests are legal until someone in the government stops them. The US government wants to end these labor organizations, it wants to permanently imprison these labor activists, and it wants to terrorize the working class into a subsistence state of living. These actions aren’t “illegal” in any practical sense. They are the law.