In Washington state, longtime immigrant farmworker and organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino has agreed to voluntarily leave the United States after being detained in an ICE jail for four months.
A crowd of his supporters and family gathered outside Tacoma’s Northwest ICE Processing Center Monday as 25-year-old Juarez appeared for an immigration hearing inside the jail.
A judge has given him until August to return to his birth country of Mexico. For now, he’s still detained. Juarez was taken by ICE agents in March after they stopped him on a rural road as he drove his girlfriend to her job on a tulip bulb farm.
When he asked for a warrant, the agents reportedly broke his car window and handcuffed him. Supporters denounced his arrest as a kidnapping and said he was targeted over his work activism. Juarez has lived in the United States for over a decade, since he was a child.
