Immigration authorities raided an Omaha meat production plant Tuesday morning and took dozens of workers away in buses, leaving company officials bewildered because they said they had followed the law.

The raid happened around 9 a.m. at Glenn Valley Foods in south Omaha, an area where nearly a quarter of residents were foreign born according to the 2020 census.

A small group of people came out to protest the raid, and some of them even jumped on the front bumper of a vehicle to try to stop officers in one location while others threw rocks at officials’ vehicles as a white bus carrying workers pulled away from a plant.

Chad Hartmann, president of the food packaging company, said the front office was stunned by the aggressive nature of federal officials’ raid and confused by why the company was targeted.

“My biggest issue is: why us?” Hartmann said. “We do everything by the book.”

The plant uses E-Verify, the federal database used to check the immigration status of employees. When he said as much to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who carried out the raid, they told him the E-Verify system “is broken.”