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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW TO FIGHT TRUMP’S ATTACKS ON FARMWORKERS  
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David Bacon
April 11, 2025
The Nation
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_ ICE is picking people up on warrants for detention across the
country. ICE Director Tom Homan calls all undocumented immigrants
criminals and therefore credible targets for deportation, no matter
how many years they have lived in the country. _

Lelo speaks to migrant farmworkers and their supporters on a May Day
march to call for unions and human rights for farmworkers. , David
Bacon

 

On March 25, Alfredo Juarez was driving his compañera to work in the
flower fields of Washington Bulb, the largest tulip grower in
Washington State. His family, including two uncles, all work there,
and until two years ago, he did too. That's when Lelo (as he is known)
started working full-time for the union, Familias Unidas por la
Justicia (FUJ).

That morning, however, was anything but normal. In the predawn
darkness he saw flashing lights in his rearview mirror and pulled
over. As a Border Patrol agent approached the car, Lelo rolled his
window down partway. He asked why he was being stopped and if the
agent had a warrant. When he reached into his pocket for his ID,
however, the Border Patrol cop broke the window. The agent dragged him
out of the car as his partner began shouting, demanding to know why he
was being brutalized, before the agent took him away.

The Border Patrol first brought Lelo to the nearby Ferndale Detention
Center, and then to the giant migrant prison in Tacoma run by GEO
Group. Within days, he was lined up to board a deportation flight to
Sonora, Mexico. But, without a clear reason, he was called out

of line and returned to detention while the others were flown off.
There he remains, at least as of the publication of this article.
Meanwhile, workers at Washington Bulb report that ICE agents picked up
two more people from the company warehouse.

 

Was Lelo A Target?

The recognition Lelo earned for his years of organizing farmworkers
created the pressure that kept him off the deportation flight,
according to Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community2Community, the
farmworker rights organization of northwest Washington. He joined FUJ
when it won a contract at Sakuma Farms in 2017, after a watershed
four-year strike and boycott of the giant Driscoll's berry company,
buyer of the fruit Sakuma workers picked. After the union stabilized,
its members began organizing in the tulip and daffodil fields in the
same valley, trying to win better wages there as well.

As a leader of the flower workers' union committee, Lelo and his
workmates tried to get an agreement from the company about their pay
and rights as the harvest started. At the same time, crowds of
tourists began to fill the valley's back roads, gawking at the fields
of brilliant blooms, and the workers laboring in them. The union's
efforts to fight for workers extended beyond the fields. The week
before he was picked up, Lelo spent several days in the state capital,
Olympia, trying to ensure that the Keep Washington Working Act would
stay in force. The law, won five years ago, prohibits state agencies
from cooperating in federal immigration raids. In the Trump era, it is
predictably under attack.

  

Lelo spoke so many times to so many members of the legislature that
politicians know him well. Within hours of his arrest they were
already discussing his detention. US Senator Patty Murphy said she was
tracking his case. "I don't care what Trump promised on the campaign
trail," her statement said. Other expressions of concern came from US
Representative Rick Larson and Governor Bob Ferguson.

Unions and immigrant rights groups began demanding Lelo's release.
Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers, called for it
during a recent march in Delano, California, celebrating Cesar
Chavez's birthday. Local groups have mounted continuous demonstrations
in front of the Tacoma center.

While this broad coalition tries to free him, immigrant rights
activists report that ICE is picking people up on warrants for
detention across the country. ICE Director Tom Homan calls all
undocumented immigrants criminals, and therefore credible targets for
deportation, no matter how many years they've lived in the United
States. "Sometimes they have a list," reports Fernando Martinez,
organizer for the Mixteco Immigrant Community Organizing Project in
Santa Maria, California. "But when they can't find a person, they go
for any family member they can find."

Yet Lelo's arrest wasn't just one of many. "ICE claims it had a
warrant from 2018," Guillen says. "But it's clear they'd been
surveilling him, because they knew when he was leaving for work and
what route he'd take. He was targeted because he's been such a visible
activist. That's why there's been this massive support for him."

Guillen believes thousands of people are in ICE's database of
immigrants who weren't notified of an immigration court date or
somehow were flagged by the system, providing the pretext for
warrants. But why was Lelo singled out, Guillen asks, and by whom?

Lelo's supporters believe his detention is another example of
immigration enforcement targeting social movement activists, from
working-class leaders to students protesting the genocide in Gaza. But
his case raises particular questions, Guillen believes, about the use
of immigration enforcement against farmworkers.

When Lelo spoke in the legislature the Friday before his arrest, he
denounced the abuse of farmworkers brought to the United States in the
H-2A guest worker program, and the use of that program to displace
local farmworkers-almost all of whom are immigrants. His union,
Familias Unidas por la Justicia, has a long record of opposing the
H-2A program because of its exploitation of both guest workers and
resident farmworkers. And over the past decade, the union has built a
reputation for helping guest workers themselves when they protest
abuse or strike against it. That makes FUJ, and Lelo himself, a target
in this new era, in which the Trump administration uses detentions and
deportations to terrorize workers, while encouraging growers to bring
in guest workers to replace them.

Attacks Against Farmworkers

Trump's immigration enforcement strategy is not new. Some of it
expands measures already initiated by Republican-held state
legislatures. In the last few years, states like Georgia and North
Carolina have passed laws mandating that employers use the E-Verify
database to identify undocumented employees, and then fire them. Last
year Florida passed a law, SB 1718, not only mandating E- Verify but
making it a crime to give a person without papers a ride to work, and
requiring hospitals to check the immigration status of patients.

During the 2024 election campaign, Democrats and Republicans vied to
claim each was more committed to enforcement than the other. After
Trump's election, the Border Patrol office in southern California
didn't wait for his inauguration. For three days, starting the day
after the January 6 certification of Trump's win, agents stopped
farmworker vehicles on their way to the fields, and detained workers
at day labor sites in front of Home Depot and gas stations.

In the orange and grapefruit groves that supply the winter's few field
jobs, the normal cacophony of ladders and voices grew silent, as
workers stayed home. "I didn't go to work for two days," Emma, an
orange picker, told me. "I have a 5-year-old, and that's the fear,
that I won't be able to come home to him. But on Wednesday I went back
to work. The fear is great, but the need is greater." Some of her
coworkers, however, decided to leave for other areas, or even to go
back to Mexico, she said.

Biden officials claimed that the raid was a "rogue operation," but
self-deportation-the predictable impact of the raid and the arrests-is
also not new. In one four-month period in 1954, at the height of
"Operation Wetback," Fay Bennett, executive secretary of the National

   Sharecroppers Fund reported, "300,000 Mexicans were arrested and
deported, or frightened back across the border." As raids drove
undocumented workers back to Mexico, the government then relaxed
federal requirements on housing, wages, and food for braceros, the
guest workers of the Cold War era. In one year, 1954, over a million
workers were deported, and two years later, the number of braceros
brought to the United States by growers reached 450,000.

 The parallel wasn't lost on Marc Grossman, who spent a lifetime as
communications director for the United Farm Workers. In a Sacramento
Bee op-ed in early March, he wrote that the growers' agenda "is
replacing the domestic farm labor work force-now comprising both
documented and undocumented farm workers-with many more H-2A guest
workers."

Grossman highlights the vulnerability of H-2A workers, who can only
work less than a year in the United States before returning home and
are tethered to the growers who recruit them. "If undocumented workers
are mistreated," he wrote, "at least they have the option to leave and
work elsewhere. More vulnerable H-2A workers, however, are at the
total mercy of employers who control their livelihoods through the
visas they obtain for their employees. If H-2A workers complain about
abuse, they are immediately shipped home. The H- 2A program is
practically serfdom."

Trump's Immigration Priorities

Combining deportation and expansion of the H-2A program has been an
explicit Trump goal since his first administration. At a Michigan
rally in February 2018, he told farmers, "We're going to have strong
borders, but we have to have your workers come in." In 2020 then-
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue emphasized the government's support
for more H-2A workers. "That's what agriculture needs, and that's what
we want," he said. In her nomination hearing, Trump's current
secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told Congress that she'd
modernize the H-2A program "to do everything we can to make sure that
none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by
immigration enforcement]."

The growth of the H-2A visa program, however, has been a bipartisan
project. Twenty years ago, the Department of Labor issued 48,336
certifications to growers for workers brought to the United States
with H-2A work visas. Eight years later, that number had almost
doubled, to 85,248. In Trump's first year in office growers received
200,049 certifications, and in Biden's last year they received
384,900. The total number of farmworkers in the United States is about
2 million, so almost a fifth are now H-2A workers.

   In Florida, with its draconian anti-immigrant and anti-farmworker
laws, growers' 47,416 H-2A certifications last year covered over half
of the 80,821 people employed on its farms. Georgia's 43,436
certifications were for over three-quarters of its 55,990 farm
laborers. Of New York's 51,330 farmworkers, 10,294 come on H-2A visas.

