A year after federal agents stormed a snack-food plant in rural Cayuga County, the video finally caught up with the story. Body-camera footage obtained and reviewed by the Associated Press shows the inside of the Sept. 4, 2025 raid at Nutrition Bar Confectioners in Cato, a family-run manufacturer with a payroll of roughly 230 workers. The footage surfaced this week as evidence in a new civil rights lawsuit, and it lands at a moment when questions about how far worksite raids can legally go are already working their way through federal courts.
What the Cameras Actually Recorded
Agents arrived shortly after 9 a.m. and, after a brief standoff at the front door, a plant manager let them in. For the next several hours, cameras kept rolling as officers fanned out across the production floor, the warehouse and the restrooms, according to the Associated Press analysis of the footage. At one locked bathroom, male officers shouted commands in broken Spanish through the door; they forced it open roughly 10 seconds later to find two women inside, one of them still in a stall.
Workers, some of them pregnant, were split into lines by citizenship status and pressed about their paperwork and how they’d entered the country. Several asked to speak with a lawyer first; officers warned them they’d be arrested if they didn’t answer questions anyway. Even employees who confirmed their citizenship on the spot weren’t released until they’d handed over a callback number and where they lived. In a separate clip, a Border Patrol agent is recorded making disparaging remarks about migrant children while describing an earlier assignment at a South Texas detention facility.
A Lawsuit That Reaches Beyond Federal Agents
The footage is now central evidence in a lawsuit that the New York Civil Liberties Union filed Thursday alongside the Worker Justice Center of New York. What’s easy to miss in the headlines: the complaint doesn’t stop at federal officers. Two local lawmen are named as individual defendants too — Cayuga County’s Brian Schenck and Oswego County’s Don Hilton — reflecting how deeply local law enforcement was woven into the operation.
“There were no arrest warrants,” Perry Grossman, the NYCLU’s supervising attorney on the case, told the AP. Agents pulled roughly 100 people aside for questioning that day and formally arrested 57, he said…