Federal agents pulled back from a raid on rooftop workers at a rental site in upstate New York on Tuesday morning, as protesters crowded the street outside the location and forcefully condemned their operation.
About 100 demonstrators joined the scene in Rochester, yelling “shame” and “Gestapo,” as immigration enforcement agents, some of which were masked, tried to arrest people working at the site, eventually forcing them to retreat, according to WXXI. The protesters clapped and made obscene gestures as the agents left, the local outlet said.
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One vehicle belonging to U.S. Customs and Border Protection was left with four flat tires. It’s unclear how the tires were slashed. Protesters cheered as that SUV was driven away.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, acknowledged that slashing the tires of a federal agent’s vehicle could amount to serious wrongdoing.
“Which is why it’s pretty incredible that we are seeing that level of willingness to engage in pretty serious behavior in opposition to immigration enforcement,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
One of the people who was doing work on the roof was taken into custody as a result of Tuesday’s operation, WXXI said. Roofing contractor Clayton Baker identified the man as one of his workers, noting that he had legal documentation, and decried his arrest as “inhumane.”
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“He’s a family guy, and he’s got a baby on the way. He’s never even had a speeding ticket that I know of. He goes to church every Sunday, and he pays his taxes,” Baker told WXXI.
The agents did not manage to detain any of the other workers, who remained on the roof throughout the operation.
ICE and the CBP did not immediately return HuffPost’s request for comment.
Ruth Reeves, one of the people who joined the protest, told WHAM why she felt compelled to show up.
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“They’re here putting on a roof, trying to make a dollar and paying taxes on that dollar, and ICE was here bothering them, so I came to bother ICE,” Reeves told the outlet.
As the White House has intensified its immigration crackdown across the country, the Trump administration earlier this year sued Rochester over its “sanctuary city” policies. The city council has since voted to reaffirm that policy.
