Latest news with #JaimeCook
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘An Open Secret': Sackets Harbor ICE raid shows 'reality' of New York dairy country
— This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a non-profit news publication investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter at Residents of Sackets Harbor, a small Northern New York town that looks at Canada across Lake Ontario, have been reeling since federal immigration enforcement agents raided a dairy farm there last month. Agents detained three students enrolled in the town's 400-student K-12 school — a third grader, 10th grader and 11th grader — along with their mother. 'WE'RE NOT AN IMMIGRATION HUB' The raid 'shocked' Jaime Cook, the school principal. Cook grew up in California's agriculture-heavy Central Valley, where many workers are immigrants and circumstances like this were more familiar, she said. 'It's so shocking that it happened here,' she told New York Focus. 'We're not an immigration hub.' Sackets Harbor may not be an immigration hub, but it is in farm country — and more specifically, dairy country. More than half of the workers on New York's dairies are foreign-born, some experts estimate. The dairy industry is responsible for about half of the state's agricultural output. Nearly 3,000 farms produce more than 16 billion pounds of milk a year — more than most other states. The industry is largely concentrated in Central, Western, and Northern New York, where it's a major economic force in rural communities. Dairy Industry Dynamics The raid there has foregrounded a fragile reality, which is that employers in some of the region's key industries consider immigrant workers essential to their operations, but many are not legally authorized to work. While immigration enforcement has always loomed large over the industry, some farmers are anticipating a heightened threat to their workforces — and therefore to their businesses. President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised 'mass deportations' of immigrants. His administration has said it will resume immigration raids on workplaces, which were largely halted under the Biden administration, and it has ramped up immigration enforcement in upstate New York in recent weeks. After spending more than a week in a Texas detention center, the Sackets Harbor children and their mother were released on April 7 without a clear explanation for why they were detained in the first place. Their detention has rocked a small town and school community in a county that is almost entirely represented by Republicans across all levels of government and voted for Trump by large margins in 2024. School superintendent Jennifer Gaffney said in a statement after their release, 'In the midst of this difficult time, the strength, compassion, and resilience of our community have shone through.' 'BORDER CZAR' HOME Sackets Harbor is a town of about 1,300 people in the northernmost part of the state. Boats are parked in a marina on Lake Ontario, and Tom Homan, Trump's 'border czar' who grew up in the North Country, recently bought a summer home on the water. Old McDonald's Farm, an 8,000-acre operation that produces crops like corn and soybeans, beef cattle, and milk from about 1,500 dairy cows, sits on the edge of town. Large signs on the road into town advertise, 'If you like animals, you'll love Old McDonald's Farm,' which also boasts seasonal activities including a corn maze, a reindeer Christmas village, and a pig race. Old McDonald's employs more than 50 workers, and at least some live on the farm in employer-provided housing. That's where federal immigration enforcement officers showed up in the early morning hours of March 27 with a warrant to arrest a worker charged with distributing child pornography to an undercover law enforcement officer. The three children and their mother, who works on the farm, along with three others, were swept up in what the agency calls 'collateral arrests' — when agents detain people they suspect are undocumented who happen to be present when they show up. The Trump administration has been using the tactic across the country. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions about why the seven individuals were detained, and federal officials have provided conflicting information. Some told local media that the individuals were not part of a criminal investigation and were 'awaiting removal proceedings.' Homan, Trump's 'border czar,' said in an interview that the children were being detained as potential witnesses to a crime. ICE 'can really only detain people if they think that person is a flight risk or a danger to 'persons or property,'' said Amy Belsher, a senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union. She said the collateral arrests in this case appeared 'unlawful.' (Belsher is not the family's attorney and commented on publicly available information about the raid.) ICE has ramped up its operations in Upstate New York in recent weeks, announcing last week that it had 'apprehended' 133 undocumented immigrants in Western, Central, and Northern New York. The release said that just 20 of them had criminal charges or convictions, and nine had been previously deported. EMPLOYEE LONGEVITY The agency has visited other dairy farms recently. and in late March, immigration enforcement agents arrested two people at a dairy farm in Lisbon, a hour-and-a-half drive north from Sackets Harbor. Around the same time, ICE detained nine employees from a lumber mill in the Adirondacks. In New York, dairy is good business. The state is a nation-leading producer of yogurt, cottage cheese, and other milk products from 630,000 dairy cows. Milking cows in an industrial dairy is around-the-clock work, grueling and sometimes dangerous. Farms 'have a very hard time finding employees' willing to do the job, according to Richard Stup, the director of the Agricultural Workforce Development Program at Cornell University. As a result, there are more dairy jobs than there are people in the area who want to fill them. Immigrant workers, largely from Mexico and Guatemala, come to New York specifically for those jobs, and often, they stay for years or even for decades, Stup said. and many don't have legitimate work authorization because there are few paths to obtain it for farm work that is not seasonal. The owner of Old McDonald's dairy farm, Ronald Robbins, has not spoken publicly about the raid. He discussed the industry's reliance on immigrant labor last fall on an episode of a podcast he co-hosts with Jay Matteson, the Jefferson County agricultural coordinator. On the podcast episode, Robbins said he provides housing, utilities and 'in many cases we pay for cable TV' for his workers. 