When Lelo denounced the impact of H-2A certifications in Washington,
one big target was the Washington Farm Labor Association (now simply
WAFLA), the state's biggest labor contractor. Both WAFLA and the
website Save Family Farms-which has a long history of fighting
environmentalists and FUJ-lobby hard for growers, who last year
received certifications for 35,884 H-2A visas, among the state's
90,166 farmworkers. Save Family Farms calls itself the voice of
Washington farmers, and takes credit for defeating overtime pay for
farmworkers.

During Trump's first administration, at WAFLA's instigation,
Washington State's Employment Security Department and the US
Department of Labor agreed to remove the guaranteed piece-rate wage
for H-2A workers picking apples, the state's largest harvest. That
effectively lowered the wage by as much as a third.

In his last term, in addition to lowering H-2A wages, Trump allowed
growers to access federal funds earmarked for farmworker housing, and
even use federal labor camps, to house H-2A workers. This December,
before Trump took office, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (who is
currently running for governor) asked him to discard the federal rule
setting the minimum wage for H-2A workers in the state.

Armando Elenes, UFW secretary treasurer, says bitterly, "On one side
of their mouth they're saying they're worried about their workforce,
but on the other they're trying to strip away workers' rights from the
guest worker program. They don't want to pay the workers what the law
requires or provide the housing that the workers need. They don't want
to pay for the transportation of the workers. They want to make it as
cheap as possible."

 

What Can Be Done?

The sharp increase in detentions and deportations raises big
questions: Will unions be able to organize in this political
environment? And can they protest the raids and displacement of
immigrant workers who are already residents (including their own
members), and at the same time organize and defend the rights of H-2A
workers brought by growers to replace them?

Over the last several years, UFW has organized H-2A workers in New
York State, where Elenes has headed the UFW effort to use the new
state labor law for farmworkers. As a result, the union has won votes
on six farms, and has invoked arbitration to force contract
negotiations on four of them. California's new law gives farmworkers
an easier way to organize. Growers have to bargain if a majority of
workers sign union cards; if they don't, the state can impose a
contract. The union has won five campaigns covering about 3,000
workers, and has signed two collective bargaining agreements.

The UFW currently represents H-2A workers under contract in California
as well, as a result of organizing drives where resident workers were
a majority of the workforce. At D'Arrigo California, for instance, the
union contract gives H-2A workers workplace rights while guaranteeing
that resident workers can't be replaced.

Other unions also represent H-2A workers, particularly the Farm Labor
Organizing Committee, which has a bargaining agreement with the North
Carolina Growers Association covering over 6,000 workers.

Roman Pinal, UFW's organizing director, says it will take a lot of
work to build unity between immigrant workers residing in the country
and the H-2A workers being brought here. "I've heard workers living
here say their shifts are being cut from five, six days to two, three
days a week, as growers use more H-2A workers. At the same time, H-2A
workers have a lot of issues of their own. Growers threaten one group
with being replaced, and the other with being sent back to Mexico. We
have to help them stick together. And we have to stick together with
unions like FUJ as well."

    While fear induced by grower threats or immigration raids can
be paralyzing, workers aren't always fearful. Guillen says the
committee at Washington Bulb was angry at Lelo's detention and plans
to organize their own march to protest. "Before the march in Delano,"
Pinal says, "many farmworkers asked me, 'Is it safe to do this?' Seven
thousand answered yes and came." More marches are planned in other
parts of the state.

In the end, a strong counterweight to fear of deportation or job loss
is the anger many workers feel over the lack of recognition of the
importance of their work, and the heavy demands it makes on them. Emma
described to me the toll farm work takes on her. "In the oranges I
have to climb ladders with a 40 or 50 pound bag on my shoulders," she
said. "When I'm bunching carrots, I'm on my knees all day. Every
season my body has to learn to adjust to the way my hands and back
hurt. It can take an hour and a half to get to the field, and for all
that the most I make is $700 a week. And last year 70 percent of the
time I only got four hours of work a day because the company hired so
many other people."

She resents growers and the government for threatening deportation
instead of recognizing the value of her labor. "The company takes
advantage of the fear [of deportation by paying] low wages, and sends
us to meetings to tell us that the union is bad. We work in the heat
and cold to put food on the table [in] this country, but they call us
criminals. We need to lift up our voice."

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* ICE
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