A bonded warehouse owned by the world’s largest industrial landlord was the site of a raid that left dozens of immigrant workers detained.
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Federal agents questioned immigrant workers for hours to verify their legal status before arresting 29 people.
Federal officers with U.S. Customs and Border Protection raided a Prologis-owned facility in Edison, New Jersey, early Wednesday, detaining 29 immigrant workers. The workers were zip-tied and taken to a nearby detention center after hours of questioning, according to The New York Times.
Third-party logistics operator Smart Supply Chain Inc. leases the building at 45 Patrick Ave. as a bonded warehouse — an industrial site certified by CBP that lets importers delay or avoid steep tariffs on foreign goods.
When Bisnow reached out on Friday, a Prologis spokesperson declined to comment on the raid, directing inquiries to Smart Supply Chain. The company’s website has since gone offline, and a representative did not respond to requests for comment.
A CBP spokesperson told Univision that the “surprise inspection” was not immigration-related but part of routine customs enforcement to ensure facilities were adhering to protocol.
Amanda Dominguez, a community organizer with immigrant workers’ advocacy group New Labor, told Bisnow she was at the raid and saw officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations join CBP on site.
Agents set up barriers around the building, blocking anyone from entering or leaving, and called in two ambulances for people injured during the arrests, Dominguez said.
The office of Edison’s mayor, which did not respond to a request for comment, told the NYT that the town’s police department had been notified that the Department of Homeland Security would be present in the area.
Dominguez said the workers — many from Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru — had been hired through outside staffing agencies.
The warehouse, one of more than 3,000 properties Prologis owns across 19 countries, is the second in New Jersey to be raided this summer. In July, federal agents arrested 20 foreign-born workers at Alba Wine and Spirits’ warehouse, CBS News reported.
“Since ICE is finding this to be a lucrative and easy operation with these bonded warehouses, I expect they will try to do this again,” Dominguez said.
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Smart Supply Chain Inc. now operates out of the Prologis-owned building at 45 Patrick Ave. in Edison, New Jersey.
There are 1,751 bonded warehouses nationwide, including about 80 in New Jersey, according to CBP. Workers at these facilities say they are increasingly uneasy about blurred lines in heightened enforcement actions.
“Workers are now beginning to ask their employers, ‘Hey, are we a bonded warehouse? I deserve to know if I’m working at a facility where at any moment I could be pushed up against a wall and handcuffed just because we’re a bonded facility,’” Dominguez said.
During his reelection campaign, President Donald Trump promised to launch the “largest deportation program” in U.S. history. This month, deportations reached a new high following a summer surge, with an average of 1,500 people detained and removed from the country per day.
The White House confirmed it was targeting workplaces, sparking consternation across the country as sweeps by ICE ramp up. Numerous construction sites across the country have been raided, with some surpassing 100 arrests.
The administration has also taken action to revoke work authorizations for more than 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Prologis CEO Hamid Moghadam said on Bloomberg TV last month that not only will the increased immigration enforcement cause a strain on the labor pool and, in turn, “radically” raise construction costs, but it will have a chilling effect on Prologis customers who need to staff their warehouses.
“It is a real issue for our customers, because they need people to work in their warehouses, and often those are the same people that are having immigration issues,” Moghadam, who was born in Iran, said in July. “So they’re being forced into more automation, which is not necessarily economic at this point in time.”
CBP, ICE and DHS did not respond to a request for comment.