It wasn’t clear who made the arrests. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement did not immediately comment.
By noon Tuesday, the parking lot in front of the car wash was nearly deserted.
The garage doors were shut, despite the busy hum of traffic on Cambridge Street. Inside the office, the manager talked on the phone, explaining to a customer that they were closed for the day. Next to him, two employees sat silent, visibly shaken, holding their heads in their hands; both of them said they had been jostled by immigration agents and forced to show identification.
They did not want to be identified out of fear of retribution and because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company.
The exterior of Allston Car Wash, which was raided by immigration agents Tuesday morning.Camilo Fonseca/Globe Staff
The raid occurred around 9:30 a.m., according to the manager. Over a dozen vehicles — one employee said they counted 17 — surrounded the business, blocking the entrances and telling customers in their cars to leave.
The raid was clearly a show of force, the manager said. “Why bring in an armored vehicle?” he said. “What are we, terrorists?”
“It’s not right,” he said, adding that he is a US citizen. “I do everything right, and still they show up here to violate my rights. Just because I look Latino.“
City Councilor Liz Breadon, who represents Allston, said in an interview Tuesday morning that her office was still working to determine the identity of the detained workers. The raid was alarming, she said, because “the scale of it is pretty immense.”
“These are honest, hard-working immigrants who are our neighbors here in Allston,” Breadon said. “There’s great concern that they’ve been taken away from their workplace. … It’s very, very distressing the scale of this, and the fact their families don’t know where they’ve been taken or what’s happened.”
Breadon said that Allston residents were long accustomed to living and working with immigrants in the community.
“We’re very pleased to have these folks live with us,” she said. “Their kids go to our schools. They work hard and they don’t cause trouble. So it’s very, very discouraging to see this happen to hard-working people.”
This corner of Allston, near the intersection of Cambridge Street and Brighton Avenue, is heavily diverse. The car wash is flanked by an Eastern European food market and an Indian restaurant, with a Turkish café — playing Colombian music — not far down the road. News of the detentions spread quickly Tuesday, with many in the community expressing their anxiety that the long-feared immigration raids had come so close to home.
Kateryna, a young Russian immigrant who manages the market next door, said workers from the car wash would come into her store several times a day, often buying lunch or groceries to take home. Most of them are men, from their 20s to their 50s, though there’s at least one mother and daughter that also work there, she said. All are friendly, she added. “They always remember us.”
On Tuesday, Kateryna — who also declined to share her name out of fear of retribution — wondered why she hadn’t seen any of them that day, until a volunteer from LUCE came in and asked her if she had video footage of the raid. LUCE is a volunteer network that monitors immigration enforcement in local communities.
Kateryna said the employees are “just people trying to live and work and make a life in the US. “
Even though her store caters mainly to Russian immigrants, there is no shortage of Hispanic customers. But after Tuesday’s raid, Kateryna worries that many of her customers and neighbors — Hispanic or not — will start staying home.
“It sounds horrible,” she said. “People are really scared.”
Emma Platoff of the Globe staff contributed.
Camilo Fonseca can be reached at camilo.fonseca@globe.com. Follow him on X @fonseca_esq and on Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports.