WHY THE B-52 FAILED TO DEFEAT THE VIETNAMESE

WHY THE B-52 FAILED TO DEFEAT THE VIETNAMESE
By David Bacon
Foreign Policy in Focus, 5/5/25
https://fpif.org/why-the-b-52-failed-to-defeat-the-vietnamese/

Children on a fighter plane in the Army Museum, Hanoi.

On the 50th anniversary of the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

On the plane to Hanoi in December of 2015, I opened my morning copy of the New York Times to find an article by Dave Philipps: "After 60 Years, B-52's Still Dominate the U.S. Fleet." The piece stuck with me.  For the next two weeks as I traveled through north Vietnam I tried to unravel the U.S. attitudes it reveals towards the people of this country and what they call "the American war."

It ends by quoting a former South Vietnamese Navy officer, Phuoc Luong.  "American technology is super," he told Philipps.  "It's a great plane. In Vietnam we didn't use it enough. That's why we lost."

If anyone knows the B-52, it's the people of Hanoi. The enormous planes bombed them day and night for twelve days at Christmas in 1972.  Today there's a museum dedicated to the bomber, and the wreckage of one still sits in a small lake in the middle of the city.

When I tried to imagine what it was like living amid the constant deafening explosions, I found an earlier article in the archives of Mr. Philipps' newspaper that gives an idea.  It describes a visit by Telford Taylor, who'd been a judge at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, folksinger Joan Baez, and two other U.S. citizens in 1972.  They'd gone to Hanoi that Christmas to deliver mail to pilots of those B-52s.  Some had managed to survive being shot down while delivering President Nixon's brutal holiday greeting, and then were apprehended by the people they'd been bombing.  

Kham Thien Street after the bombing, in a photo from the Hoa Lo Museum, Hanoi.

The visitors described their fear in the midst of cataclysmic destruction, and their subsequent journey through the city and its ruins.  "The most horrible scene that I've ever seen in my life was when we visited the residential area of Khan Thieu, and as far as I could see, everything was destroyed," mourned Yale University Divinity School associate dean Michael Allen.

Thirty years later another Times writer, Laurence Zuckerman, also wrote about this iconic airplane:  "The B-52's Psychological Punch: The Enemy Knows You're Serious."  Zuckerman was reacting to a documentary on the B-52s by filmmaker Harmut Bitomsky.  Zuckerman's piece was not exactly a paean to the aging airplane, but like Philipps, he couldn't quite hide a certain admiration for its long life.  

The B-52 was built originally in the early 1950s to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union.  Since then it's carried "conventional" bombs, releasing them instead over people and homes in dozens of other countries. "It is the longevity and versatility of the giant bomber, which started flying in 1952 and is expected to remain in service until 2037, that is so fascinating," Zuckerman commented.

While both writers carefully note that carpet bombing inspired massive protests both in the U.S. and internationally, what's glaringly absent in their pieces is any sense of what it means to be under the B-52, on its receiving end.

The Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi today.

The Christmas bombing of Vietnam was a war crime.  No U.S. official was ever tried and punished for it, and it was as irrational as it was savage.  The negotiations for the U.S. troop withdrawal from South Vietnam would reach a conclusion within a few weeks of it.  Could some minute extraction of leverage in those talks have been worth the deaths of so many?  

Throughout the eight years in which the U.S. bombed North Vietnam, its bombers had few military targets.  One airman quoted by Philipps tried to claim that bombing nevertheless had some strategic value:  "We're doing a lot more than killing monkeys and making kindling wood out of the jungle," he claimed.  The B-52s targets, however, were people and the infrastructure that held their lives together.  U.S. planes bombed dikes to try to cause flooding in Hanoi and the countryside.  They bombed the Long Bien railroad bridge - the link that brought food and coal into Hanoi so that people could eat and keep warm.  

The B-52s and their accompanying F-4s and F-14s bombed the small town of Sapa in the hills north of Hanoi, near the Chinese border.  Sapa is the cultural center for many of Vietnam's ethnic minorities.  It has no military value.  Why bomb it, if the purpose was not to terrorize people and extract revenge for their defiance?

Traveling through the north, I sometimes asked ordinary people - taxi drivers or restaurant workers - what I should see in Hanoi.  Mostly they'd tell me to go to the Army Museum.  One morning I did, and I could see why.  On the ground outside the main halls are captured tanks, a Huey helicopter, and rows of bombs.  In the courtyard pieces of shot-down planes have been welded together into a tower, topped by the tail assembly of a U.S. jet.

The Hanoi Station after the bombing, in a photo from the Hoa Lo Museum, Hanoi.

Kids are climbing all over them.  At the museum entrance sits an old MIG fighter the Vietnamese got from the Soviet Union.   Parents send their children up a small ladder bolted to the side, and there they pose for iPhone pictures, next to the 14 red stars painted on the fuselage, each representing a U.S. plane it shot down.

It was a moment for conflicting feelings. I was glad to see the instruments of war surrounded by happy families - no war anymore.  Then I thought about the pilot of the MIG.  How terrifying it must have been to fly up into the anti-aircraft and missile fire above Hanoi and shoot at the B-52s and their phalanx of fighter escorts.  And then I realized, it must have been terrifying for the U.S. pilots too.  Eighty four planes were shot down over Vietnam during the Christmas bombing, including 34 of the giant Stratofortresses, according to the museum.  

Today's remote controlled wars, with drones guided from computer screens in Colorado, seem antiseptic by comparison -- for the pilots.  Not so for those under the bombs.  For people living in the ancient cities of Gaza or Sana'a or Kunduz, the reality today is much as it was for people in Hanoi that Christmas.

I believe people also had another reason for urging me to go to the museum.  Hanoi has long since been rebuilt.  In the city and its environs Vietnam is on a building binge, and the impact of the war is no longer so visible.  Children born during the Christmas bombing are celebrating their 43rd birthdays.

Children on a fighter plane in the Army Museum, Hanoi.

People walk through the Army Museum exhibit halls, mostly lined with photographs showing all the things they did during that war.  Some show Central Committee meetings that made the decision to fight the Americans.  Some show people in demonstrations, especially in the South, demanding that the foreigners leave.  Some show the hard work of people in the north, sending food and soldiers south to drive them out.  There are many portraits of people killed, or imprisoned in the infamous tiger cages, for fighting the U.S. and the South Vietnamese government it propped up until the last helicopter took off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy on May 1, 1975.

But despite the bombing and the meticulous documentation of the war's terrible cost, I felt little hostility or bitterness in the people I met.  In the end, they'd won.  How could the war's planners back in Washington have thought it would turn out otherwise?  The Vietnamese were no latecomers to insurrectionary organizing.  They were hardly ignorant or apolitical countryfolk, although this was certainly the prevalent stereotype in Congress and the Pentagon.  

The Army Museum is focused on the American war.  But the half dozen other museums in Hanoi that also document Vietnam's revolutionary history make plain how long liberation took.  Sophisticated political organizations took decades to mature and gain experience.  By the time of the U.S. intervention, they'd been at it for many, many years.  That experience finally brought about the U.S. defeat.

If anything, the Vietnamese official history on display in museums is even angrier with France than with the U.S.  Long rooms and galleries of photographs show the nationalists and their first resistance to the French colonizers starting in 1858.  It joined the rising revolutionary wave of the early 20th century, and crystallized in the launch of the Indochinese Communist Party in the 1930s.  

The Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi today.

Hanoi Hoa Lo monument (now largely overshadowed by a new office and residential complex) preserves the prison where the anti-French resisters were held.  In the cells of the old French Maison Centrale, dioramas of prisoners in manacles and leg irons shout at their jailers with their fists raised.  Two guillotines, used to chop the heads off those who couldn't escape, sit in dark corners of this and the official history museum.  Even the women's museum has a floor dedicated to those imprisoned by the French.

That history of resistance went on far longer than the U.S. war - almost a hundred years.  During much of it Ho Chi Minh was not even in Vietnam to lead it.  He was first an itinerant sailor, then in Moscow working for the Comintern, and finally was sent to one country after another, to jumpstart movements like those that had already begun in his own country.  While it's possible to see why western governments feared and demonized him as a hardened revolutionary, the Vietnamese resistance movements were not dependent on any single person.  The final defeat of the U.S. came several years after Uncle Ho had died.

The language used to demonize Vietnam's Communists and nationalists by those they sought to overthrow was just as vituperative as that used in the U.S. Congress against Muslim radicals today.  Terrorist, after all, was a term used to describe anarchists and socialists for over a century.  That language of terrorism and the cold war was used to create hysteria that easily justified sending U.S. advisors, and then troops, into Vietnam once the French had been defeated in 1954.  Ultimately, it was used to justify the B-52s and the 1972 Christmas bombing.  It cost millions of Vietnamese lives, and tens of thousands of U.S. lives as well.

When President Reagan and his successors sought to overcome the "Vietnam Syndrome" to make later interventions acceptable, they once again used that language.  It justifies even today's use of the B-52s, 63 years after they began flying.  The U.S. Air Force has no intention of retiring the 76 remaining planes in its fleet.  In fact, the successors to General Curtis ("Bomb them back to the stone age") LeMay wanted to deploy them in Syria.

The Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi today.

They are institutionally unwilling to remember.  Bombing did not defeat the Vietnamese.  Phuoc Luong is wrong.  More B-52s would not have won that war.  They will not win any new war against a people willing to do whatever it takes to survive and win.  

Walking through the streets of Hanoi, I could see see why.  One morning I went out to Long Bien Bridge to take photographs at sunrise.  The trains going north leave downtown Hanoi just as it gets light.  It's a great moment to see them emerge from the warren of houses next to the tracks, their old cars flashing past as they set out across the long span over the Red River.  

Long Bien is an old bridge, and was one of the four great bridges of the world when it was built in 1902.  A plaque at one end reminds the commuters who trundle past on bicycles and scooters that it was built by Gustav Eiffel, who used the same iron that went into his tower along the Seine in Paris.  During the American war it was probably the one structure U.S. bombers could clearly see from on high, and they blew it apart over and over.

Down below the bridge abutment is the Long Bien market, where many of the city's fruit and vegetable sellers go to meet farmers bringing produce into the city.  As I took pictures of the train and the stalls below, I tried to imagine the columns of smoke, the deafening roar of jet engines and then explosions, the screams of people torn to shreds with their dogs, their pushcarts and melons. 

The Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi today.

As the trains passed I wondered if the locomotives were the same as those that must have been repaired a thousand times during the war.  They look old.  Despite the glitz of Hanoi's new wave of foreign investment, Vietnam is still a poor country.  Things must be saved and reused again and again, including railroad cars and bridges.

I felt that persistence as the sun came up.  It's why the bombing, despite its immense destruction, failed so utterly.  

Then I went down into the old quarter below, looking for a cup of Hanoi's excellent coffee.

ICE CAN'T ERASE WHAT LELO JUAREZ BUILT

ICE CAN'T ERASE WHAT LELO JUAREZ BUILT
Photoessay by David Bacon
Labornotes, 4/24/25
https://labornotes.org/2025/04/ice-cant-erase-what-lelo-juarez-built

Lelo with his partner and niece in the May Day march next to the sign that says "With No Fear."

In 2022 I went to Washington State for May Day, and the following year as well.  Just south of Canada, in Bellingham and Mount Vernon, Community2Community and Familias Unidas por la Justicia  celebrate the workers holiday in the tradition followed by the rest of the world.  They march.  For me, a child of the Cold War, when May Day was the forbidden Communist holiday, it's a time to appreciate how the world has changed,  Brightly-painted hand-made signs and banners call out - "Another World is Possible!"  - a May Day sentiment if there ever was one.  Some demonstrations can be formal exercises.  Theirs are filled with farmworkers and children chatting in Mixteco or Triqui, with students and earnest young men in religoius collars, and of course with activists from a dozen unions.  

Both years I came a few days early.  I wanted to see the tulip harvest, or at least the end of it, since it's almost over by May.  Thousands of tourists come to see the flowers.  Fields of solid red and yellow blooms stretch for miles, from Mount Vernon halfway to the ocean.  Shiny BMWs and Acuras crawl bumper-to-bumper down tiny country roads, creating an urban-sized traffic jam.

Both years I got up early, before the madness, and drove those same roads, as yet still empty.  I wasn't looking for the flowers, though. Instead, I was keeping an eye out for beat-up Fords and Toyotas parked by the side of the fields, or dusty school busses transformed to transport labor.  I was seeking the workers.  I hoped I'd find the ones who stopped the harvest in the first year of the pandemic, using the power they'd discovered when they organized their independent union at the Sakuma blueberry farm a decade earlier.  (See Trouble in the Tulips, https://labornotes.org/2022/03/trouble-tulips-organized-farmworkers-win-basic-demands-quick-strike and Why These Farmworkers Went on Strike, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-these-farm-workers-went-on-strike-and-why-it-matters/)

Today one of those worker-organizers rots in a cell, in the infamous Tacoma Detention Center.  Lelo (Alfredo Juarez - as his mother named him) was a teenager when Triqui and Mixtec indigenous workers rose up in the Sakuma fields and labor camps.  As they fought for their union, Sakuma strikers put Lelo to work while he was still a boy.  Because he'd gone to school in Washington he could translate easily back and forth from classroom English to the Spanish of the streets and the indigenous language of his family.  

It took four years to win a contract for berry pickers at Sakuma Farms.  Indigenous Mexican migrants learned to use short walkouts to push up piece rates and protect each others' jobs.  Some left the fields for days or weeks, traveling from campus to campus, from Seattle to San Diego, asking students to picket and boycott Driscoll berries, the giant company that bought the fruit they picked.  In the end they won, and with that contract in hand, Familias Unidas por la Justicia became the voice for farmworkers across northwest Washington.

As I drove through the early morning, I saw a small group of workers hoeing weeds among the giant leaves of overgrown cabbages,.  As usual, I stopped to talk, then take some photographs. It didn't take long before I asked them if they'd ever worked at Sakuma.  The leader of the little crew proudly announced she and her workmates all belonged to Familias Unidas.  That morning they were not laboring at a union job, but they had thr union in their hearts.

Then I caught up with a larger crew cleaning the remaining flowers in a tulip field, and the experience was repeated.  I'd just walked into the rows with my camera when someone called out my name.  There was Benito Lopez, wearing his Familias Unidas sweatshirt, marking him as a member of the union committee.  Benito stayed in my Bay Area house on one of those boycott journeys a few years before.  He plays in a band and plays for FUJ and community fiestas, and his mirror sunglasses gave him away as a musician or a rocker as he worked down the row of flowers.

When the field was nothing but bare tulip stalks, and the petals from the last discarded blooms were trampled into the mud between the rows, the foreperson came to Benito to ask if the crew wanted to move to another field.  It was late in the day by then, and perhaps they might want to go home.  But the crew held an impromptu committee meeting in the dirt road, and decided they wanted to get a couple more hours in before quitting.  There's no written contract with Washington Bulb in the tulips, but it was clear that the supervisor knew he had to get their agreement.  That is the power that Lelo and Benito and the rest of the workers built.

The next morning I saw a huge machine, motionless in the middle of what had been a tulip field the day before.  I parked and walked down the dusty road from the highway, and found a crew eating breakfast.  Some were men in blue coveralls, and the others were women in regular work clothes.  They offered me their tacos.  Eating has social meaning in a field, so we ate together and talked.  

The men were H-2A workers, who come from Mexico to do this work every year on temporary work visas.  They clearly needed the work to support families back home.  But I wondered if the regular tulip workers in the picking crews were ever trained to work on the huge rig.  Those jobs probably pay better than cutting tulips and daffodils.  

The workers in Familias Unidas por la Justicia have tried to find a way to fight for the interests of both groups - H-2A workers and local residents.  During their organizing saga at Sakuma Farms, they had to defeat an effort to replace hundreds of strikers with H-2A workers.  Their success in doing that ensured they could keep their jobs win the strike.  Yet every year their marches carry banners honoring Honesto Silva, an H-2A worker who died from the conditions in a Washington field.  When his coworkers stopped work after he died, Familias Unidas helped organize their protest before the company cancelled their visas and fired them.  A worker is a worker, and everyone needs to be organized, the union says.

Breakfast over, the machine coughed to life and again began its ponderous travel down the now-bare field.  As it clanked along it dug up the tulip bulbs, separated them from the dirt, and spat a stream of them into a gondola alongside.  Behind it a small group of women gathered up any bulbs the machine missed.  Tulip bulbs must be worth a lot, I thought.

Now, looking at the images from those two years, I see the kind of hard labor Lelo gave the company as a worker in those flower fields.  Then I thought of the work he gave the union, when he decided that the most important thing was to change the lives of the people who work in them.  That was not an easy decision.  His actions, and those of his workmates, have made some powerful people very angry.  They are using his immigration status to remove him and throw him in a hole.  By extension they threaten anyone else who dreams of doing what Lelo did.  I can see the family Lelo has just started is out there on the May Day march, now facing such terrible danger.

These photographs are just a few of the many I've taken since that first strike at Sakuma Farms in 2013.  To me they show the hard reality of these workers' lives, and their determination over years to change it.  Getting Lelo out of detention will bring justice for him.  And it will move that struggle a little further down the road.  

Pablo Ramirez works in a crew of farmworkers weeding a field growing organic cabbage plants for seed at Morrison Farm.  Because it is an organic field, the grower doesn't use herbicide, and instead hires a small crew to weed the field before harvesting the seeds.  

Farmworkers clean a tulip field belonging to Washington Bulb.  The workers are members of Familias Unidas por la Justicia.  Benito Lopez is a leader of the union.

Juana Sanchez is a worker in the crew cleaning a tulip field.

Benito Lopez cutting the tops of tulip flowers.

Natalia Feliciano is a worker in the crew.

Natalia Feliciano walks in the mud and tulip petals.

The tulip cleaning crew leaves the field.

Benito Lopz, Juana Sanchez and other members of Familias Unidas hold a meeting to decide if they will continue working in another field.

The family of Benito Lopez at the Tierra y Libertad cooperative farm, started by the union.

Benito Lopez and his fellow musicians at a party after the May Day march, celebrating the successful strike a month earlier by workers in the tulip harvest.

Lelo speaks to a May Day march of migrant farmworkers and their supporters, calling for unions and human rights.

On the May Day march workers remind the growers that with no workers there will be no tulip harvest.

A march protesting federal regulations making it more difficult to protect the rights of H-2A and resident farmworkers the H2-A guestworker program, on the anniversary of the death of Honesto Silva.  The march stopped in front of the Ferndale Detention Center, where Lelo was later taken.

Foreman Jose Partida and other workers eat lunch in a tulip field belonging to Washington Bulb.

Helene Mancillas, Heidi Garcia and Ismael Lopez eat lunch on a break from their work collecting tulip bulbs.

Maria Ramirez, Victoriana Galvan, Helene Mancillas and Heidi Garcia walk down the rows collecting tulip bulbs.

Maria Ramirez works in the tulip field.

Maria Ramirez, Victoriana Galvan and Heidi Garcia collect bulbs missed by the big machine.

Working behind the machine.

 A worker supervises the tulip machine as it makes it way down the field.

Two farmworkers pick bulbs out of the dirt on the tulip machine.

Two farmworkers on the machine.

As they cross the river into Mount Vernon during the tulip harvest, May Day marchers carry a banner remembering Honesto Silva, an H-2A worker who died in the fields.  Another sign says Without Workers There Are No Tulips.

Two young women on the May Day calling for unions and human rights for farmworkers. 

"Another World is Possible"

HOW TO FIGHT TRUMP'S ATTACK ON FARMWORKERS

HOW TO FIGHT TRUMP'S ATTACK ON FARMWORKERS
By David Bacon
The Nation, 4/11/25
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/migrant-farmworkers-trump-2025/

On March 25, Alfredo Juarez was driving his compañera to work in the flower fields of Washington Bulb, the largest tulip grower in Washington State. His family, including two uncles, all work there, and until two years ago, he did too. That's when Lelo (as he is known) started working full-time for the union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ).

That morning, however, was anything but normal. In the predawn darkness he saw flashing lights in his rearview mirror and pulled over. As a Border Patrol agent approached the car, Lelo rolled his window down partway. He asked why he was being stopped and if the agent had a warrant. When he reached into his pocket for his ID, however, the Border Patrol cop broke the window. The agent dragged him out of the car as his partner began shouting, demanding to know why he was being brutalized, before the agent took him away.

The Border Patrol first brought Lelo to the nearby Ferndale Detention Center, and then to the giant migrant prison in Tacoma run by GEO Group. Within days, he was lined up to board a deportation flight to Sonora, Mexico. But, without a clear reason, he was called out of line and returned to detention while the others were flown off. There he remains, at least as of the publication of this article.

Meanwhile, workers at Washington Bulb report that ICE agents picked up two more people from the company warehouse.


 

Lelo speaks to migrant farmworkers and their supporters on a May Day march to call for unions and human rights for farmworkers. (David Bacon)


Was Lelo A Target?

The recognition Lelo earned for his years of organizing farmworkers created the pressure that kept him off the deportation flight, according to Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community2Community, the farmworker rights organization of northwest Washington. He joined FUJ when it won a contract at Sakuma Farms in 2017, after a watershed four-year strike and boycott of the giant Driscoll's berry company, buyer of the fruit Sakuma workers picked. After the union stabilized, its members began organizing in the tulip and daffodil fields in the same valley, trying to win better wages there as well.

As a leader of the flower workers' union committee, Lelo and his workmates tried to get an agreement from the company about their pay and rights as the harvest started. At the same time, crowds of tourists began to fill the valley's back roads, gawking at the fields of brilliant blooms, and the workers laboring in them. The union's efforts to fight for workers extended beyond the fields. The week before he was picked up, Lelo spent several days in the state capital, Olympia, trying to ensure that the Keep Washington Working Act would stay in force. The law, won five years ago, prohibits state agencies from cooperating in federal immigration raids. In the Trump era, it is predictably under attack.

Teresa Romero is the president of the United Farm Workers.(David Bacon)


Lelo spoke so many times to so many members of the legislature that politicians know him well. Within hours of his arrest they were already discussing his detention. US Senator Patty Murphy said she was tracking his case. "I don't care what Trump promised on the campaign trail," her statement said. Other expressions of concern came from US Representative Rick Larson and Governor Bob Ferguson.

Unions and immigrant rights groups began demanding Lelo's release. Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers, called for it during a recent march in Delano, California, celebrating Cesar Chavez's birthday. Local groups have mounted continuous demonstrations in front of the Tacoma center.

While this broad coalition tries to free him, immigrant rights activists report that ICE is picking people up on warrants for detention across the country. ICE Director Tom Homan calls all undocumented immigrants criminals, and therefore credible targets for deportation, no matter how many years they've lived in the United States. "Sometimes they have a list," reports Fernando Martinez, organizer for the Mixteco Immigrant Community Organizing Project in Santa Maria, California. "But when they can't find a person, they go for any family member they can find."

Yet Lelo's arrest wasn't just one of many. "ICE claims it had a warrant from 2018," Guillen says. "But it's clear they'd been surveilling him, because they knew when he was leaving for work and what route he'd take. He was targeted because he's been such a visible activist. That's why there's been this massive support for him."  

Guillen believes thousands of people are in ICE's database of immigrants who weren't notified of an immigration court date or somehow were flagged by the system, providing the pretext for warrants. But why was Lelo singled out, Guillen asks, and by whom?

Lelo's supporters believe his detention is another example of immigration enforcement targeting social movement activists, from working-class leaders to students protesting the genocide in Gaza. But his case raises particular questions, Guillen believes, about the use of immigration enforcement against farmworkers.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta marches with Lorena Gonzalez, executive secretary of the California Labor Federation and Yvonne Wheeler, President of the Los Angeles Labor Federation.(David Bacon)


When Lelo spoke in the legislature the Friday before his arrest, he denounced the abuse of farmworkers brought to the United States in the H-2A guest worker program, and the use of that program to displace local farmworkers-almost all of whom are immigrants. His union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, has a long record of opposing the H-2A program because of its exploitation of both guest workers and resident farmworkers. And over the past decade, the union has built a reputation for helping guest workers themselves when they protest abuse or strike against it. That makes FUJ, and Lelo himself, a target in this new era, in which the Trump administration uses detentions and deportations to terrorize workers, while encouraging growers to bring in guest workers to replace them.

