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.