Saturday, July 19, 2025

photos from the edge 15 - chinatown's living room

CHINATOWN'S LIVING ROOM
Photos by David Bacon



Without doubt, Portsmouth Square is the best-used public space in San Francisco, affectionately called "Chinatown's Living Room."  Soon it's getting a facelift.  The city took bids, is choosing projects, and begins renovation in the fall.

Maybe the benches are old, and could use more paint, even cushions for the bony elders who sit on them  or the exhausted workers who lie on them.  The swings and playground could use an uplift too, for the kids.  A new shelter might give people somewhere better to shelter out of the rain.  

The Arts Commission asked for proposals for an Art Wall in the shelter, which would give the town's brilliant muralists space for celebrating Chinatown's real history, especially its radical one.  After all, it's right across Kearny Street from the site of the International Hotel, the hardest fought eviction and housing struggle ever in San Francisco.

But there's a lot in Portsmouth Square that makes it feel like home, and the square's homies might not want to lose it.  The pile of plastic buckets and cardboard, for instance, waiting for cardplayers to set up another of the games that go on in every corner.  

Cities these days have an unfortunate practice of seeing people lying on benches as enemies, putting little obstructions on them to make stretching out as uncomfortable as possible.  People need those benches, though, real ones, and the park functions fine if they can actually rest on them.  Too many live on the sidewalk here and in lots of neighborhoods, tucked between trash cans.  A bench can be better, but really we need so much more

And if the city has to drain and rebuild the garage in Portsmouth Square's underground basement, which functions mostly for the convenience of people who don't live in Chinatown, it shouldn't shut down the park on top while it all happens.

So here's a small slice of Portsmouth Square, just a few of the many pictures I've taken there since I was an organizer for the Ladies Garment Workers long ago.  In those days I'd walk through on the way from Mission Street to our Garment Workers Center, my first serious camera in hand, starting to think that documenting the working class was as worthy an activity as convincing workers to go on strike.

And since you have to take BART to get there, if you live in the East Bay, here are a few commute pictures as well.

















Wednesday, July 16, 2025

WHY DID THIS FARMWORKER DIE IN AN IMMIGRATION RAID?

WHY DID THIS FARMWORKER DIE IN AN IMMIGRATION RAID?
By David Bacon
The Nation, 7/17/25

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ice-raid-jaime-alanis-garcia/

Community and immigrant rights organizations rally in Oakland's Latino Fruitvale district protesting immigration raids.  One sign says "For my father, who was deported.  Watch me from Heaven, Papa.  This is Our War!"


Jaime Alanis Garcia died of a broken neck in the Ventura County Medical Center on Saturday.  He fell 30 feet from the roof of a Glass House Farms greenhouse, where he'd climbed in a desperate effort to get away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and National Guard soldiers during an immigration raid on Thursday.

In announcing his death, Alanis' family called him, "not just a farm worker [but] a human being who deserved dignity. His death is not an isolated tragedy."   The raid, they said, inspired "chaos and fear" among hundreds of farmworkers in the company's two cannabis farms in Camarillo and Carpenteria, an hour north of Los Angeles.  

ICE announced that 319 people had been detained in the raid, and Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin denied responsibility for Alanis' death. "This man was not in and has not been in CBP or ICE custody [and] was not being pursued," she claimed.  

Of course, Alanis was being pursued.  All the workers were, by dozens of agents in battle gear as they fanned out inside the greenhouse.  That pursuit was the reason he climbed to the roof.  

Another worker was recorded in a video during the raid after climbing a tall scaffolding.  "Do what you want.  Say what you say. I'm not coming down," she cried out.  "They say they will come and get us.  They are saying whatever they want to get us down.  We ask them who they are but they won't answer."   The video was uploaded onto a website, @mrcheckpoint, used to track raids.  The woman's fate is still not known.

Chaos and fear are deliberately used as weapons to terrorize workers and their families.  At Glass House Farms, agents arrived in unmarked tan troop transports whose license plates had been removed.  They were dressed in military camouflage uniforms reminiscent of the Afghan and Iraq wars, with balaclavas covering their faces.  

