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WHY LELO JUAREZ CHOSE SELF-DEPORTATION  
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David Bacon
August 11, 2025
The Progressive
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_ How the current conditions of immigrant detention and Trump
Administration policies impelled a farmworker organizer to return to
Mexico. _

Lelo Juarez with his compañera and niece in a 2023 May Day march in
Mount Vernon, Washington, next to a sign that reads “Without
Fear.”, David Bacon

 

hen I spoke with Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, known as “Lelo,” while
he was imprisoned in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma,
Washington, he had to be very careful about what he said.  Calls to
detainees are monitored. “My freedom of speech here is very
limited,” he warned me.  Lelo had been held there since
his detention
[[link removed]] in
March, and I interviewed him in July.

Lelo Juarez speaks at a 2023 May Day march of migrant farmworkers and
their supporters in Mount Vernon, Washington, calling for union rights
and human rights. David Bacon

Two weeks after our conversation Lelo agreed to
[[link removed]] “voluntary
departure”—the term used by immigration authorities for
self-deportation.  In early August, by telephone from Santa Cruz
Yucucani, his hometown in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, he
was able to describe the conditions in this enormous immigrant
detention center, which today holds
[[link removed]] more than 1,500 people
awaiting deportation.  

“It’s a really terrible place,” Lelo told me. He said bad food
was probably the worst problem:  The Geo Group, a private corporation
that runs the detention center, is supposed to provide three meals a
day, but often the last meal would come at one or two in the morning.
“The rice was hard, like it never touched hot water, and the beans
were never cooked all the way,” Lelo said. “That was the main food
they gave us. Chicken was so undercooked that sometimes it dripped
blood, and people got sick during the night. One time everybody turned
in their trays and we wouldn’t take the food.”

The second week he was there, Lelo started having vision problems
because the lights were always on at night, making it hard to sleep.
He signed up for the “sick call” list to get eye drops. “I
waited a long time to see a doctor,” he recalled, “and finally an
officer told us to go back to our unit. They only had one doctor, and
we weren’t going to be seen. After that I didn’t sign up again,
but other folks in my unit would wait hours and hours and still not
get seen. I’d share an apple or something sweet for people who were
diabetic. But day after day it was the same thing. Sign up and maybe
tomorrow somebody will see you.”

The Tacoma immigrant detention center is run by the Geo Group, founded
as a division of the Wackenhut Corporation, with ties to U.S.
intelligence agencies going back to the Cold War. Since discovering in
the 1980s the huge profits to be made in federal contracts, the
company has become one of the two largest corporations running
immigrant detention centers in the United States. Much of those
profits are earned by keeping operating costs at a minimum; as a
result Geo has been repeatedly charged
[[link removed]] with
short staffing at the prisons it runs. “Geo does this on purpose to
make it hard for folks, while maximizing their profit by not having
more employees,” Lelo said. Bad conditions serve to coerce people
detained at the Northwest Detention Center into self-deportation. 

Self-deportation is an important arm of the Trump Administration’s
immigration policy. According to Mark Krikorian
[[link removed]],
executive director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration
Studies, “Any successful strategy to cut the illegal population
significantly will have to combine two things: ICE [Immigration and
Customs Enforcement] arresting and removing illegal aliens, and other
illegal aliens leaving on their own . . . . Preliminary data
suggest nearly one million
[[link removed]] illegal
aliens have departed the country since President Donald Trump’s
Inauguration.”  

That number is highly questionable, and the center provides no data to
support it. It is undeniable, however, that the government is
pressuring people to self-deport. Fear of deportation and family
separation, as well as hopelessness about any prospect for legal
status, has led many people to leave the United States.

In a highly-publicized immigration raid at Glass House Farms
[[link removed]] on
California’s central coast, chaos and fear were deliberately used as
weapons to terrorize workers and their families. One man, Jaime Alaniz
Garcia, fell to his death desperately fleeing ICE agents. The terror
produced by the raids is also a weapon to get people to leave on their
own. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official in charge of the
Southern California region, responded to criticism of the Glass House
raid. “Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self deport,”
he said
[[link removed]].
“Now we’ll help things along a bit.”

“They are trying all they can to get folks out of the country,”
Lelo said, “whether through deportation or asking folks to self
deport.” Inside the Tacoma detention center, ICE agents took another
tactic. “They went to my unit three times, saying that if people
gave up their right to fight their case and self-deported, they’d
send them $1,000 after sixty days. People got really mad because a lot
have lived here for many years. We have families and we’re part of
the community. What is $1,000 compared to twenty years of your
life?”

Nevertheless, the constant pressure took its toll on his family, and
eventually on Lelo himself. In early March his family decided to
return to their hometown, Santa Cruz Yucucani. At that point, Lelo had
not yet been detained. Later, as he languished inside, he described
their reasons.

