Over 100 construction workers on a job site in Tallahassee, Florida, were arrested Thursday morning in a massive police-state raid led by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, in coordination with the Tampa Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) office and local and state authorities. Video and pictures posted on social media show workers being lined up, cuffed and transported onto buses as distressed family and community members looked on.
Videos posted of the raid showed dozens of police vehicles, white school buses and heavily armed and masked agents descending on the construction site. Many of the Gestapo thugs had their faces covered and virtually all were wearing body armor, even though it appears none of the workers were armed or wanted for violent crimes.
This is the second major raid led by HSI Tampa in Florida this month. On May 13, HSI, ICE, the Florida Highway Patrol, and the US Marshals targeted construction sites in Wildwood, Florida, arresting 33 people in the process.
The workers affected by Thursday’s raid were employed by Hedrick Brothers Construction and were in the middle of building a new student housing complex in the College Town neighborhood near the Florida State University campus. Hedrick Brothers released a statement confirming they were “aware that the authorities have taken control of the site” and would “fully cooperate with all elements of the investigation.”
In a post on X, (formerly Twitter), Tampa HSI claimed those arrested were from Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, and Honduras. In addition to ICE and HSI agents, personnel from the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), US Marshals, and the Florida Highway Patrol participated in the raid.
In an interview with Florida Capitol Correspondent Jason Delgado, Leonardo Garcia, a worker on the site, said that his uncle was among those arrested.
“We were just doing our job like normal,” Garcia said. “Five to nine, and people just came in here, barging in. Police surrounded the whole building, all the corners, and they just started barging in, telling people, ‘Show your papers, show your verification.’ Some people started to run away, and they just tackled them to the ground like nothing.”
Delgado reported that those arrested were transported to local holding facilities, including the Leon County Jail.
The massive raid drew a crowd of distressed onlookers and family members. Videos posted on social media quickly went viral, with thousands condemning the arrests of the workers.
“Working people [are] going to ICE detention but fraudsters, scammers, felons going free from prison,” Eugene wrote in response to a TikTok video of the raid. “Florida won’t survive without these hard workers,” Sherry added.
The arrests are part of the Trump administration’s ongoing mass deportation operation and an attack on the democratic rights of the entire working class. The fact that these militarized raids are taking place at active work places exposes the right-wing lies that immigrants are violent criminals and a threat to society.
The attacks on immigrant workers and their families must be opposed by the entire working class, regardless of citizenship status. Trump has already threatened to go after the “home growns.” There is no question that the detaining and deporting of so-called “illegal” workers will be expanded to include all those who resist the Trump administration’s drive toward dictatorship.
No faith, however, can be placed in the Democratic Party to resist these attacks. The current deportation operation, while qualitatively intensified under the present administration, is a continuation of previous policies pioneered by the Democrats—from Clinton’s construction of the border fence in the 1990s to Barack Obama’s massive deportation operation, which Trump is now seeking to eclipse. The fact is, no faction within the ruling class or either corporate party will defend the rights of immigrants.
This reality was underscored in a recent interview with Democratic Representative Vicente Gonzalez Jr. of Texas, co-founder of the El Salvador Caucus, published in Politico. Gonzalez founded the caucus alongside former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz.
In the interview, Gonzalez showered praise on President Nayib Bukele, the self-declared “cool dictator” of El Salvador. Since 2022, the Bukele government has enforced a state of exception in the country, suspending democratic rights and imprisoning 2 percent of the population in the process.
“I think it’s undeniable what he’s done has been spectacular, in terms of bringing security to over 98 percent of the population that lived in turmoil for over a generation,” Gonzalez told the outlet. He added, “I think that we have a lot in common,” referring to Bukele—a fixture at the fascistic Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and a favorite of neo-Nazi Elon Musk.
“And I don’t think Bukele comes from an extreme right-wing history. I think he’s kind of been a middle-of-the-road survivor,” Gonzalez added. “I think Bukele is a good person, and I really do think he means well and wants to do the best he can for his country, and I think we should work with him,” Gonzalez concluded.
The Bukele government, in exchange for millions of dollars from the US government, has offered up the notorious “terrorism prison” known as CECOT as an immigration detention center. In mid-March, nearly 300 people—including Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Andry Hernandez Romero—were sent to the prison despite not having committed a crime.
As of Thursday, according to NBC News, at least 14 asylum cases involving Venezuelan immigrants sent to CECOT have been dismissed by immigration judges, including the case of Hernandez Romero—further imperiling his and others’ chances of receiving a rightful return to the United States and any semblance of due process.
NBC’s David Noriega reported that lawyers for the immigrants said, in dismissing the cases, the immigrants “were essentially being disappeared from the American legal system” and that the US government is “trying to pretend that they were never here seeking asylum in the U.S. in the first place.”