NEW BEDFORD — Market Basket suspended dozens of workers from its store on Sawyer Street this week – a direct result of recent “operations” by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
According to the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, 47 workers at the New Bedford Market Basket were let go this week shortly after being asked to give Social Security cards they originally used to get their jobs. A spokesperson for Market Basket confirmed that it was the result of an ICE action.
“ICE conducted operations recently in New Bedford at Market Basket and took enforcement actions against some employees,” the spokesperson said in an email. “This happens from time to time in the regular course of business.”
The Light also asked the spokesperson in an email to confirm the number of total employees, the number of suspended employees, the date on which they asked employees for Social Security cards, and whether other locations were being audited. The company spokesperson declined to answer those questions.
On Friday, after publication, the spokesperson issued an updated statement:
“The employees were suspended as a result of a Homeland Security investigation dating back to 2023. The employees have an opportunity to be reinstated pending updating their working papers.”
Thursday’s action comes after Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE, told CBS News that the agency would begin targeting employers of undocumented immigrants as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Adrian Ventura, the executive director of CCT, said this is a moment he was worried would come.
“This is sincerely my biggest fear,” he said in Spanish. “It’s also my fear when it comes to the fishing industry.
“They’re going to use documents as weapons,” he continued. “I call this a document raid.”
Elizabeth said her alarm bells first went off about a month ago, when management at the store asked employees for the Social Security cards they used to apply for their jobs.
“I’ve worked there for two and a half years,” said Elizabeth, a Guatemalan woman who asked to use a pseudonym due to fears around her immigration status. “They never asked for that before.”
The action — formally called an I-9 inspection though often referred to as an audit — was likely triggered by a Notice of Inspection to the employer to review the I-9 forms of their employees. All employees are required to fill out and show proof of permission to work in the U.S., be it with a passport or combination Social Security card and driver’s license. By law, the employer is required to have available the I-9 forms of all current employees and maintain those of all former employees for three years.
According to guidance from ICE, if the audit finds that an employee is not currently authorized to work in the U.S., the employer can no longer provide them work. But, according to Jennifer Velarde, a New Bedford-based immigration attorney, this is not something employers generally do of their own volition.
“Usually a company is concerned they might have to pay penalties and they might have an attorney at a law firm working to help them extend the audit,” said Velarde.
Elizabeth said there were rumors of ICE agents walking around the store in recent weeks, a credible fear in a city where at least 42 immigrants have been detained by the agency as part of a national mass deportation campaign. The most recent arrest occurred on Monday. None of the suspended workers have yet been reported as detained.
Elizabeth said she realized what was happening after work Monday when she saw a friend leaving in tears.
“A colleague told me they were firing people,” she said. “They called them into a meeting in the morning and said they were suspended.”
In that first group of seven to eight workers was a 22-year old woman from Guatemala, who said the move was unexpected.
“It was sad for me,” said the woman, who requested anonymity due to her immigration status. She said she is married with an infant child at home. “They didn’t give us any warning and took me by surprise.
“I asked if they were going to help us find work and they said ‘no,’” she continued. “Where am I going to find work? No one is hiring now.”
Ventura said CCT is looking into whether the move qualifies as a violation of the Warn Act, a law in Massachusetts that requires employers who let go of 50 or more workers at a time or employ 500 or more employees at a site give them ample notice and help with finding new work.
So when Elizabeth, who is 40 with two daughters, aged 14 and 8, received a call at 8 a.m. on Tuesday, her first day off after six days of full-time work at $15 an hour, asking her to come in, she knew what was coming. That didn’t soften the impact though.
“[A Social Security card] is not just something you can go buy,” said Elizabeth, who added that she is currently in the process of seeking work authorization. “[The company] knew the whole time about our status.”
“I felt it was unjust,” Elizabeth said. “Management didn’t seem to even think of us as people. They treated us like we were disposable. Like we were garbage.”
Ventura said that what most disturbed him was the secrecy.
“They called them in and spoke so beautifully, saying they could come back once they had Social Security cards,” he said. “But that’s not true. They got rid of them forever.”
Velarde said she believes that current immigration policy has a lot to do with the Market Basket suspensions.
“This is a Catch-22 for a lot of the people working here,” she said. “But it could be triggered, especially in this environment, on a large scale.”
She added that recent appropriations to ICE means there will be more prisons and more beds to detain immigrants, leaving large swaths of the population vulnerable, especially those who work in industries such as hospitality, leisure, restaurants, supermarkets, and fishing.
“Where are they going to get the people [to fill the prisons]? At workplaces like Market Basket and the fish houses,” she said. “It makes me sad because they are people that have to feed their families and now they have no work and they feel trapped.
“If we keep going at this rate where companies are concerned about ICE. It’ll have a big impact on small cities like us.”
That’s a question Michael Goodman, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, has been pondering.
“Forty-seven workers at Market Basket, it may not be as easy to backfill that number of workers as some folks may believe,” he said. “I think the impact for New Bedford for employers will be concentrated in certain areas where there are foreign-born workers whether they are documented or undocumented.”
Though there are no studies available to examine the impacts of recent immigration policies on New Bedford’s economy specifically, a recent report from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, estimates that current immigration and enforcement policies would reduce migration inflows and shrink the economy by between .31 and .38 percentage points in 2025.
“If the administration manages a higher deportation rate and a policy climate that is even more hostile to immigrants than we currently project for the low scenario, the macroeconomic consequences would be more adverse,” the report reads. “It is also possible that a low scenario or a more extreme outcome would disrupt specific labor markets, supply chains, and civil society in unpredictable ways beyond what we have modeled here.”
Goodman said that he could easily see that happening in New Bedford.
“This creates anxieties and concerns in worker communities where they might be mistakenly identified as undocumented,” he said. “There may be a discouraged worker effect where people are discouraged from working in environments where they might get the scrutiny.”
He added that the lack of safety in the community will spread outward and begin to affect employers’ ability to hire people as well.
“These stories spread within communities that feel most vulnerable and have cascading effects that are difficult to measure,” he said, adding that the drop in income, spending, and even customer experience due to a smaller workforce could lead to knock-on effects throughout the local economy. “Simply enforcing the rules more strictly is not making anyone safer and will not create jobs for native workers that were not already there.”
One of those who is not discouraged though is Elizabeth. She said that despite the hard times, she intends to grind through the difficulty. She has two natural-born U.S. citizen daughters who need her.
“I’m going to look for a new job and I’m determined to stay,” she said. “Maybe I won’t have a better life, but perhaps my daughters will.”
Email Kevin G. Andrade at [email protected]
Editor’s note: This story was amended on Friday, July 25, 2025, to add an additional after-publication comment from Market Basket.