"Farmworkers Are Terrified Right Now": ICE Operations Terrorize Immigrant Workers, Shatter Families

The Trump administration's mass deportation machine continues to shatter families and communities with violent, indiscriminate raids on schools, homes and workplaces. Farms are a particular target of its brutal, racist crackdown; around two-thirds of U.S. farmworkers are immigrants, largely from Mexico. Earlier this month, a raid on a farm in California turned fatal when 57-year-old Jaime Alanís died after falling from the roof of a greenhouse. Dozens of his fellow workers were rounded up and loaded onto buses destined for a detention center. Many of the targeted farmworkers are members of the United Farm Workers, the nation's oldest farmworkers' union. Its president, Teresa Romero, a longtime labor leader who is the first Latina and first immigrant to head the organization, says "farmworkers are terrified." She says that "replacing people who are experienced, who are professional, who have been in agriculture, working sometimes for decades, [is] not how we should repay them for the sacrifice and hard work," and adds that "sooner or later, the agriculture industry is going to suffer."