‘Pull Up Your Pants!’ ICE Raided A Plant And Detained Dozens — With No Arrest Warrant.

As federal law enforcement personnel from at least three agencies swarmed a manufacturing facility in upstate New York in September, a Border Patrol agent spotted a pallet of nutrition bars from the brand That’s It.

“Oh man,” he said. “That’s It bars? My Costco run is going to be fucked.”

The agent seemed to know what was about to happen. One by one, workers in the plant were rounded up and told to sort themselves by citizenship status. Agents then questioned each suspected unauthorized immigrant in a hot, over-capacity break room.

By the end of the raid, agents had used an unusual form of that similar enforcement actions would continue.

“You can expect to see federal law enforcement at more worksites going forward,” Sarcone said.

Large immigration raids were not a feature of Trump’s first term in office, but they are now. That’s by design.

“You would need to switch to indiscriminate, or large scale, enforcement activities, basically going into any place where there’s no congregations of illegals and holding everybody on site, determining who’s there illegally, and then taking people who are there illegally into federal detention,” Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and by far the loudest voice in Trump’s ear on immigration enforcement, said in 2023.

That approach has become part of Trump’s mass deportation agenda. And should Blackie’s warrants become normalized ― as the authors of Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a second Trump term, recommended ― they would open the door for the Trump administration to enter workplaces to question employees, even if officials only have a general idea that undocumented people may work there.

But Sannes’ decision Friday adds to a swell of judicial resistance to the warrants.

In May, a magistrate judge in the Southern District of Texas flatly denied the Trump administration’s application for a Blackie’s warrant in that district, writing, “People are not documents or safety hazards.”

Magistrate Judge Andrew Edison noted that a few years after the appeals court case that gave Blackie’s warrants their name, Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 into law, which criminalized knowingly hiring undocumented people without work authorization. At that point, he said, it became possible for the government to use administrative Blackie’s warrants, which are easier to get than criminal warrants, to collect evidence for a criminal investigation.

“That simply cannot be right,” the judge wrote.

Nonetheless, the government argued in New York’s North District that the magistrate’s decision in Texas’s Southern District was “not binding or precedential.” And they may say the same about Sannes’ decision to suppress the evidence gained after what has now been deemed as an unlawful arrest.

The September raid at the Cato plant “appears to be the white hot center of a massive web of constitutional questions,” Perry Grossman, a supervising attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, told HuffPost. The NYCLU assisted in Juarez-Lopez’s motion to suppress the evidence gathered after her arrest.

Grossman compared the Blackie’s warrant used in the search to the so-called “general warrants” used by British King George III, which ultimately inspired the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

“My hope,” he said, “is that the Fourth Amendment still protects people against the things we fought a goddamn revolution over.”