The Department of Justice says the family is part of an international drug trafficking and money laundering ring, while local community members refute the claims, saying there is no evidence
NORCROSS, Ga.—On the morning of Tue., April 15, five people were apprehended by police at their Norcross home during a multi-agency raid that included local law enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), and plainclothes officers who were originally not identified.
Sources who were on site during Tuesday’s raid told Mainline that the plainclothes officers appeared to be Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, consistent with other incidents involving ICE agents in the area, where officers were seen wearing similar clothing, driving unmarked cars with covered license plates and tinted windows.
“ICE agents typically wear plainclothes and are the ones present for these raids,” says local community member Peter Hopkins, who is familiar with ICE operations and raids that have been happening in the area. (Hopkins asked to be referred to by an alias due to fear of retaliation and surveillance.) “There was also someone who was in the area talking with one of the plainclothes men, who said the man was with ICE.”
MG News reporter Mario Guevara later confirmed in his reporting that two of the five people apprehended on Tuesday are now in ICE custody, and that the agency has plans to deport them for being undocumented.
“By the time we arrived, we saw several people lined up in handcuffs,” explains Hopkins, who was on site during the raid along with neighbors and other community members. “One of the women was let back inside and came back to show documents to one of the officers. They took handcuffs off of some of them, and the rest were put inside cars and taken away.”
Hopkins and other witnesses say they spoke with the family members, including children, who were left behind. Their front door was reportedly destroyed along with other damage.
“The children and family members were in tears,” Hopkins recalls. “We went to the house next door and saw their front door was also damaged, but no one came out.”
The Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs released an official press statement following the raid and did not mention the presence of ICE agents, but it did say the raid was part of “Operation Take Back America.” The operation was established in a March 6 memo to all DOJ employees from the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, who specifically cited the purpose of “repelling the invasion of illegal immigration” under Executive Order 14159, entitled Protecting the American People Against Invasion. This executive order, signed by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2025, states that the Department of Homeland Security will take “all appropriate action” to enable and ensure that ICE, the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to “execute immigration laws of the United States.”
The order claims that the Biden administration “invited, administered, and oversaw an unprecedented flood of illegal immigration into the United States,” claiming that “millions of illegal aliens” crossed U.S. borders or were “permitted to fly directly into the United States on commercial flights and allowed to settle in American communities, in violation of longstanding Federal laws.”
However, data and reports show that the Biden administration deported people at a faster rate than the current administration. According to a March 2025 report by Reuters, Trump currently lags Biden in initial deportation numbers. While President Trump deported 37,660 people during his first month in office, this is far less than the monthly average of 57,000 removers and returns in the last full year of the Biden administration.
Trump’s executive order goes on to say that many of these individuals the government believes to be unlawful “present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans”
Regarding last week’s Norcross case, the DOJ’s press statement says those detained were indicted by a grand jury for their involvement with a “massive international drug trafficking and money laundering ring” in Atlanta. However, local residents have told Mainline that there is no evidence of their community members’ involvement with any drug trafficking or money laundering rings.
According to neighbors, ICE had been patrolling in their neighborhood for at least a few weeks. While it’s been reported by local reporter Guevara that the agency has plans to deport those apprehended last Tuesday, our sources tell us they have not been able to ascertain where the detainees are being held.
