Employer in Nebraska Says Business Was Targeted By ICE Despite Legally Hiring Migrants, Raid Sparks Protests

The owner of an Omaha food packaging company says his business has been the target of workplace raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE),despite having followed the rules for hiring migrants.

Glenn Valley Foods, in Omaha, Neb., was the subject of ICE raids recently, resulting in the company to now operate at about 30% of capacity as it scrambles to hire more workers, owner Gary Rohwer told ABC News.

But what's peculiar about this case? Rohwer said he meticulously followed the government's system to verify that immigrant workers are in the country legally.

"I was very upset because we were told to e-verify, and we e-verified all these years, so I was shocked," he told ABC News. "We did everything we could possibly do," he added.

E-Verify is an online U.S. Department of Homeland Security system launched in the late 1990s that allows employers to quickly check if potential employees can work legally in the U.S., often by using Social Security numbers. The system is used by some of the U.S.' largest employers, including Starbucks and Walmart.

However, critics say that the system is fairly easy to cheat, particularly with false documents.

Rohwer explained that he was told by federal agents that the workers targeted in his business used fake documents to bypass the system. ICE later confirmed that more than 70 people were arrested during the Glenn Valley Foods raid on Tuesday. It also said one of the workers, described as a Honduras national, assaulted federal agents as he was being detained.

Rohwer says it is counter-productive to arrest migrants, while not addressing the issues with the e-verifying system and leaving business to repair their employment deficit on their own.

"I'd like to see the United States government... come up with a program that they can communicate to the companies as to how to hire legitimate help. Period," he said.

The workplace raid in Omaha comes as ICE scrambles to meet a daily quota of arrests amid increased pressures. Last month, White House deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, met with ICE leadership, asserting that the agency needed to meet 3,000 daily migrant arrests or it would face layoffs.

The increased arrests by ICE, particularly the tactic of arresting migrants at their place of work, has inspired hundreds of thousands of people across the country, specially in Los Angeles, to swarm the streets of their communities to showcase their anger towards the administration. Throughout the week, the protests in L.A. led to President Trump deploying more than 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines, while also carrying out around 300 arrests of protesters.

Following California's footsteps, the Glenn Valley Foods raids, in the southeastern section of Omaha where nearly a quarter of residents are foreign born according to the 2020 census, led to hundreds of people turning out to protest Tuesday evening.

"Everybody's still on alert, waiting to see what happens today and in the coming days," Douglas County Board of Commissioners Chairman Roger Garcia, whose district covers south Omaha, said about the protests and the decision to close an Omaha library branch and the Metropolitan Community College's South Omaha campus Tuesday afternoon. "So there's still a lot of anxiety and fear out there."