A year after federal agents stormed a snack-food plant in rural Cayuga County, the video finally caught up with the story. Body-camera footage obtained and reviewed by the Associated Press shows the inside of the Sept. 4, 2025 raid at Nutrition Bar Confectioners in Cato, a family-run manufacturer with a payroll of roughly 230 workers. The footage surfaced this week as evidence in a new civil rights lawsuit, and it lands at a moment when questions about how far worksite raids can legally go are already working their way through federal courts.
What the Cameras Actually Recorded
Agents arrived shortly after 9 a.m. and, after a brief standoff at the front door, a plant manager let them in. For the next several hours, cameras kept rolling as officers fanned out across the production floor, the warehouse and the restrooms, according to the Associated Press analysis of the footage. At one locked bathroom, male officers shouted commands in broken Spanish through the door; they forced it open roughly 10 seconds later to find two women inside, one of them still in a stall.
Workers, some of them pregnant, were split into lines by citizenship status and pressed about their paperwork and how they'd entered the country. Several asked to speak with a lawyer first; officers warned them they'd be arrested if they didn't answer questions anyway. Even employees who confirmed their citizenship on the spot weren't released until they'd handed over a callback number and where they lived. In a separate clip, a Border Patrol agent is recorded making disparaging remarks about migrant children while describing an earlier assignment at a South Texas detention facility.
A Lawsuit That Reaches Beyond Federal Agents
The footage is now central evidence in a lawsuit that the New York Civil Liberties Union filed Thursday alongside the Worker Justice Center of New York. What's easy to miss in the headlines: the complaint doesn't stop at federal officers. Two local lawmen are named as individual defendants too — Cayuga County's Brian Schenck and Oswego County's Don Hilton — reflecting how deeply local law enforcement was woven into the operation.
"There were no arrest warrants," Perry Grossman, the NYCLU's supervising attorney on the case, told the AP. Agents pulled roughly 100 people aside for questioning that day and formally arrested 57, he said.
Four plaintiffs are named in the suit, and their circumstances differ sharply. Pedro Rojas, who was born in Puerto Rico and holds U.S. citizenship, still works at the plant and says he was seized and interrogated anyway. Maribel Lopez Martinez and Argentina Juarez-Lopez each allege they were unlawfully stopped and held without cause. Hediberto Ramirez Perez was sent back to Guatemala and, according to his attorney, could stay apart from his wife and kids in the U.S. for as long as two more years. The lawsuit's other deported plaintiff has already been cleared to return.
How Investigators Found Cato in the First Place
Court filings tied to the lawsuit lay out, for the first time in detail, how the case against the plant came together. According to the unsealed affidavits, Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Andrew McCoy — who is individually named as a defendant — built the case starting with three tip calls in January 2025 alleging the plant employed workers without legal status. Surveillance of the property followed within a month, and Oswego County sheriff's deputies then began pulling over vehicles leaving the factory for routine traffic stops, turning up pay stubs and W-2 forms that investigators cited as further justification for the raid.
That surveillance and those traffic stops ultimately supported two separate warrants: a criminal warrant under Rule 41 that authorized agents to seize business records and computers, and what's known in immigration law as a "Blackie's warrant" — an administrative search tool dating back to a 1981 federal appeals ruling that permits agents to search a worksite for people believed to lack legal status.
A Governor's Claim That Doesn't Match the Court Record
The existence of that criminal warrant complicates a claim Gov. Kathy Hochul made publicly less than two weeks after the raid, when she toured the plant's idled assembly lines and told reporters the agents involved had "only had administrative warrants," insisting no criminal warrant existed. Court filings unsealed in the months since show investigators had, in fact, obtained both. Hochul's broader account of that visit — including her description of three mothers with infants under a year old, one of whom was still nursing an 8-month-old and remained separated from the child — is independently confirmed by her own office's transcript of the event.
Grossman told the AP that of the 57 people arrested, only five ultimately faced criminal charges, the most serious being unlawful reentry, and that one of those five had her case dismissed after arguing her Fourth Amendment rights had been violated. Separately, court records reviewed by Spectrum News describe a different tally: four people taken into custody on federal illegal-reentry counts, all of whom later had their cases thrown out.
The Toll on a Family Business
Co-owner Lenny Schmidt has said the plant lost roughly half its production capacity once dozens of workers didn't return. "Coming in like they did, it's frightening for everybody," Schmidt said at the time, describing the mood among both Latino and non-Latino staff. Hochul, who met the Schmidt family during her visit, described walking silent assembly lines and said the family felt as though people who'd worked there for years had effectively been treated as suspects based on nothing more than appearance.
Not an Isolated Incident in Upstate New York
Cato fits a broader pattern rather than standing apart from one. In Lake Placid, ICE agents detained 14 workers at the Grandview Resort on May 28, 2026, followed by seven more employees pulled over on their way to a restaurant job on June 2 — 21 total across the two actions, in a resort town whose seasonal workforce depends heavily on immigrant labor. Outside Rochester, agents have picked off at least six employees of a greenhouse and tomato-packing operation in the town of Ontario over roughly three months, part of what area advocates describe as a slow-building pattern of arrests rather than a single dramatic sweep. In Buffalo, several restaurants, cafes and shops — including Extra Extra Pizza — closed their doors on Jan. 30 as part of a nationwide general strike protesting ICE's tactics.
"People are disappearing, they are getting transferred all over the place, it is chaos," said Jessica Maxwell, executive director of the Workers Center of Central New York, describing the broader climate for immigrant workers across the region.
According to immigration attorneys who track the data, Notices of Inspection sent to employers rose roughly 800% in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, concentrated in food processing, construction, hospitality, agriculture and warehousing — the same industries that most heavily employ Latino workers nationwide.
Know Your Rights
Legal advocates recommend that workers carry printed information about their rights, decline to sign any document without a lawyer present, and ask to see the specific type of warrant agents are carrying before a locked door is opened. An administrative warrant, unlike a judicial search warrant signed by a federal judge, generally does not by itself authorize agents to enter non-public areas of a workplace without an employer's consent.
Homeland Security has not responded to requests for comment on the footage or the lawsuit. Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who took over the department in March after the ouster of Kristi Noem, said last week that nationwide camera coverage for ICE's field officers should be finished before October. Congress has funded the purchases but never actually passed legislation forcing ICE to put cameras on its agents, even though administration officials keep describing the rollout as something lawmakers required.