“It was a hard decision because my parents had lived in Washington
for eighteen years,” he explained. “My siblings were born in the
United States. They were going to school there. All their friends are
there. But as we saw ICE begin to round up more and more folks, we did
not want to put my family through the trauma of separation. So we
decided they would leave, which they did on March 16 from Santa Maria,
[California, a town from which many people leave to go back to Mexico]
on the bus. It’s hard to describe the feeling. We always had this
plan for my siblings to go to school and have a better life, more
opportunity than my parents had. It was like we had to start all over
again.”

Then, on March 25, as he was driving his _compañera_ to work in the
tulip fields of the Washington Bulb Company, in the Skagit Valley
north of Seattle, he was stopped by immigration agents. When he asked
for a warrant, they broke the car window and dragged him out. Within
hours he was in the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, and in line for
a flight back to Mexico. Only a wave of public outrage
[[link removed]],
including calls from U.S. Representative Rick Larson, Democrat of
Washington, and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson, also a Democrat,
kept him from being loaded onto a deportation plane.

Those protests acknowledged
[[link removed]] that
Lelo’s arrest was not random. ICE later said he had been detained
because of an earlier deportation order, but Lelo called the charge a
pretext. “Before my detention, I had no idea that there was a
removal order for me from 2017, under the first Trump Administration.
If they’d really wanted to remove me, they could have, but they
didn’t. They waited until Trump was President again to go after me.
I was never given the opportunity to respond or fully defend myself.
There was never any due process.”

Lelo was targeted because of his history as a farmworker organizer. He
was a cofounder of Washington’s new union, Familias Unidas por la
Justicia
[[link removed]],
and helped organize many of the campaigns by Community to Community
[[link removed]], the state’s advocate for
agricultural workers. One of these was for a cap on rents, and another
for the Keep Washington Working Act
[[link removed]] to
protect the rights of farmworkers.

Lelo Juarez in 2025 after accepting voluntary departure. Courtesy of
Lelo Juarez

But it was his public criticism of the H-2A contract labor program
[[link removed]] that
earned Lelo the greatest hostility among growers. That program allows
growers to recruit workers in Mexico for a season’s work, after
which they must return. Workers are very vulnerable, and can be fired
and blacklisted for organizing, or simply for failing to meet
production quotas. Almost one-third
[[link removed]] of
farmworkers in Washington state have now been replaced by contractors
[[link removed]] using
the H-2A program.  

“Growers like WAFLA [the Washington Farm Labor Association—a large
labor contractor] know me very well,” he recalled, “and were very
upset at our opposition to the H-2A program. I would talk to local
workers about losing jobs because of it, and to the H-2A workers
themselves when they called to report abuses. That made me a big
target. But I don’t regret anything I’ve done. It was all
supporting workers.”

In the end, however, months in detention took their toll. In mid-July
Lelo decided to leave the country voluntarily. He and many others
faced the same situation, worn down by the impact of dehumanizing
conditions and hopelessness for any solution to their cases. “It’s
very hard to bring legal cases from within this place,” he explained
during our conversation while he was still in Tacoma. “There are
many people here and they’re all losing [their cases] and getting
deported. Two people even won their cases, and they’re going to be
deported anyway. A lot of people here have legal status. They have
good jobs. They’ve been paying taxes for many years. But at the end
of their last hearing, they get removed from the country anyway.”

In that sense, Lelo’s case was no different. “Winning from within
just doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “Even if I went through
all the legal steps and had a decision in my favor, there is no
guarantee I will be released after that. Signing the voluntary
departure is the only option I have.”

At the end of the ordeal, however, Lelo found himself in Santa Cruz
Yucucani, an Indigenous Mixtec community that he only remembered as a
child, but which still remembered him. “I went to town a couple of
days ago and people recognized me and invited me to eat,” he told
me. “I’ve had a lot of really good food here. There are other
families in Santa Cruz that have come back as well, and folks are
excited that we’re back.”

Lelo’s family are farmers, and on his return he began going out to
the fields with his father and grandfather, where they plant corn,
green beans, pumpkins, and bananas. “My grandpa sells a little bit
of it, but it’s mostly just for the family. We clean the fields and
take care of the crops.”

As a union organizer of farmworkers in the United States who labor for
wages in industrial agriculture, it has been a revelatory experience.
“The big difference is that here we don’t work for anybody,
because the fields belong to the family,” he says. “We can take a
break whenever we want, and when it gets hot we just go find shade.
It’s a huge change from being a farmworker working for a
boss.”  

But he doesn’t forget the union and the community from which he was
taken by force. “I haven’t stopped feeling part of an immigrant
community that’s trying to defend itself. As a farmworker it’s
heartbreaking to see pictures of the military chasing us in the
fields. We’ve never been able to legalize, and now we have to leave.
It’s not right. People have to pay attention to what's happening and
speak up. Don’t look the other way.” 

Lelo Juarez harvesting bunches of bananas on his family's farm in
Santa Cruz Yucuyachi, Guerrero, Mexico, 2025.

In the meantime, though, Lelo simply has to live. “Tomorrow I’m
going to the banana field. It’s going to be the first time in
eighteen years,” he says.

DAVID BACON. A former union organizer for thirty years, David Bacon's
photoessays and stories seek to capture the courage of people
struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the
world.

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