Attacks Against Farmworkers

Trump's immigration enforcement strategy is not new. Some of it expands measures already initiated by Republican-held state legislatures. In the last few years, states like Georgia and North Carolina have passed laws mandating that employers use the E-Verify database to identify undocumented employees, and then fire them. Last year Florida passed a law, SB 1718, not only mandating E-Verify but making it a crime to give a person without papers a ride to work, and requiring hospitals to check the immigration status of patients.

During the 2024 election campaign, Democrats and Republicans vied to claim each was more committed to enforcement than the other. After Trump's election, the Border Patrol office in southern California didn't wait for his inauguration. For three days, starting the day after the January 6 certification of Trump's win, agents stopped farmworker vehicles on their way to the fields, and detained workers at day labor sites in front of Home Depot and gas stations.

In the orange and grapefruit groves that supply the winter's few field jobs, the normal cacophony of ladders and voices grew silent, as workers stayed home. "I didn't go to work for two days," Emma, an orange picker, told me. "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." Some of her coworkers, however, decided to leave for other areas, or even to go back to Mexico, she said.

Biden officials claimed that the raid was a "rogue operation," but self-deportation-the predictable impact of the raid and the arrests-is also not new. In one four-month period in 1954, at the height of "Operation Wetback," Fay Bennett, executive secretary of the National Sharecroppers Fund reported, "300,000 Mexicans were arrested and deported, or frightened back across the border." As raids drove undocumented workers back to Mexico, the government then relaxed federal requirements on housing, wages, and food for braceros, the guest workers of the Cold War era. In one year, 1954, over a million workers were deported, and two years later, the number of braceros brought to the United States by growers reached 450,000.


 

Guillermina Castellanos and members of Nueva Sol, the new San Francisco organization of day laborers and domestic workers, march behind their banner.(David Bacon)


The parallel wasn't lost on Marc Grossman, who spent a lifetime as communications director for the United Farm Workers. In a Sacramento Bee op-ed in early March, he wrote that the growers' agenda "is replacing the domestic farm labor work force-now comprising both documented and undocumented farm workers-with many more H-2A guest workers."

Grossman highlights the vulnerability of H-2A workers, who can only work less than a year in the United States before returning home and are tethered to the growers who recruit them. "If undocumented workers are mistreated," he wrote, "at least they have the option to leave and work elsewhere. More vulnerable H-2A workers, however, are at the total mercy of employers who control their livelihoods through the visas they obtain for their employees. If H-2A workers complain about abuse, they are immediately shipped home. The H-2A program is practically serfdom."

Trump's Immigration Priorities

Combining deportation and expansion of the H-2A program has been an explicit Trump goal since his first administration. At a Michigan rally in February 2018, he told farmers, "We're going to have strong borders, but we have to have your workers come in." In 2020 then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue emphasized the government's support for more H-2A workers. "That's what agriculture needs, and that's what we want," he said. In her nomination hearing, Trump's 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]."

The growth of the H-2A visa program, however, has been a bipartisan project. Twenty years ago, the Department of Labor issued 48,336 certifications to growers for workers brought to the United States with H-2A work visas. Eight years later, that number had almost doubled, to 85,248. In Trump's first year in office growers received 200,049 certifications, and in Biden's last year they received 384,900. The total number of farmworkers in the United States is about 2 million, so almost a fifth are now H-2A workers.

In Florida, with its draconian anti-immigrant and anti-farmworker laws, growers' 47,416 H-2A certifications last year covered over half of the 80,821 people employed on its farms. Georgia's 43,436 certifications were for over three-quarters of its 55,990 farm laborers. Of New York's 51,330 farmworkers, 10,294 come on H-2A visas.

 

Narcisco Martinez, an artist whose work is based on the lives of farmworkers, marches with Veronica Wilson of the UCLA Labor Center.(David Bacon)


When Lelo denounced the impact of H-2A certifications in Washington, one big target was the Washington Farm Labor Association (now simply WAFLA), the state's biggest labor contractor. Both WAFLA and the website Save Family Farms-which has a long history of fighting environmentalists and FUJ-lobby hard for growers, who last year received certifications for 35,884 H-2A visas, among the state's 90,166 farmworkers. Save Family Farms calls itself the voice of Washington farmers, and takes credit for defeating overtime pay for farmworkers.

