In the 1970s, during the height of the farmworker movement, United Farm Workers leader César Chávez often rallied supporters with the phrase “Sí se puede” (“Yes we can”)—a slogan coined by UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta in 1972 during Chávez’s 25-day fast in Phoenix, Arizona. Today, as undocumented farmworkers face aggressive immigration enforcement in California’s fields, a darker refrain might be more fitting: “Cuidado con ICE”—watch out for ICE.
Farmworkers say they feel like they are being “hunted like animals,” as they desperately try to avoid getting swept up by Donald Trump’s “crackdown on immigration,” the Guardian’s Michael Sainato recently reported.
During interviews with farm workers and farmworker organizers, Sainato pointed out that “Raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have caused workers to lose hours and income, and forced them into hiding at home.”
Trump has been all over the map in defining his policy toward undocumented farm workers. In April, according to Fruit Growers News, “Trump suggested that farmers could help retain key workers by submitting letters of recommendation to delay deportations and support legal re-entry.
“‘A farmer will come in with a letter concerning certain people saying, they’re great, they’re working hard, we’re going to slow it down a little bit for them and then we’re going to ultimately bring them back. They’ll go out, they’re going to come back as legal workers,’ Trump said during the Cabinet meeting.”
In late-June, CNBC reported that Trump told Fox News that “We’re working on [a plan] right now. We’re going to work it so that some kind of a temporary pass where people pay taxes, where the farmer can have a little control, as opposed to you walk in and take everybody away.”
Trump added: “What we’re going to do is we’re going to do something for farmers, where we can let the farmer sort of be in charge. The farmer knows. He’s not going to hire a murderer. When you go into a farm and he’s had somebody working with him for nine years doing this kind of work, which is hard work to do, and a lot of people aren’t going to do it, and you end up destroying a farmer because you took all the people away. It’s a problem.”
That plan, which would put farmers in charge of immigration enforcement, “alarmed workers’ rights advocates, who suggested they were being asked to surrender ‘their freedom to their employer’ just to stay in the country,” the Guardian noted.
“You can’t go out peacefully to do things, or go to work with any peace of mind anymore. We’re stressed out and our kids are stressed out. No one is the same since these raids started,” one farm worker told the Guardian. “We are stressed and worrying if it continues like this, what are we going to do because the rent here is very expensive and it has affected us a lot. How are we going to make ends meet if this continues?”
Of the more than 2.6 million farm workers in the US, most are Hispanic, non-citizen immigrants. According to the Department of Agriculture, around 40% of crop workers — roughly 500,000 individuals – are undocumented.
In a recent Iowa rally, Trump “claimed the administration is looking into legislation to defer immigration enforcement on farms to farmers. ‘Farmers, look, they know better. They work with them for years.’”
“They have really demonized us with the word ‘criminals’,” Lázaro Álvarez, a member of the Workers’ Center of Central New York and Alianza Agrícola, said. “Despite the fact we are undocumented, we pay taxes. We are invisible to the government until we pay taxes, and we don’t receive any benefits.”
Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers, said: “Everything that he’s doing to detain these workers is unconstitutional. They don’t have a document signed by a judge. They don’t have a court order. They want to just eliminate protections of farm workers who are currently here and have been working in the field for 20 to 30 years.
“These workers who have not committed any crime are being taken by people who are masked, are not wearing a uniform and don’t have a marked vehicle, so they are essentially being kidnapped.”
One undocumented farm worker told Sainato: “We worked through Covid. We worked through the wildfires in Los Angeles. We get up at 4am every day. No one else is willing to work the eight-, 10-hour days the way we do. We’re not criminals. We’re hardworking people trying to give our kids a better life. And we contribute a lot to this country.”
The post “Hunted Like Animals” Say Farmworkers Targeted by Trump’s Gestapo-Like ICE Raids first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.