The Trump administration’s mass deportation machine continues to shatter families and communities with violent, indiscriminate raids on schools, homes and workplaces.
Farms are a particular target of its brutal, racist crackdown; around two-thirds of U.S. Farmworkers are immigrants, largely from Mexico. Earlier this month, a raid on a farm in California turned fatal when 57-year-old Jaime Alanís died after falling from the roof of a greenhouse.
Dozens of his fellow workers were rounded up and loaded onto buses destined for a detention center. Many of the targeted farmworkers are members of the United Farm Workers, the nation’s oldest farmworkers’ union.
Its president, Teresa Romero, a longtime labor leader who is the first Latina and first immigrant to head the organization, says “farmworkers are terrified.”
She says that “replacing people who are experienced, who are professional, who have been in agriculture, working sometimes for decades, [is] not how we should repay them for the sacrifice and hard work,” and adds that “sooner or later, the agriculture industry is going to suffer.”
And she adds, “and for many years, for decades, farmworkers have not had a seat at the table. The previous administration, thankfully so, we did, but it’s going back to where farmworkers’ voices are not heard.
“What they’re trying to do right now is deport and replace. They want to deport farmworkers who have been working in the fields, putting food on our tables for decades, and want to replace them with workers who come here with the H-2A visa program. These farmworkers are even more vulnerable, because they’re under — 100% under the control of the employer. So, this is not the answer. Replacing people who are experienced, who are professional, who have been in agriculture, working sometimes for decades, three, four decades, it is not how we should repay them for their sacrifice and hard work.”
(This story was first published in part on Democracy Now)