Arrests were indiscriminate.  After a security guard-a US citizen and US Army veteran-was detained, his family couldn't even find out where he was being held.  Jonathan A. Caravello, Ph.D., also a US citizen and professor at the California State University Channel Islands campus in Camarillo, was also arrested by ICE.  A judge finally ordered him released from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center on July 14.

After the raid President Trump claimed the agents were under attack, and gave ICE "Total Authorization ...  using whatever means is necessary."  A few days earlier, after sending mounted agents and National Guard soldiers into Los Angeles' Macarthur Park, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said no one could stop these military-style deployments.  "You have no say in this at all," he told Mayor Karen Bass.  Miller has given DHS a quota of 3,000 arrests per day

Immigration authorities knew that a death like Alanis' would happen sooner or later.  There is a long history of people dying while fleeing from ICE.  Santos Garcia and Marcelina Garcia were two indigenous Mixtec farmworkers killed when their car overturned, trying to escape from ICE agents in Delano in 2018.  Agents had been staking out roads to stop laborers going to work-a terror tactic during Trump's first administration, but not one he invented.  Five migrants were killed in the 1992 crash of a van fleeing the Border Patrol in Temecula, and two years later another seven died in another truck pursued by agents in the same area.

Inspiring terror, as a tactic, is openly acknowledged.  Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official in charge of the Southern California region, said "Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self deport. Now we'll help things along a bit."  Bovino earlier led a January raid the day after Trump's election victory was certified, targeting farmworkers in roadblocks and Home Depot parking lots in the San Joaquin Valley.  "Self-deportation" is the euphemism used by immigration authorities when people are made so fearful that they leave their homes to return to their countries of origin, or simply to another safer place.

But the military deployment of ICE agents is also a response to rising protest that is defying this campaign of intimidation.  Within minutes of the arrival of agents at the greenhouses, calls on cellphones brought family members and community activists to the sites.  They were met with tear gas, "flash bang" grenades and smoke bombs.

Immigrant communities have been preparing for raids since Trump's election.  For months in the state's farmworker towns young people (mostly documented and US citizens born here) have organized marches to defend their parents, in an inspiring demonstration of courage and determination.  The conduct of the raids, by armed soldiers in combat fatigues, is an effort by ICE and Homeland Security to intimidate them into halting any action that might interfere.

In many communities activist groups like Union del Barrio and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles have formed teams to monitor the movements of ICE and Border Patrol agents.  They carry bullhorns, and warn community residents not to open their doors when a raid seems likely.  White House border czar Tom Homan was explicit about consequences.  "The rhetoric keeps rising and rising and rising - someone's gonna get hurt," Homan told NBC News a month prior to the Glass House raid. "If this violence isn't tamped down, someone's gonna die, and that's just that's just a cold fact of life."

The Trump administration was careful to target a marijuana-growing operation because it provides headlines appealing to its MAGA base, while not threatening its big ag supporters.  Fox News accused California Governor Newsom of receiving big campaign donations from Glass House co-founder Graham Farrar.  Like most big marijuana operations, Glass House Farms donates to state politicians from both parties because it depends on their votes for the license to operate.  Marijuana is still illegal under Federal legislation, and Federal law enforcement has long made California cannabis a target.  

ICE even claimed that its raid had "rescued" a handful of minors.  A statement by the United Farm Workers responded, "detaining and deporting children is not a solution for child labor."

The Trump administration, however, has been careful not to conduct raids targeting big corporate farms.  California's central coast, where Glass House Farms is located, is the nation's biggest strawberry-growing area.  While fear in the coast's farmworker towns is endemic, the strawberry crop is getting harvested.  In Washington State's Wenatchee River Valley-the largest apple growing area in the U.S.-Jon Folden of Blue Bird farm cooperative says, "We've not heard of any real raids.''   The Border Patrol's Bovino says,  "For us, targeting agricultural workers at their job, absolutely not."

The Glass House raid didn't even make it into the news section of the website of the Western Growers Association, which includes the country's largest growers of fruits and vegetables.  Their silence, in fact, is deafening.  There is no WGA statement opposing raids, and its website reassures growers, "While enforcement activities have not targeted agriculture, here are some prudent proactive steps to respond appropriately to potential [ICE] visits."  Among them, it advertises, "Western Growers H-2A Services available to support growers during this complex labor environment ... helping members secure a capable, reliable and legal workforce."

Last year growers recruited 384,000 H-2A workers (a sixth of the country's farm labor workforce), mostly from Mexico, under temporary work contracts.  These laborers can only work for the grower who recruits them, and can be fired and deported for protesting, organizing or simply working too slowly.  

In the fields surrounding Glass House Farms, central coast strawberries are picked because growers increasingly rely on this program. According to the Employer Data Hub of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, agribusiness has brought 8,140 workers to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties, about a quarter of all the farm workforce.

Trump has promised to make this program even more grower-friendly, and big ag has supported him overwhelmingly. The current secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told Congress that she'd modernize the H-2A program "to do everything we can to make sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by immigration enforcement]."

At the end of June Trump scrapped the Farmworker Protection Rule, regulations put in place by Julie Su, Biden's Secretary of Labor, that provided minimal protections for H-2A workers.  By getting rid of it, growers can now bar outsiders (community groups or unions) from labor camps, give workers contracts in languages they can't read, retaliate against workers who complain of bad conditions, and even stop using seat belts in the vehicles transporting laborers to the fields.  In 2019 Trump froze the minimum wage for H-2A workers, and growers are calling on Congress to support a bill that would do that permanently.

Pushback against ICE, however, continues to win in court.  The day after agents arrived at Glass House farms, U.S. District Judge Maame E. Frimpong in Los Angeles made permanent two temporary restraining orders which would limit the ways ICE can conduct immigration raids.  One prohibits agents from stopping and detaining people based on skin color, language or other general factors used to profile immigrants.  The second mandates legal representation for detainees held in the notorious B-18 jail in downtown L.A.  

DHS's Tricia McLaughlin attacked Judge Frimpong for "undermining the will of the American people," and claimed ""enforcement operations are highly targeted."  That was certainly how Jaime Alanis must have felt before he fell.

So who gained and who paid in the Glass House raid?  The Trump administration hyped up the MAGA base once again with images of extreme force deployed against immigrant farmworkers.  Big Ag growers, meanwhile, seem immune, continuing to pay wages at the bottom, with government-sponsored access to a labor program that has been described as "close to slavery."  Terrorized farmworker families risk deportation if they try to organize and raise those wages, while living in fear that parents will be picked up when their kids are in school.  

The brutality of entrenching an agricultural system based on poverty and fear of deportation is the real price of raids.

Thursday, June 26, 2025

AS THE LEFT ERUPTED IN PROTEST, ANSEL ADAMS MOVED RIGHT

AS THE LEFT ERUPTED IN PROTEST, ANSEL ADAMS MOVED RIGHT
By David Bacon
Jacobin, 6/26/25
https://jacobin.com/2025/06/ansel-adams-berkeley-fsm-left

Review:  Lost in the Wilderness
Ansel Adams in the 1960s
California Museum of Photography
January 2, 2025 to May 17, 2026
3824 + 3834 Main Street
Riverside, CA 92501

For decades, Ansel Adams ran in circles of left-wing photographers with a radical eye. But come the 1960s, he was denouncing the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement protests and calling for expulsions.



Author David Bacon, center, taping speeches for KPFA during the UC Berkeley student protests, 1964. (FSM Archives)

By the fall of 1964, students from the Berkeley campus of the University of California had succeeded in enraging Republican senator William F. Knowland, darling of the anti-communist "China Lobby." Knowland owned the Oakland Tribune, then a mighty newspaper and right-wing center of California politics, which students had criticized for refusing to hire black people.

Several Berkeley students had gone south during Freedom Summer to register black voters. On their return, they decided to sit in at San Francisco's luxurious Sheraton Palace Hotel and the auto dealers on Cadillac Row, protesting hiring discrimination there as well. Knowland fulminated against them in angry editorials, demanding that the university ban the tables in front of Sproul Hall where students recruited for these sit-ins.

Administrators complied. And when the tables remained, university police arrived in a patrol car, arresting former student Jack Weinberg for sitting at one. They were quickly surrounded by hundreds of chanting, shouting students. The Free Speech Movement was on. Speakers mounted the police cruiser's roof to denounce the university's cowardice.

I climbed up with them and held a microphone to record the many speeches, later broadcast on our local community radio station, KPFA.