During Trump's first administration, at WAFLA's instigation, Washington State's Employment Security Department and the US Department of Labor agreed to remove the guaranteed piece-rate wage for H-2A workers picking apples, the state's largest harvest. That effectively lowered the wage by as much as a third.

In his last term, in addition to lowering H-2A wages, Trump allowed growers to access federal funds earmarked for farmworker housing, and even use federal labor camps, to house H-2A workers. This December, before Trump took office, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (who is currently running for governor) asked him to discard the federal rule setting the minimum wage for H-2A workers in the state.

Armando Elenes, UFW secretary treasurer, says bitterly, "On one side of their mouth they're saying they're worried about their workforce, but on the other they're trying to strip away workers' rights from the guest worker program. They don't want to pay the workers what the law requires or provide the housing that the workers need. They don't want to pay for the transportation of the workers. They want to make it as cheap as possible."


 

Lelo and his family.(David Bacon)


What Can Be Done?

The sharp increase in detentions and deportations raises big questions: Will unions be able to organize in this political environment? And can they protest the raids and displacement of immigrant workers who are already residents (including their own members), and at the same time organize and defend the rights of H-2A workers brought by growers to replace them?

Over the last several years, UFW has organized H-2A workers in New York State, where Elenes has headed the UFW effort to use the new state labor law for farmworkers. As a result, the union has won votes on six farms, and has invoked arbitration to force contract negotiations on four of them. California's new law gives farmworkers an easier way to organize. Growers have to bargain if a majority of workers sign union cards; if they don't, the state can impose a contract. The union has won five campaigns covering about 3,000 workers, and has signed two collective bargaining agreements.

 

"Esta es nuestra tierra" -demanding recognition that the land of California's corporate agriculture is unceded land of native people.(David Bacon)


The UFW currently represents H-2A workers under contract in California as well, as a result of organizing drives where resident workers were a majority of the workforce. At D'Arrigo California, for instance, the union contract gives H-2A workers workplace rights while guaranteeing that resident workers can't be replaced.

Other unions also represent H-2A workers, particularly the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which has a bargaining agreement with the North Carolina Growers Association covering over 6,000 workers.

Roman Pinal, UFW's organizing director, says it will take a lot of work to build unity between immigrant workers residing in the country and the H-2A workers being brought here. "I've heard workers living here say their shifts are being cut from five, six days to two, three days a week, as growers use more H-2A workers. At the same time, H-2A workers have a lot of issues of their own. Growers threaten one group with being replaced, and the other with being sent back to Mexico. We have to help them stick together. And we have to stick together with unions like FUJ as well."

Andres Cruz, a Triqui farmworker and irrigator for D'Arrigo Brothers Produce, came to the march from Greenfield in the Salinas Valley.(David Bacon)


While fear induced by grower threats or immigration raids can be paralyzing, workers aren't always fearful. Guillen says the committee at Washington Bulb was angry at Lelo's detention and plans to organize their own march to protest. "Before the march in Delano," Pinal says, "many farmworkers asked me, 'Is it safe to do this?' Seven thousand answered yes and came." More marches are planned in other parts of the state.

In the end, a strong counterweight to fear of deportation or job loss is the anger many workers feel over the lack of recognition of the importance of their work, and the heavy demands it makes on them. Emma described to me the toll farm work takes on her. "In the oranges I have to climb ladders with a 40 or 50 pound bag on my shoulders," she said. "When I'm bunching carrots, I'm on my knees all day. Every season my body has to learn to adjust to the way my hands and back hurt. It can take an hour and a half to get to the field, and for all that the most I make is $700 a week. And last year 70 percent of the time I only got four hours of work a day because the company hired so many other people."

She resents growers and the government for threatening deportation instead of recognizing the value of her labor. "The company takes advantage of the fear [of deportation by paying] low wages, and sends us to meetings to tell us that the union is bad. We work in the heat and cold to put food on the table [in] this country, but they call us criminals. We need to lift up our voice."