'We try to eliminate as much turnover as possible in the dairy operation,' he said. 'Longevity of those employees is of the utmost importance.' (His farm did not respond to a request for comment.) Robbins said that a few employees on the crop — not dairy — part of his farm are working on H-2A visas, a program for seasonal farmworkers that has grown dramatically in recent years. Dairy farmers have long clamored for the program to be expanded to their industry, which is currently excluded because the jobs are not seasonal. 'We would hope that this focus on immigration and national security could put a focus on the importance of food security, and how having a temporary guest worker program that includes the dairy industry is a better fit,' said Allyson Jones-Brimmer, a vice president at the Northeast Dairy Producers Association in a March interview. Robbins said on the podcast that he supports a policy like that to make it easier for immigrant workers to receive work authorization for a few years. Such a proposal, which would have to happen at the federal level, would allow workers to come to the U.S. legally and on a longer-term basis, but provides no path to citizenship and ties them to their employer. Worker advocates have often opposed the idea for these reasons, arguing that it makes workers vulnerable to exploitation when their immigration status is tied to their employers, and the visa status excludes them from key benefits available to other workers, like Social Security. Worker Vulnerability If raids 'become much more widespread … they're going to find quite a few people who are unauthorized' in the dairies, Stup said. 'Especially if it's concentrated in a small area, then we could have a real problem finding enough workers to get the work done. It could be pretty devastating to the industry pretty quickly.' On Saturday, upwards of 1,000 people from the town and neighboring ones rallied to demand the children be returned home. The rally was organized by the Jefferson County Democratic Committee, although organizers told New York Focus they did not want the event to be 'political.' They said the goal was just to have the family returned home. Rally for Justice The detention of the family from Sackets Harbor prompted a strong local response, in part, according to some community members, because the school and town are so small, and the raid felt unexpected. Some rally attendees noted that the kids stood out in a school where, according to state data, about 90% of the students are white and only six students across 12 grades are 'migrants.' 'I think that there was an understanding that our students were maybe vulnerable, but I don't think anyone thought this was going to be our reality,' said Jonna St. Croix, a teacher in Sackets Harbor who teaches the two teenage students who were detained. She's also the president of the local teachers union. 'This was shocking for us because, you know, this is a family. These aren't criminals.' Protestors marched from the town visitor center to his house, and some people carried signs saying, 'Return The Children, Deport Homan.' They said they believed the children had been denied 'due process' and lamented a lack of transparency around the situation. Some were concerned because the family had been attending hearings in their immigration case. 'These people were following the rules,' said Dawn Nier, town board member in neighboring Hounsfield. Nier, who went to Sackets Harbor high school herself, is a farmer selling produce and goat's milk products. With detentions like this one, she worried, 'we are not living by the rule of law.' 'IT'S A CHOICE' Others drew a link to local agriculture. Paul Siskind attended the rally from the nearby town of Norwood. He said he was there because, as a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church, he believes in the dignity of all people. 'The whole situation with immigrant farmworkers is an open secret,' he said. For the dairy industry, it is also a stark material fact. 'It's a choice for the U.S. government at this point,' said Matteson, the Jefferson County Agricultural Coordinator, on the podcast. 'Do you want to import your food or do you want to import your labor?' Robbins, the farm owner, responded: 'They can sensationalize this issue all day long, but that's the reality.'
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Fact Check: This letter by a school principal about ICE detaining her students is real
Claim: An image authentically shows a letter by a school principal in Sackets Harbor, New York, calling for the release of three students and their mother from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. Rating: In early April 2025, a letter purportedly showing a school principal's appeal for the return of her students from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody spread widely online. Social media users posted the alleged letter on platforms like Bluesky, Facebook and X. The letter was allegedly written by Jaime Cook, principal of New York's Sackets Harbor Central School that teaches preschool through high school students. It described a situation where ICE officials detained three unnamed students from the same family, even though they allegedly followed "the legal [immigration] process." According to the letter, agents supposedly went "door to door" and "handcuffed" the students before putting them in a van with an "alleged criminal" and taking them to a detention center. Officials also detained their mother, according to the letter. Per the letter, at least one of the students is a third grader. "We are in shock—and it is that shared shock that has unified our community in the call for our students' release," Cook allegedly wrote. While Snopes has not independently corroborated every claim in the letter (it's true ICE agents detained the family), we have confirmed it is real. The principal posted the letter on Facebook on April 5, 2025, and Cook confirmed the document's authenticity via email. The school also confirmed the document's authenticity via a phone call. Therefore, we have rated this claim true. ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment. As of this writing, the family has not been identified. The case gained national media attention in part because it happened in the hometown of U.S. President Donald Trump's "border czar," Tom Homan. He told New York television station 7News he first heard about the situation from a childhood friend, New York Assemblyman Scott Gray of Watertown. Gray said via an emailed statement on April 7 he was "pleased to share that the family at the center of this recent federal immigration matter is being returned home." Sackets Harbor Central School District Superintendent Jennifer Gaffney also confirmed in an emailed statement that the students and their mother "are returning home." "At this time, we respectfully ask both the media and the community to honor the family's privacy," the statement read, noting that the district did not plan to respond to further media inquiries. While the letter did not state the day ICE detained the family, news reports said the arrests happened in an early morning raid on March 27, 2025, that was initially focused on arresting a South African man who is accused of distributing images of child sexual abuse. In addition to the woman and her three kids, three other people were detained in the sweep, per The Associated Press. The case sparked outrage among the local community, which organized protests calling for the students' return. In a 7News interview about the situation on April 2, Homan said, "ICE is doing everything by the book" and the family was "found in the country illegally" (see 2:15). Here is an excerpt from the conversation (see 2:54): First of all, the family is not in a jail. They're in a family residential center; it's an open-air campus. So the investigators are doing their due diligence. The victim witness specialists are reviewing the safety and security of the children, medical evaluations — it's usually a part of the investigation, so the investigation continues. It's a criminal investigation. The full interview is available on 7News' YouTube page. In Cook's letter, she challenged Homan's description of the family's circumstances: We are in direct communication with our students. Let me be clear: they are not "being medically evaluated." They are not being "questioned as potential victims." Calling a detention center by another name does not change what it is. We deserve better than spin and misinformation. My teachers and my students are already hurting. Family residential centers are detention centers according to ICE's own website. In her email, Cook said she posted the letter to Facebook "in response to misinformation," claiming the family had no association with the "alleged criminal" ICE initially targeted. "I lent my voice as a person and I do not represent my school district or the teacher's union," she continued. Homan's interview with 7News did not address Cook's allegations that the students were handcuffed. However, page 10 of the 2015 ICE arrest procedures handbook reads: "Age, size, and gender are not valid reasons for failing to handcuff an individual. Juveniles may be handcuffed for officer safety." There does not appear to be a more recent handbook publicly available at the time of publication. Gray, the New York assemblyman, said via email he did not know whether the children were handcuffed and could not verify details in Cook's letter. "My focus was on the family first, I will attempt to work on the [other details] next," he said. 7News | WWNY | Watertown. "7News Extra FULL INTERVIEW: Border Czar Tom Homan Talks about ICE Sweep near Sackets Harbor." YouTube, 2 Apr. 2025, Accessed 7 Apr. 2025. "Arrest Procedures Handbook." U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 21 July 2015, p. 10, Accessed 7 Apr. 2025. "Detention Management." Harbor, Sackets. "Sackets Harbor Central School." Accessed 7 Apr. 2025. Jaime Montana Cook. "Message from Sackets Harbor Principal." 5 Apr. 2025, Accessed 7 Apr. 2025. Ormsbee, Molly. "Three Students Detained by ICE Agents near Watertown." WPTZ, 1 Apr. 2025, Accessed 7 Apr. 2025. "South African Man Living in Jefferson County Charged with Distribution of Child Pornography." 28 Mar. 2025, Accessed 7 Apr. 2025. Thompson, Carolyn. "Family Swept up by US Immigration Agents Looking for Someone Else Is Released from Custody." AP News, 7 Apr. 2025, Accessed 7 Apr. 2025.
Miami Herald
28-03-2025
- Miami Herald
Alligator breaks into home, whips at furniture as family watches, Louisiana video shows
A 9-foot alligator broke into a Louisiana family's home, and video of the intrusion shows it started slapping around furniture when confronted. The break-in happened around 10 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, at the Waterfront East subdivision in Maurepas, according to the Livingston Parish Sheriff's Office. Nobody got hurt, unless you count the alligator's pride. '(The) family tells us this gator 'broke in' through their screened-in porch,' the sheriff's office said in an email to McClatchy News. 'Livingston Parish has close to 400 nautical miles of waterways,' Livingston Parish Sheriff Jason Ard said. 'This isn't LPSO's first run-in with a gator and won't be our last. ... It's part of the job out here!' Sheriff's office video shows the alligator had bellied up to the bar when deputies arrived. It then bit down on a chair cushion and went into a series of 'death rolls,' a term for the spinning maneuver alligators use to drown their prey. One man eventually got on the gator's back — like a horseback rider — and held it down long enough to be tied. The alligator was dragged across the yard to a dock, then released into the nearby Diversion Canal, officials said. The video had been viewed more than 345,000 times on Facebook as of March 28, and racked up 4,000 reactions and comments. Among the commenters were amused Louisianians who likened an alligator in the house to an Uber Eats delivery. 'He's lucky he didn't end up by my house (because) he would have been dinner,' Jaime Cook wrote. 'I'd have a freezer full of gator meat,' David Danna posted. 'This is south Louisiana. We call this a good day. (That) don't shoot back,' Mitchell Harris said. 'Just imagine seeing that going out of the door in the morning if (you are) running late for work,' Sarah McMichael wrote. Maurepas is about a 70-mile drive northwest from New Orleans.