Negotiations stalled for weeks until, on December 2, hundreds marched into Sproul Hall. There we sang civil rights songs and articulated our vision of a "free university." And in the dark hours of early morning, the police dragged us out to waiting buses.

I was sixteen. We were told to go limp, so I did. A cop dragged me by the ankles, my head bumping down the hall's marble steps. At each landing, he'd swing me so I'd hit each wall before bouncing down the next flight. With two other minors, I was sent to Oakland's juvenile hall. They gave me a shapeless shift, like a hospital gown, and left me there for three days. The older students had been taken to the county lockup at Santa Rita. I was left on my own, trying hard to hold onto the determination that had brought me there.

I was actually still in high school, taking courses at the university at the same time. The legal cases for all eight hundred arrestees wound on for months and then years. My case eventually reached the US Supreme Court, which handed down a decision called In Re Bacon. Rather than denouncing the university for violating my rights, however, the justices found that as a minor, those rights weren't worth considering. Exams were given while we were in jail. The university wouldn't let me make mine up or take an incomplete, so that was the end of my student days at Berkeley.

So what does all of this have to do with Ansel Adams?

By sixteen, I'd already been given my first camera, an Argus C3, and had learned to develop film. My family had traveled to Yosemite Park several times, and there I'd seen Ansel Adams's photographs. I don't know what I would have thought then had I known that this photographer I admired had just called our sit-in an act of "destructive trespass, aggressive interruption of institutional affairs and gross ridicule and deprecation of the persons involved in the management of a great institution. These angry extroverts . . . have succeeded in embarrassing a great university and the dignity of a great state."

Ansel Adams told the governor to expel us - unnecessary in my case, since I'd already been thrown out.

Fiat Lux

A few weeks ago, Sally Stein, a professor emeritus at UC Irvine whose long career has focused on the politics of photography, sent me the catalog of an exhibition at the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside. The text is by Doug McCulloh, the museum's curator, who died suddenly in January.  The exhibit was his last project. It was in his catalog that I found Adams's quote about the UC Berkeley protesters.

The exhibition's title, "Lost in the Wilderness: Ansel Adams in the 1960s," describes a project to extol in photographs the nine campuses of the University of California in the mid-1960s. The project's name, "Fiat Lux," is the university's motto, translated from Latin as "Let there be light" - an arrogant statement of the university's view of itself, shedding light on those beneath it. Ansel Adams's adoption of the motto was an equally audacious announcement for a set of photographs created by that light.

Adams's work is famous for its luminous depiction of nature without human presence. On the high walls of the old Downtown Berkeley branch of Wells Fargo Bank, where I deposit my unimpressive freelancer's income, there are enormous mural-size prints that have been there for decades. One shows the Golden Gate before the bridge was built. Another photograph is from the Fiat Lux series, taken from a high vantage point in the hills above the Berkeley campus. It is a very peaceful image of stately buildings. No police car idles in Sproul Plaza. No students are visible at all, even going to class, let alone marching with signs and banners or being dragged away by their ankles.

Lost in the Wilderness reveals one reason why the project is hardly known compared to his other work. In many cases, Adams simply photographed buildings or objects rather than magnificent landscapes. Some images in the exhibition do show people, but they are uninspired depictions of teachers and researchers at work, or students diving into a swimming pool or lying and talking on the grass.

There are two exceptions. One image shows a piece of plywood announcing a protest. In another, a crowd of students greets US ambassador to the United Nations Arthur Goldberg with signs condemning his support for the Vietnam War. But even these emphasize an absence where photographs might have been, of the tumultuous events exploding in the institution he was hired to photograph during the mid-1960s. "It's hard to escape the conclusion," McCulloh says in the catalog, "that Adams cannot face what is happening at the university and in society, let alone stare it down on the unforgiving ground glass of his camera. He prefers blindness."

McCulloh traces the origin of the Fiat Lux project in the relationship between Adams and UC president Clark Kerr, a Cold War liberal. Kerr eventually lost his job because he was insufficiently conservative for Gov. Ronald Reagan, but before he left, he gave Adams the best-paying assignment of his career. At $75,000, the Fiat Lux budget would today be worth ten times that. In addition, the university guaranteed the publication and sale of a book of the images. Fiat Lux's 7,161 negatives are a large part of Adams's career total of 40,000 photographs.

