The alarm extended through the California agricultural centers on Tuesday when panic workers reported that federal immigration authorities, which had greatly refrained from the great application actions in the agricultural communities in the first months of the Trump administration, were presented in the agricultural fields and the packers from the central coast to the San Joaquin Valley.
“Today we are seeing an increase in the chaotic presence of immigration application, particularly the border patrol,” said Elizabeth Strater, vice president of United agricultural workers. “We see it in multiple areas.”
The officials of the National Security Department refused to confirm specific locations, but said that the compliance actions were carried out in the area of the Southern State. The defenders of numerous immigrant defense groups said that their phones were illuminated with calls, videos and text messages of multiple counties.
The Times checked a video that showed a worker crossing a field on the cover of the morning fog, at least one agent on foot persecution and a border patrol truck that accelerates along an adjacent land path. Finally, the worker was caught.
In Tulare County, near the community of Richgrove, immigration agents emerged near a field where agricultural workers were picking up blueberries, which caused some workers to run away.
In Oxnard in Ventura County, the organizers responded to multiple calls from federal immigration authorities organized by Campos near the fields and entered a packaging house in Boskovich Farms. Hazel Davalos of the cause of the group, said there were reports from immigration and customs compliance agents trying to access nine farms in Oxnard, but that in many cases, they were denied entry.
In Fresno County, the workers informed federal agents, some in the border patrols, in the fields near Kingsburg.
Strater said he still had no information about the number of people detained in the raids, but that fear among workers was widespread. According to UC Merced Research, at least half of the 255,700 agricultural workers estimated in California are undocumented.
“These are people who will be afraid to take their children to school, fearful of going to graduation, fearful of going to the grocery store,” Strater said. “The damage is going to be done.”
The expansion to rural communities follows the days of the coordinated raids in the urban areas of Los Angeles County, where the authorities have addressed to home improvement stores, restaurants and manufacturers of clothing. The compliance action has caused protest waves, and the Trump administration has responded by sending hundreds of marines and troops from the National Guard.
Two Democratic members of Congress representing the Ventura area, representatives Julia Brownley and Health Carbajal, issued a statement condemning the raids around Oxnard.
“” We have received disturbing reports from ice application actions in Ventura County, even in Oxnard, Port Hueneme and Camarillo, where the agents have stopped the vehicles, the schools close near the schools and have tried to enter the agricultural properties and facilities in the oxnard plain, “they said.” These actions are completely unjustified, deeply harmful, and raise serious issues about the tactics of the agency and its respect for their respect for the agency process and its respects.
They added that “these raids are not about public safety. They are about stoking fear. These are not criminals being targeted. They are hardworking People and families who are an essential part of ventura county. OUR local economy, like much of california's and the country Whole, depend on work.
The defenders of agricultural workers said that Tuesday's raids occurred despite a judicial decision derived from a dishonest border patrol action in Kern County this year.
The Aclu lawyers representing the agricultural workers of United and five residents of Kern County sued the head of the Department of National Security and officials of the border patrol of the United States, claiming that the three -day raid of the border patrol in the Valley of the South of San Joaquín in early January amounted to a “expedition of fishing be day workers or day workers.
Judge Jennifer Thurson of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California said in a ruling of 88 pages that the evidence presented by the lawyers of the American civil liberties union established “a pattern and practice” in the border patrol of violating the constitutional rights of people by stopping people without reasonable suspicions and then federal laws and then federal laws No court without determining the risk of flight.
The Thurston ruling required that the border patrol presented detailed documentation of any stop or arrest without a court order in the central valley and show a clear guide and training for law agents.
