Central Valley farm groups question recent immigration raids. ‘The fear was always there’
When Border Patrol started detaining people in the Central Valley last week, it caught elected officials and immigration advocates off guard. It sent shock waves through the agricultural industry, too.
That was true, especially among citrus growers, who are actively harvesting fruit right now, unlike many other farmers in California’s winter months.
In Kern County, where the immigration sweeps were concentrated, some farms saw as much as 85% of their workforce absent after news of Border Patrol’s presence spread, according to estimates from California Citrus Mutual President Casey Creamer.
In Fresno County, where other fresh fruit growers aren’t in their peak season, farmworkers are still performing important postseason work, like pruning – and many of those workers didn’t show up last week either, said Daniel Hartwig, president of the California Fresh Fruit Association.
“We still saw pruning crews and things like that where we had more than half of crews just not showing up,” Hartwig said, “regardless of their citizenship status.
“Nobody wants to feel like there’s a target on their back,” he said. “Nobody wants to go to work feeling like they’re going to be made into a criminal, regardless of their immigration status.”
These absences follow reports of detainments of several farmworkers during U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s operation “Return to Sender” last week. But the reports were far out of step with what Border Patrol agents shared in official statements about their activity over 300 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.
In social media posts, agents have characterized the operation as a targeted pursuit of criminals that resulted in 78 arrests on charges ranging from child abuse to petty theft.
Meanwhile, immigrant rights groups, as well as farmers, have stated the operation appeared much broader than that, sweeping up workers who were going about their usual routines in its tide.
Daniel Larios, a spokesperson for the United Farmworkers Foundation, told Fresnoland they’ve recorded 192 detainments between Jan. 6 and 7 in Kern County – a number that likely grew later in the week, he added.
During last week’s immigration sweep, farmworkers were detained at gas stations and supermarkets they frequent, according to reports out of Bakersfield.
“It feels like they’re just stopping everybody that looks a certain way,” Larios said, “and are basically playing by a playbook that is very outdated.”
The discrepancy has fueled additional concerns from farmers, immigrants’ rights groups and local elected officials alike.
“To me, that doesn’t seem like a targeted, criminal activity,” Creamer said of Border Patrol’s operation.
Border Patrol didn’t respond to a question from Fresnoland about these concerns Tuesday.
A spokesperson for the federal agency has also stated that its officers have packed up and returned to their outpost hundreds of miles south in California’s Imperial Valley, The Fresno Bee reported – despite vague promises to expand operations even further north of the border to Fresno and Sacramento.
But the fear is still alive.
And although these immigration sweeps have taken place in the final days of the Biden administration, with President-elect Donald Trump’s promises of a mass deportation campaign, anxieties among immigrant workers in agriculture and other industries remain high.
“When asked about what degree of fear they had on the topic of family separation, two-thirds – like 64% – expressed the highest level of fear,” said Ed Flores, faculty director of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center, alluding to the center’s February 2023 farmworker health study.
“The fear was always there,” he added. “It was always really high, really widespread. But what we’re hearing is that it’s escalating.”
Uncertainty lingers
Though Border Patrol said its operations last week were focused in Kern County, rumors of sightings further north spread widely on social media.
While some of these rumors – including one regarding enforcement targeting Clinica Sierra Vista offices in Fresno – were false, others have yet to be disproven.
Elisa Rivera, a spokesperson state Sen. Anna Caballero, said their office received several phone calls and photos from trusted sources last week showing Border Patrol presence north of Bakersfield. Hartwig said he also heard of Border Patrol sightings in Kingsburg and Caruthers.
Without answers from Border Patrol, the uncertainty lingers.
But as for this week, Hartwig said Monday that he hadn’t heard of continued operations from Border Patrol in the Central Valley.
Farms have seen fewer absences this week as a result, according to Creamer.
Then again, some farmworkers don’t have much of a choice whether to return to the fields, Hartwig said.
“If you’re working in this industry, usually you’re hard-working, and you’re just trying to support your family. That’s what they’ll do,” he said. “There will be some folks that may not come back, but the vast majority of folks will come back. … People want to put food on the table for their families.”
Farm labor concerns heading into the Trump administration
The worries for immigrant workers in the Valley are far from over – especially as advocates wait to see what Trump’s promises of mass deportations will look like as he takes office Monday.
But studies show the Biden administration was on pace to match the number of deportations carried out under the first Trump administration, and the Border Patrol operation took place in the final days of Biden.
“President Trump was already in office for four years,” Hartwig said. “We saw some impacts to the labor force, but we didn’t see widespread, mass issues.”
Flores of UC Merced said there’s a bigger issue here than who’s in the Oval Office – and that is a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment.
“It’s generally the byproduct of people losing faith in economic systems,” he said. “Workers who don’t have a sufficient safety net, who work full time and live below living wage, who don’t have any retirement set aside – those fears are real.
“During times of uncertainty, people tend to lash out and find scapegoats,” including immigrants, he added.
No matter who’s in office, Creamer said he’s hopeful the administration will help pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a bill that’s passed the U.S. House of Representatives twice but has yet to make it out of the Senate. The bill was reintroduced by U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse in 2023.
“We think that there’s a bipartisan answer to this issue of border security,” he said of the bill, “plus a legal process to deal with the people that are here and the needs of the agriculture sector.”
Creamer added that he hopes immigration enforcement going forward will focus on folks with criminal histories, rather than “broad immigration sweeps that don’t really deal with the problem and create other unintended consequences.”
“We’re not against police officers going after criminals. This just did not seem to be that,” he said of the recent Border Patrol operation.
But it’s an open question whether immigration authorities can carry out targeted enforcement like that without individuals who don’t have any criminal record getting caught in the crossfire.
“Multiple times during the Biden and during the Obama years, I had heard from national immigration nonprofits that have lawyers that prosecutorial discretion was really a farce,” Flores of UC Merced said. “It was still the same people that ended up being deported.”
While many of these questions won’t be going away for a while, Flores said the next question advocates need to answer is how to keep people informed without stoking unnecessary fear.
“How do we talk about this in the public arena in a productive way that really advances human rights, instead of escalating those fears without really any steps we can take right now to begin addressing the issue?”
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