McCulloh's "lost in the wilderness" is a double entendre, playing on both the primary subject of Adams's work and his inattention to the society changing around him. He finds that the university project shares its blindness with Adams's earlier landscape work. "It is simply Adams' sturdy, unchanging worldview carried forward into Fiat Lux," he charges.

McCulloh presents other contemporary photographs to support his perspective. One is an image by Rondal Partridge, Adams's assistant for two years, showing Half Dome, the object of many Adams landscapes. But in Partridge's photograph, the granite monolith is in the background, and the foreground is a parking lot jammed with cars. It was taken in 1965, forty years after Adams's first professional photograph at Half Dome and four years after his last. It is clearly intended to critique Adams's deliberate omission of his most famous scene's transformation into a tourist mecca.



Pave It and Paint It Green, Yosemite National Park, Rondal Patridge, circa 1965. (California Museum of Photography)

To McCulloh, Adams can "park himself in the vast Curry Village parking lot at Yosemite, tilt his tripod and camera upward, and, above the rows of cars, frame a pristine view of the sheer face of Half Dome." Adams's "distilled, essentialist images carry an inverse: he determinedly excludes almost everything. He is both a high art practitioner, and blind."

Cars in parking lots weren't Adams's only omissions. Yosemite Valley was home to the Ahwahneechee people for four thousand years before European colonization. In 1953, the National Park Service prohibited native people from living in the park's boundaries and evicted those who were still there. By then, Adams had been excluding them from his photographs for decades.

Friends in Left Places

Fiat Lux was the culmination of a long and illustrious career, throughout which Adams had consciously maintained distance from photography that critiqued or threatened the social order. He was rewarded for it: over four working decades, Adams became an icon of the establishment, and the Fiat Lux contract was proof of his acceptance.

Socially conscious photography developed during the early period of Adams's work, and in the 1930s, the politics of the Popular Front made it possible for such photography to gain access to the mainstream. The New Deal-era Farm Security Administration (FSA) funded photographers whose images, albeit intended to justify New Deal social reforms, couldn't help but dramatize deep poverty and racism. Other photographers too radical for the FSA could also make a living, like Hansel Mieth and Otto Hegel. Both chronicled the strikes of farmworkers and longshoremen and worked for Life magazine in its early days but then were blacklisted when the Cold War started.



Picketing. Copper miners on strike waiting for scabs to come out of mines. Ducktown, Tennessee, Sept. 1939 by Marion Post Wolcott. Post Wolcott was the most radical of the FSA photographers, and this is one of the few FSA photographs that documented a strike. (Library of Congress)

Yet Adams was a friend of left-wing photographers in that era. He helped start Group f/64, which included Consuelo Kanaga, a red photographer deeply respected by her peers. Many photographers then belonged to the radical Photo League, the center of a photographic tradition more radical than the FSA, linking their work to unions and anti-racist social movements. Adams's work was much less threatening politically, giving him access to museum directors, corporate sponsors, and government officials.

His most political moment came in 1943, when he was invited by the commandant of the Manzanar concentration camp for Japanese Americans, Ralph Merritt, to take photographs of the camp's residents. Adams opposed the internment and produced a book called, with intentional irony, Born Free and Equal, praising the internees' "democratic internal society and a praiseworthy personal adjustment to conditions beyond their control." The book included text by John Hersey, later the first journalist to witness the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Interior secretary Harold Ickes even wrote an introduction and sent two copies to President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a note expressing his opposition to internment. The book was publicly burned in the war hysteria.

After the war, the Photo League was put on the attorney general's list of subversive organizations and subsequently destroyed. In the heat of McCarthyism, Adams had the courage to sign a protest petition - a risk, given the blacklisting suffered by many radical photographers of the era. He emerged unscathed and became the country's best-known photographer. Fiat Lux came a decade later, by which time he had soured on the Left.

As the World Turns

McCulloh contrasts the formalism of Adams's timeless landscapes and his modernist aesthetic of the clear, sharp image with a new style of photography that became popular in 1950s and '60s. While Adams received enormous mainstream recognition, he became an outlier in a photographic world that welcomed movement, blur, and human subjects.

