A maze of warehouses winds through Edison, N.J., a suburb where highways assure easy access to New York City and beyond.
In Edison, thousands of immigrant workers toil in hundreds of warehouses, sorting millions of boxes arriving from nearby ports before being sent by trucks across the United States. But this summer has delivered something else.
Immigration raids a few weeks apart at two warehouses have unsettled the daily rhythms of this busy corridor, where Amazon, FedEx and UPS have a large presence. The second raid happened Wednesday and resulted in the arrests of 29 workers, among the largest sweeps in the region since President Trump took office.
Warehouses have been left short-staffed and behind schedule as detained workers were sent to immigration jails and others stopped showing up.
Business owners, who often rely on staffing agencies to verify the immigration status of workers who are hired to operate forklifts and load trucks, are alarmed.
And immigrant workers are rattled. Documented and undocumented, they power a critical cog in the country’s delivery network from Edison, an immigrant-rich township of 100,000 people a short drive from Staten Island.
“It’s a fear where one cannot be calm, whether you are sleeping or at work,” said Jose Ante, 37, an Ecuadorean warehouse worker who said he had a work permit and an active asylum case but still feared being picked up by the immigration authorities.
“It’s a psychological trauma, really, wondering if you have to run, to hide, to know where you could hide, even if you did nothing wrong,” he said during a lunch break on Thursday.
The workplace raids in Edison, over a stretch of six weeks, led to the detention of 49 workers, making them the most visible symbols in New Jersey of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
The first major raid took place on July 8, when immigration and customs agents descended on a wine and liquor warehouse and detained 20 workers, most of them Hispanic, who the federal government said did not have legal status. That operation was eclipsed by Wednesday’s.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection was involved in both raids, which had similar hallmarks.
Both of the raided facilities are bonded warehouses, which are subject to the supervision of the customs agency. The agency cited its authority to conduct unannounced inspections of such facilities, which are used by importers to hold foreign goods before paying import duties. Once inside the warehouses, agents interrogated and verified the legal status of the workers; it was unclear if they had inspected merchandise. On both occasions, they chased some workers who ran, gave up on a number who hid and detained dozens with zip ties.
On Wednesday, Nelson Alvarez was working as a security guard at the second warehouse to be raided. Eight officers got out of two S.U.V.s in the morning, told him not to move and grabbed his walkie-talkie, he said.
“I told them I had to ask for my boss’s permission and if they had any authorization,” Mr. Alvarez recalled on Thursday. “They said they were Border Patrol and customs and that they didn’t have to ask for permission to be here.”
After agents opened the gate, about 20 vehicles with tinted windows drove in, Mr. Alvarez said.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security, of which Customs and Border Protection is a part, said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had also been involved in the raid.
“Work site enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to protect public safety, national security and economic stability while rescuing individuals who may be victims of labor trafficking or exploitation,” the agency said. “These operations target illegal employment networks that undermine American workers, destabilize labor markets and threaten American communities.”
The agency said it had arrested 29 “illegal aliens” employed at the warehouse by Smart Pony Inc. In interviews, workers said the warehouse operated under a variety of names, including Smart Supply, a Texas company, which did not reply to requests for comment. The warehouse receives goods from abroad, including China, and stores them for large online retailers.
Workers at the warehouse said they had been hired by a staffing agency but did not disclose its name, fearful they could lose their jobs. Staffing agencies often play the middleman in corporate America, helping warehouses and factories employ migrants, including some who have entered the country illegally and are desperate for jobs, sometimes leading to exploitation.
The raids left immigrant activists wondering whether Edison was being targeted because of its concentration of warehouses and whether more raids were on the horizon.
“We are unique in that we have a large number of warehouses that do store, manufacture and ship goods all over the country,” said Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice.
Most of those detained were from Latin America, even though Edison is better known for its concentration of Asians, who account for half of the township’s population. Decades of migration turned the once largely white, middle-class community into one of the best-known Indian enclaves in the country.
Along Oak Tree Road, stores and restaurants with an Indian flavor give the strip its nickname, Little India.
There, in a supermarket, an Indian software engineer who came to the United States on a student visa two years ago said that his sympathy for those arrested during raids was tempered by a desire that people enter the country legally.
“People should come here with proper documentation,” the engineer, Sai Hitesh Mangaiahgari Radhakrishna, 29, said. “If this mass of people keep coming and try to get jobs, they should have the proper information about what to expect before they come.”
But some Indian business leaders said they believed workplace raids could dampen the area’s commercial activity, which is also driven by health care and manufacturing.
“People elected President Trump to improve the economy,” said Mahesh Shah, the vice chairman of the Indian Business Association in Edison. “All these sideshows with the tariffs and the raids is not good for the economy, it’s not good for the community, it’s not good for anybody.”
The wine and liquor warehouse raided last month — Alba Wines and Spirits Warehousing and Distribution — has been reeling, as fewer workers have shown up in the weeks since the raid, according to employees.
“What happens if you have papers and you don’t bring them, or what happens if you come to work and they take you anyway?” said Jose Villalta, a worker at Alba who is from El Salvador and is a U.S. citizen and was at the warehouse during the raid. “There’s less workers, and people are afraid.”
At the time, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said that the raid was a joint inspection with Customs and Border Protection, in part “to ensure businesses are following immigration and employment laws.”
In a statement the week after the raid, the owners of the liquor warehouse said that those who had been arrested were “temporary workers hired by third-party staffing agencies.”
“Our hearts go out to them and their families during this incredibly difficult time — these are hardworking people, fundamental for the functioning of our country’s infrastructure,” the company told WABC-TV.
The company did not reply to requests for comment on Thursday.
As the Trump administration escalates its crackdown on workplaces, immigrant labor and the hiring practices of employers have remained a fraught political issue, even in heavily Democratic states such as New Jersey that have large populations of undocumented immigrants.
Asked about the raids, Representative Jefferson Van Drew, a Republican of New Jersey, said he supported “legal immigration and work visas.”
“When millions of people come in unvetted, we don’t know who they are or what their background is, and that puts our communities at risk,” he said.
The state’s Democratic senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, condemned the raids, describing them in a joint statement as “performative theatrics that do little to enhance public safety.”
On Oak Tree Road, Rahul Patel, 21, a worker at a bakery, pointed to a sign on the door that said, “We’re hiring.”
He said that the bakery had stopped hiring people without papers after Mr. Trump’s election but that business owners who were unable to find workers had few options but to hire unauthorized workers.
“If people show up and they’re willing to work, they’re going to get hired anyway,” he said.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní is a Times reporter covering immigration in the New York region.
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