Weird silence hangs on the Central Coast farm after the raid on ice

Oxnard, California – At 6 a.m. Wednesday, teenager Juvenal Solano drove slowly along a broken road with strawberry and celery fields, covering this fertile sight of Ventura County, his eyes drooping signs of trouble.

A creepy silence hung in the morning. Workers who usually shuffle up and down the strawberry rows are largely not. The entry doors entering many area farms are closed and locked.

Still, Solano, director of the Mixteco Indigena community organization project, felt relieved. Silence is better than the chaos that broke out on Tuesday, when immigrant agents raided Oxnard’s fields and radiated fan shapes in the communities of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, which accounted for a large portion of the state’s strawberries, avocados and celery.

The organization is part of a wider fast response network that provides support and attorneys to workers targeted by immigrant raiders, caught off guard while reporting on influx of residents and reporting on residents gathering near the fields. Team leaders said they have confirmed at least 35 people were detained in the raid and are still trying to determine the exact figures.

Solano said the group has obtained a dispersed report of immigration authorities arresting undocumented residents over the past week. But Tuesday, he said, marks a new level of approach and scope as federal agents try to get into the fields and packaging. Solano, like other organizers, wants to know what they will do next.

“If they didn’t show up in the morning, then they might show up in the afternoon,” Solano said. “We will be on guard against everything that is happening.”

When agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol appear at food production sites from the Central Coast to the San Joaquin Valley, most of which are centered on the Oxnard Plains. Maureen McGuire, CEO of the Ventura County Agriculture Bureau, said federal agents visited five packaging facilities and at least five farms in the area. The agents also blocked people from going to work, she said.

In many cases, according to McGuire and community leaders, farmers refused to grant opportunities to agents without judicial arrest warrants.

California, which grows more than a third of the country’s vegetables, and more than three-quarters of fruits and nuts, has long relied on undocumented labor to grow its crops. Although a growing number of farmers’ workers are immigrants who are seasonally imported through the controversial H-2A visa program, at least half of the state’s 255,700 farm workers are undocumented, according to a study by UC Merced. Many people have lived in California for many years and have taken root and started families.

Until this week, California’s agricultural sector largely escaped mass attacks deployed by the Department of Homeland Security in urban areas, most recently in Los Angeles and Orange County. California farmers (many of whom are keen on Donald Trump) – the president vowed mass deportation of undocumented workers, which seemed very calm.

Many expect Trump to find ways to protect his labor force, noting that without enough workers, food will rot in the fields, causing grocery prices to soar.

But this week brought different information. Tom Homan, chief adviser to Trump’s border policy, said when asked about law enforcement actions in food-producing areas that growers should hire legal labor.

“There are some programs – you can get people in and do the job,” he said. “So work with ice, with [U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services]and employ legal labor. It is illegal to intentionally hire illegal aliens. ”

On Wednesday, the day after federal agents carried out immigration attacks in the area, there were far fewer workers in the strawberry field in Ventura County.

(Michael Owen Baker / The Times)

Two California senators, both Democrats, issued a joint statement on Wednesday decrying the farm attacks, saying deportation against farm workers would damage businesses and families.

Sens. Alex. “It is unreasonable and unreasonable to target hard-working farm workers and their families who have been doing hard work in the fields for decades,” Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff said in a statement.

The California Farm Bureau also issued a statement warning that continuing law enforcement would disrupt production.

“We want to be very clear: California agriculture depends on and value its workforce,” said Bryan Little, senior director of policy advocacy at the California Farm Bureau. “We are still early in the season with limited harvest activity, but that will soon intensify. If federal immigration enforcement continues in this direction, it will become increasingly difficult to produce food, process food and put it on grocery store shelves.”

Micop executive director Arcenio Lopez said he was particularly concerned about the prospect of detention of indigenous workers, as many people were unable to read or write in English or Spanish, speaking only their indigenous languages. The group’s leaders suspect that many of the detained people are indigenous and are eager to find them before they sign documents to sign documents for voluntary deportation. They urge anyone arrested to call their hotline for legal aid.

Rob Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Association, said he has been warning growers since November to this time and provide training on their legal rights. He said many people knew to seek a search warrant. But this still makes undocumented workers vulnerable to get off work and on the way off work.

“I think overall they’re pretty safe on a farm or a building,” Roy said. “But when they leave work, they’re very worried.”

VC Defensa organizer Elaine Yompian said she urged families to avoid exposure, if possible.

“In fact, we’re telling a lot of families we’re in contact with, and don’t go if you may not be able to work,” Yompian said, adding that they’re able to provide limited support to families with the donations they receive.

She said families whose loved ones were detained were working to understand what would happen next.

“People feel fear; they don’t know when they will be targeted,” Yompian said. “Their narrative of sending criminals or taking bad guys to the streets is completely wrong.

This article is part of the Times Equity Reporting Plan,,,,, Depend on James Irving FoundationExplore the challenges faced by low-income workers and their efforts to solve them California’s economic divide.