For McCulloh, the challenge came from the "new 1960s photographers [who] trigger an absolute explosion in approach and subject matter." He lists their obsessions as "alienation, deformity, sterility, insanity, sexuality, bestial and mechanical violence, and obscenity. . . . Their collective subject matter was the unseemly, the outcast, the dangerous, the forbidden, the exotic, and the bizarre." Larry Clark's image of two men shooting heroin was taken in 1963, a year before Fiat Lux and the Free Speech Movement. McCulloh highlights other photographers of that era, from Robert Frank to Diane Arbus, who had little interest in Adams's Zone System for perfect exposure or the slow process required by the view camera.

McCulloh presents this cohort as an alternative to Adams. Yet despite their effort to offend 1950s conformity, this generation of photographers was quickly absorbed by the mainstream, with gallery exhibitions and books that purported to look under the covers. They turned out not to be so dangerous after all. They did not celebrate establishment values, as did Fiat Lux, but, unlike the work of 1930s radicals, their photography was nonetheless disconnected from any movement for social change. It did not challenge twentieth-century capitalism, as had the radicals of the '30s.

A better alternative is represented by a new generation of photographers, none of whom appear in Lost In the Wilderness, who documented protests against the war and for civil rights, from the South to Cadillac Row. One was Bob Fitch, who spent years in the US South carrying a camera with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, organizing for social and racial justice. "I did organizing for the balance of my life," he remembered, "and photographed those activities as I went through. And I perceived myself as an organizer who uses a camera to tell the story of my work."

George Ballis, like Fitch, began photographing Southern civil rights struggles. Then he, Harvey Richards, and Ernie Lowe started documenting the abysmal conditions of California farmworkers, much as Hegel, Mieth, and Dorothea Lange had done two decades before. By the time the Delano grape strike began in 1965, inaugurating the modern farmworker movement, they'd been in the fields taking pictures for several years.

Their work, and that of the photographers connected to the movements of the 1930s and '40s, provides a much more critical counterpoint to Fiat Lux. While Adams was "lost in the wilderness," they used photography to inspire and support a vision of social justice and believed that photographers had to be participants in order to advance it. Fiat Lux was a dead end for Adams and for a kind of modernism palatable to powerful institutions. But the socially committed alternative had a future - and lives on.

Sunday, June 22, 2025

WHO PUSHED TRUMP INTO HALTING RAIDS, AND IS IT FOR REAL?

WHO PUSHED TRUMP INTO HALTING RAIDS, AND IS IT FOR REAL?
By David Bacon
The American Prospect, 6/23/25
https://prospect.org/labor/2025-06-25-who-pushed-trump-into-halting-raids-california-farmworkers-immigration/

Farmworkers struggle against deportation and even lower wages.

SANTA MARIA, CA - Immigrant and farmworker youth and families, and their supporters march to protest the wave of immigration raids by the Trump administration.  One sign says "Fighting for the Ones that Fought for Us."

President Trump's wild swings about immigration raids over the last few days may sound unhinged, but they have surfaced some basic realities.  The economic importance of immigrant workers in the U.S. economy couldn't be more clear, and Trump's fealty to the powerful companies that employ them couldn't be more obvious.  Yet immigrant workers are not simply exploited victims in this system.  They have power, and increasingly know how to use it to defend themselves and their communities.  Their actions are a real, if uncovered, story.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that over the last two decades forty to fifty percent of the two million farmworkers in U.S. fields don't have what they call "work authorization."  This euphemism pretends that an immigration visa is required to pick strawberries.  The truth behind it became clear in Trump's first term when the pandemic hit.  He called farmworkers, including strawberry pickers, "essential."  

It was not a compliment.  He meant that their places of work would not shut down, despite the high danger of the virus spreading through work at close quarters or living in poverty-enforced proximity.  People did go into the fields.  Many got sick and died.  And the profits of the growers rolled in.

While the virus hit farmworkers hard for the pandemic's first three years, poverty is the endemic condition for these essential workers.  California's 55,000 strawberry workers, for instance, produced $2.7 billion of fruit last year, and undocumented workers are the backbone of the industry.  They include about 80 percent of the laborers in Santa Maria, a central coast valley that is a center of production, according Jamshid Damooei, director of the Center for Economics of Social Issues at California Lutheran University.  "Without them there is no agriculture," he says.  "Yet the median wage, which in 2019 was $26,000 a year for farmworkers born in the U.S, was only $13,000 - half that - for the undocumented."



