TUPPER LAKE — More than one month after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided the Tupper Lake Pine Mill, its parent company has yet to make contact with the detainees, but noted that they are being deported.

Matra Group — the Quebec-based owner of the Tupper Lake mill — confirmed this after being told by I.C.E. that all of the detainees were to be sent back to their countries of origin, according to Jordan McKay, the company’s director of marketing.

But, she said on Monday that’s about all they know at this point.

“We don’t even know if they have actually been sent back yet,” she said. “We have not heard from any (of the detained employees).”

I.C.E. determined all nine employees from the Tupper Lake Pine Mill on Feb. 18 were not authorized to work in the U.S., according to McKay. She said the company stands by its employment eligibility verification processes and procedures — known as the Form I-9, which she said they completed all of the required verification for.

“We cooperated with the I.C.E. investigation,” McKay said. “Their determination on their end was that they were not valid to work in the United States, but again, we did everything on our side to verify their identification through the necessary processes.”

All employees working in the U.S. are required to have an I-9 form on file to verify their identity and prove they have the right to work in the country. Every employer is required to verify that form, according to the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, a federal agency responsible for the country’s naturalization and immigration system.

“The employer must examine these documents to determine whether they reasonably appear to be genuine and relate to the employee, then record the document information on the employee’s Form I-9,” the website states.

McKay said Matra Group has made repeated efforts to get in touch with the detainees through various forms of contact information the company had for them while they were working for the company.

“Our team has been reaching out as much as they can to make sure that everyone gets home safe,” she said. “But, we don’t have any new information.”

McKay added that the company worked with a lawyer and are continuing to follow up, but such efforts proved unsuccessful so far. She said that although the company was told that all of the detainees would be removed from the U.S. and sent back to their country of origin, they were unable to verify if that deportation process had yet to occur for any of the workers.

“From what we know, they may or may not actually still be in detention,” she said. “We truly don’t have any idea. We’re just hoping, of course, that if and when they do go back to their country of origin, that they will let us know that they are OK because obviously they’re valued members of our team and we’re just hoping that — despite everything — that they arrive home safely.”

McKay added that while the workers had been living in local housing provided by Matra while they worked here, the Feb. 18 raid itself took place at the mill. She said this resulted in a number of their personal belongings being left at their housing, which Matra Group was looking to find a way to return to the employees.

“I do know that there were some people living at a rented house, but aside from that, I don’t have any details,” she said. “They came to work, (I.C.E.) took them directly from the mill, so they have some loose ends that we want to make sure we can help them tie up here. That’s another reason, of course, we want to get in contact with them and make sure that we can facilitate that if needed.”

McKay said Matra Group will continue its attempts to reach out to the detained workers.

“We greatly miss those team members, and it’s unfortunate that they’re no longer with us,” she said. “We’re just doing everything we can on our end, which is unfortunately very limited.”

I.C.E. did not respond to a series of questions from the Enterprise by press time Monday evening.

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Operational impacts

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McKay reported that while Matra Group has been able to make some new hires in the wake of the raid, and the company is not completely “back to normal” in terms of its staffing levels before the raid.

“We definitely still are looking to hire for positions, but we’ve been able to cover all of our production needs,” she said. “We’ve hired a few more employees and I think everyone’s just trying to make sure that everything’s up and running, but there’s definitely still a need for us to look for other employees to fill some of those positions.”

In addition to owning the Tupper Lake mill, which it officially titles the Matra Tupper Lake Sawmill on its website, as well as two processing plants in Quebec, Matra Group is also the parent company of Princeton Forestry Products — which distributes lumber products finished in Canada throughout the eastern U.S.

Currently, tariffs are set to increase to 25% on softwood lumber coming into the U.S. from Canada beginning on April 2. The tariffs were originally set to go into effect in early March before President Donald Trump announced a delay on March 6 on all products covered under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a free trade treaty that was negotiated under Trump’s first term and went into effect in July 2020.

It replaced the preceding North American Free Trade Agreement, which was negotiated and went into effect in the early 1990s, reducing tariffs and other trade barriers between the three nations. Although softwood imported from Canada was not stipulated under the USMCA, it was nonetheless included in the current tariff exemptions, according to the National Association of Home Builders, a trade association that advocates for favorable policy on behalf of home builders, developers, contractors and associated businesses across the U.S.

McKay said Matra Group was in a wait-and-see situation to see if there will be any further delays in the tariffs before evaluating on whether or not to change any business or distribution practices.