Rumors are rampant in the city's immigrant communities that federal agents are swooping down into neighborhoods and plucking undocumented workers from restaurants, car washes and even soccer fields.
"My employees are nervous to come to work now," said Ana, a Woodhaven, Queens, hair salon owner who called the Daily News to report an unsubstantiated raid of a Latino food restaurant on Jamaica Ave. and 104th St. "I really don't know what to tell them."
The stories are not true, advocates and immigration officials say.
Yet, they continue to spread quickly among tens of thousands of New Yorkers who live and work without legal papers - and for whom the fear of deportation, real or not, is ever present.
Dozens of organizations held an emergency meeting in Queens on April 28 to discuss the paranoia, said Monami Maulik, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving or DRUM.
The false rumors seem to have started after the federal Department of Homeland Security announced last month that it was stepping up efforts targeting employers who hire undocumented workers.
Soon after, on April 19, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out a multicity raid, hitting 52 work sites operated by IFCO Services, a pallet supply company headquartered in Houston, including one factory on Long Island. A total of 1,200 workers and several managers have been arrested.
At about the same time, immigrants throughout the nation started asserting themselves with massive marches and rallies, said Kavita Pawria, legal and policy organizer at DRUM. Many New Yorkers who attended the rallies said they had decided to participate despite fears of being arrested.
"It's happening at a particular moment when immigrants have been very vocal," Pawria said. "There's so much mistrust."
Rosa, a Mexican immigrant from Queens, told The News that a Bronx car wash on Fordham Road and Webster Ave. was raided last week by immigration officials. Immigrants playing a soccer match also were arrested at a park in Westchester County recently, she believed.
But neither roundup actually happened, according the the feds.
Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the stories are all false and he stressed that the agency is not haphazardly targeting undocumented immigrants.
"We don't do random sweeps - we do targeted enforcement actions," he said. "We've said all along our enforcement actions are intelligence driven. They are not random."
