ICE raids rattle Lake Placid’s summer workforce

After much-publicized immigration operations in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and many other cities, the last few months have seen immigration enforcement less in the news. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations continue.

Documented has a story on a recent ICE activity outside major cities.

"Lake Placid is known around the world for having twice hosted the Winter Olympics. In warmer months, though, the 2,000-person rural hamlet in the Adirondacks swells to a population of more than 10,000, in large part because of seasonal immigrant workers who fuel the town’s summer tourist economy. 

Now the workers who typically labor behind the scenes have become the target of recent ICE worksite raids. In late May, ICE agents detained 14 people at a resort property, and then detained seven more people en route to work at an Indian restaurant a few days later.

According to the North Country Immigrant Allies, a local immigration group, and one of the detained resort workers who has since been released on bail, none of those detained were allowed to show documents proving their legal right to work before ICE agents took them and shipped them off to ICE detention facilities scattered across the country.

`So they grabbed me, they brought me to a white van, and they put handcuffs [on me], they tied my feet and also around my waist,' the worker on bail told Documented, speaking on the condition of anonymity. `I tried to tell them that the documents were in the car, but no one would listen.'” 

Continue reading the full story from our senior labor reporter Amir Khafagy.