SANTA MARIA, CA - Immigrant families, march to protest the wave of immigration raids.

In the past, anger over low wages produced small work stoppages at the beginning of every season, as workers sought to force growers to increase a piece rate that gives them about 25¢ for picking a plastic clamshell box that sells in the supermarket for $5.  Santa Maria farmworker advocates have been trying to convince the county board of supervisors to set a minimum strawberry wage of $26 an hour.

This year, Trump's raids have meant that those mini-strikes didn't happen, and $26-an-hour was out of the question, a gift to growers.  Instead, ICE agents camped out in farmworker neighborhoods, looking for people to detain and deport.  Last week in neighboring Oxnard, they ran into a field, grabbing some workers while others fled.  Some stayed home for two or three days afterwards.  A few "self-deported," an ugly phrase used by border czar Tom Homan to mean that they were terrorized into leaving their homes and looking for safety elsewhere, be it Mexico or simply another agricultural valley.  

And despite their terror, people went back to work, as they did during the pandemic.  Emma, an orange picker, told me why, a few days after ICE mounted immigration raids in Bakersfield that coincided with Trump's inauguration. "I didn't go to work for two days," she explained.  "I have a 5-year-old, and that's the fear, that I won't be able to come home to him. But on Wednesday I went back to work. The fear is great, but the need is greater."

As raids have increased, community organizations in Santa Maria have trained immigrant families to know their rights in the face of ICE agents.  They handed out "red cards" with written advice not to answer questions about their immigration status.  Families learned they didn't have to open their doors unless an agent had a judicial warrant.  That was so effective that, instead, ICE agents had to park their vans in immigrant neighborhoods, hoping to stop people on their way to work, workers told me.



OAKLAND, CA - Community and immigrant rights organizations rally in the Latino Fruitvale district to protest immigration raids.  One sign says "For my father, who was deported.  Watch me from Heaven, Papa.  This is the New War!"


These trainings were not isolated efforts.  A network of immigrant rights and labor activists across the country mounted similar trainings, not just in agricultural valleys, but in urban immigrant neighborhoods as well.  Making raids difficult was the central idea.  In southern California, some urban groups, like Union del Barrio, followed ICE vans into apartment complexes, warning residents with bullhorns not to open their doors.

This activity depended especially on young people.  Students walked out of high schools not long after Trump took office, incensed by his anti-immigrant threats.  Daughters and sons of undocumented workers organized marches throughout California, coming out to defend their parents when they felt it was too dangerous for people without papers to be in the streets.  One sign I saw in Santa Maria, and then in many other farmworker towns, said "Fighting for the Ones who Fought for Us!"  

David Huerta, head of California's janitor's union, was thrown to the ground and transported to a federal lockup, after witnessing an immigration raid in Los Angeles' garment district.  His union had already held numerous discussions about ways to defend members from jobsite raids.  His arrest was a watershed, validating the predictions in many unions that Trump's immigration raids would target labor.  Unions responded by organizing demonstrations in over a dozen cities.  Huerta's release after three days convinced many activists that organized opposition can force the administration to retreat.

Trump's apparent wild swings in immigration policy owe as much to this determined opposition as they do to his fealty to wealthy growers and hotel owners.  He called in the National Guard and Marines, with the explicit threat that interference with ICE agents would bring violence and detention.  Yet sending armed soldiers with every ICE van is beyond his ability and the armed forces' capacity. Fear is his real objective- creating an atmosphere in which people willingly submit themselves to detention, and communities and unions stand by helplessly watching.  That paralysis, however, is not likely. Indeed, it's been continually overcome.



OAKLAND, CA - Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee speaks at a rally protesting immigration raids and the use of the National Guard in Los Angeles.

At the same time, however, another threat to farmworkers makes their economic vulnerability even sharper.  In the face of the threatened loss of much of their workforce to immigration enforcement, the silence of growers for the past five months has been deafening.  While the labor of local workers has been needed in the past, in many areas their employers are using the immigration system to replace them. This too recalls what happened in Trump's first term.

