Workers building an apartment complex near the Florida State University campus were detained Thursday morning by agents from U.S. Homeland Security, U.S. Marshals Service, and Florida Highway Patrol.
After entering a construction site in Tallahassee, federal and state officials asked workers for identification and separated them into two categories, witnesses told the Phoenix.
Some were free to go; others were handcuffed and led onto white buses with metal-covered windows to be transported away from the worksite, escorted by the Highway Patrol. Officials on the scene declined to provide information about the operation.
Construction workers who’d been allowed to leave told the Phoenix that law enforcement officers had surrounded the site on West Gaines Street in FSU’s College Town before the raid began at about 9 a.m.
Agents surrounded dozens of workers in line for the bus.
An ICE public information officer in Tampa told the Phoenix Thursday afternoon: “U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigation served multiple search warrants as part of an ongoing investigation in the Tallahassee region.”
A social media post from Homeland Security Investigations called it a “targeted enforcement operation.”
Homeland Security Investigations Tampa posted on social media that it arrested “more than 100 illegal aliens (some of which were previously deported and others with criminal backgrounds).” Those arrested are from Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, and Honduras and other countries, the agency said.
Calls to the U.S. attorney and U.S. district court yielded no warrant information. The Leon County Sheriff’s office did not return a call asking whether the detainees were delivered to their detention facility.
Bystanders protesting the raid told agents they should be ashamed of themselves, criticized them for wearing masks, and told them they are all descendants of immigrants.
Standing with them were workers’ family members, trying to communicate with their loved one who had been detained, asking where they were being transported to.
A man who identified himself as the manager of the construction site told the Phoenix “there’s no information” about the raid.
Layne Griffith, 22, is a graduate student at FSU who just finished her master’s degree in oceanography. She was packing to leave her apartment in College Town at around 9 a.m. to travel home to Pinellas County when she became aware of a large presence of people in the area.
“So, the state trooper was kind of doing a perimeter check around the apartment buildings itself and I was curious to know what was going on, and I started to notice more of a police presence — people in camo outfits and people in masks and state troopers. I didn’t know what departments they were working for, I couldn’t tell from my apartment,” she said.
“But I started to see dozens of people at that point in handcuffs getting walked to the opposite side of the construction site and I saw them all lined up behind the prison bus and I stood out there for a while and there were more people showing up and being detained.”
Griffith said she saw law enforcement officers from a variety of agencies: the U.S. Marshals Service; the FBI; and “lots of state troopers.”
–Mitch Perry, Jay Waagmeester, Florida Phoenix