In 2017 Trump promised his agribusiness supporters that his plan for immigration enforcement would not deprive them of workers.  Sonny Perdue, then Secretary of Agriculture, assured them he'd make the country's contract labor system for importing farm labor, the H-2A visa program, easier for them to use.  In a 2019 speech he said he wanted, "to separate immigration, which is people wanting to become citizens, [from] a temporary, legal guest-worker program. That's what agriculture needs, and that's what we want ... We need people who can help U.S. agriculture meet the production."

Trump's current secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, said much the same when she told Congress that she'd modernize the H-2A program "to do everything we can to make sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by immigration enforcement]."  



SAN FRANCISCO, CA - David Huerta, President of United Service Workers West, stands with other labor and immigrant rights activists supporting AB 450, a California law protecting workers during immigration raids and enforcement actions.

Unfortunately for workers, it's not a promise, but a reality.  Last year the Department of Labor gave growers 384,000 certifications for H-2A visas for workers who now make up about a fifth of the U.S. agricultural workforce, up from 48,000 twenty years ago.  Detentions and self-deportations make it even more attractive for labor contractors and employers to recruit temporary contract workers to take the place of those already living here.  

In California most certifications come from five strawberry-producing counties: of the 25,000 farmworkers in Santa Maria and surrounding towns, 8,140 were H-2A workers brought in by 29 growers.  Says Marcos Lopez, a staff member at the U.C. Davis Community and Labor Center, "The H-2A program grows where the strawberry industry grows."  Local farmworkers, almost all immigrants who have been living and working in the valley for years, say they no longer get a full week's work, and fear being replaced permanently.

H-2A visa holders sign contracts for a maximum of 10 months per year, after which they have to return home, usually to Mexico. They can only work for the grower who recruits them, and can be fired for protesting, organizing, or simply working too slowly.  At the end of Trump's last term, he froze their minimum wage, in effect a wage savings for employers. Last year  Congressman Bill Huizenga (R-MI) and 119 other Representatives urged the House Appropriations Committee to freeze H-2A wages again, and some growers propose eliminating that wage guarantee entirely, along with requirements for housing.



SAN FRANCISCO, CA - David Huerta speaks in support of AB 450, which protects workers during immigration raids and enforcement actions.

H-2A and H-2B visas are promoted as legal immigration, but they are really a kind of legal exploitation, condemned over many years as "close to slavery."  Immigrant communities propose instead the legalization of undocumented workers already here, and a reform of the system for family immigration.  

At the same time that National Guardsmen poured into L.A., hundreds of immigrants were marching in Sacramento for an alternative to both raids and guestworkers.  The Registry Bill, HR 1511, was introduced in the last Congress by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren and Senator Alex Padilla.  The proposal would give legal status to an estimated 8 million undocumented people by updating the cutoff date that determines which undocumented immigrants are eligible to apply for legal permanent residence.  The current date is January 1, 1972, effectively making the legalization process unavailable to all but a few hundred people nationally.

Stopping immigration raids is one part of immigrant families' fight for survival.  But whether Trump agrees to halt or slow down the raids or not, there is more to justice than that.  Giving people real security at home and at work, and at wages that mean a future for their children, is, and must be,  equally the goal of the movement against deportations.


SANTA MARIA, CA - A boy from a farmworker family walks in front of a banner with a portrait of Cesar Chavez, in a march to protest the wave of immigration raids by the Trump administration.

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

photos from the edge 14 - OAKLAND AND SAN FRANCISCO PROTEST IMMIGRATION RAIDS

photos from the edge 14 - oakland and san francisco protest immigration raids
Photos by David Bacon



OAKLAND AND SAN FRANCISCO PROTEST IMMIGRATION RAIDS

OAKLAND, CA - 10JUNE25 - Community and immigrant rights organizations rally in the Lationo Fruitvale district to protest immigration raids and the use of the National Guard in Los Angeles. The demonstration was organized by the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, and Mayor Barbara Lee and Supervisor Nikki Bas spoke.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 9JUNE25 - Unions and immigrant rights activists protest immigration raids and the arrest in Los Angeles of David Huerta, head of United Service Workers West during a raid. Labor leaders included Olga Miranda, SEIU Local 87, Kieth Brown, Alameda Labor Council and others.


OAKLAND

 















SAN FRANCISCO