The voice of farmworker activist Alfredo “Lelo” Juárez Zeferino is missing in Washington state these days.
For years, he was an advocate for farmworker rights, speaking on behalf of workers in English, Spanish and Mixtec, an Indigenous language used in southern Mexico. Now, he continues his fight from Guerrero, Mexico.
On July 14, he requested voluntary departure from the United States after being detained for nearly four months at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.
“The injustices that were happening to all the other detainees, that was part of the reason I made the decision to request voluntary departure,” Juárez Zeferino said in an interview from Mexico.
He was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on March 25 in Skagit County while taking his partner to work in the tulip fields. He thought they were looking for someone else. The agent asked him for his name and for his license. He gave his name and began searching for his license.
“I repeatedly asked him to explain why he had stopped me or to show me a warrant,” he said. “Everything happened so quickly that by the time I pulled my driver’s license out of my wallet … I realized he had something in his hand that he pressed against my window. And immediately, the window shattered into pieces. And my partner started crying.”
Then, he got out of the vehicle and was handcuffed before being taken to a Customs and Border Protection facility in Ferndale.
“They also detained two other people in Skagit. One of them was a construction worker who looked very familiar to me, and I asked them: ‘Hey, who are your relatives?’ He gave me the names of his uncles, whom I recognize from the fields. Sometimes, without knowing it, we would go pick blueberries with his uncles, and he also recognized me from my organizing work in the community.”
Juárez Zeferino was later transferred to ICE's processing center in Tacoma. He remained there while his attorney fought to obtain his release. He was detained for not complying with ICE orders during the traffic stop and because of a 2018 removal order, he said.
Juárez Zeferino said he was following ICE’s orders during the stop.
Families affected
Juárez Zeferino is one of hundreds of people affected by immigration measures under the Trump administration.
Attorney Laura Contreras, with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Granger, said it’s difficult to give a short answer when people ask her how things have changed this year.
“It’s different, it’s more brazen, more cruel and wicked, in my opinion, it’s very unfair … and things happen very quickly, every day,” she said.
Currently, people who have entered the country without permission in the past two years can be detained and deported immediately without the opportunity to see a judge. Previously, expedited removal applied to people who had been in the country for 14 days and only at the border, Contreras said.
The number of people in ICE detention in Tacoma increased from 718 in mid-January to 1,180 as of Sept. 15, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Until recently, detainees weren’t allowed to post a bond as they had in the past, Contreras added.
“Many of the people detained from our communities do not have criminal records. They have lived here, some of them, for nearly decades,” Contreras said. “They have raised their children in our school districts. They are members of our churches and of our school systems, and they are detained indefinitely without the possibility of getting out on bond and returning to their families; therefore, they give up.”
The bond rule changed on Oct. 1 after U.S. District Judge Tiffany Cartwright ruled that the Tacoma court’s practice of denying bond hearings to detainees violates the Immigration and Nationality Act. The ruling applies only to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.
Juárez Zeferino found no way to be released from the detention center after a couple of hearings with immigration judges, nor did he see that his fellow detainees, who had been held for weeks or months, had any option to get out.
Juárez Zeferino agreed to voluntary departure in July. The mechanism allows people facing deportation to leave the U.S. within a specific amount of time to avoid a deportation order. Voluntary departure gives people more options to return to the U.S., while a deportation order may prevent a person from coming to the U.S. for up to 10 years, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Two days later, Juárez Zeferino was put on a plane with around 200 detainees bound for California, and later on another plane to Arizona, before being transferred to Nogales, a city in Sonora, Mexico.
On his own, he made it to Guerrero, Mexico, where he currently lives with his partner and the rest of his family.
“My entire family was in the United States, including my parents and siblings, but we saw the increase in raids everywhere and we did not want my brothers to go through the trauma of family separation. So we decided that my parents should leave the United States and return to Mexico. And that’s what they did,” said Juárez Zeferino.
In the Yakima Valley, Jamie Ortiz is also dealing with family separation. Her husband, José, was detained on Sept. 8 by Department of Homeland Security agents while he was on his way to work in an orchard. He has a work permit and a pending immigration case.
“He called me at 5:55 a.m. and told me that a white van was pulling him over. I told him to stop and I left. As soon as he stopped, four vehicles surrounded him with several agents. They opened the door and pulled him forcibly out of the vehicle, hitting his head against the concrete, and then they pushed the back of his neck against the concrete with their knees. They did not have an arrest warrant,” said Jamie Ortiz in a post on her Facebook account.
She permitted NWPB to share her family’s story.
José Ortiz has been at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma for more than three weeks and has not had the opportunity to appear before an immigration judge. He faces deportation because he crossed the border without authorization, Jamie Ortiz said.
“We have come to accept that this country no longer defends justice, that due process and the American Dream, for which so many come here, are dead,” said Jamie Ortiz in one of her Facebook posts, realizing that there is nothing she nor her lawyer can do to prevent her husband from leaving the United States.
“Look at my face, swollen, crying for three weeks. In a few days, I am going to lose my husband,” she said in a video on social media.
She plans to travel to Mexico to meet him. Then, they'll decide what they will do with their family.
More removals, more fear in the community
The Yakima Immigrant Response Network is among the grassroots groups that aims to help immigrants in the state. It helps train volunteers to monitor raids, accompany people to court hearings and distribute “know your rights” materials in the Yakima Valley.
Volunteer David Morales said the group has watched as immigration enforcement evolved this year in Central Washington. He expects things to continue to change. While there haven’t been workplace raids in this part of the state, there has been an increase in individual enforcement, he said.
“We will see an evolution. Different groups of people are being targeted. Sometimes asylum seekers, sometimes Venezuelans, and sometimes Mexicans,” Morales said.
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE are continuing work during the federal government shutdown, with DHS saying this past week it will continue deportations “to put the safety of the American people FIRST.”
President Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act adds $170 billion over four years for border security and immigration enforcement. The act “is surging hiring efforts and turbocharging the arrests and deportations,” the department said on Sept. 23.
Wider effects
The impact of detentions and deportations in Washington is not only reflected in numbers, but in the daily lives of people who are being hit by immigration measures.
“People who are heads of household, who work in construction jobs, working in the harvest, some of those people simply do not return home, and many families are suffering right now and are being affected by all these injustices,” said Contreras.
Alex Galarza is the community outreach coordinator of the Farmworker Unit of the Northwest Justice Project. Galarza said that earlier this year, families were not sending their children to school, were not going to doctors’ appointments and were not accessing many services. Phone calls to the Farmworker Unit decreased and their labor rights information events had to be done virtually.
“Because for them it is not a priority. The priority is to keep the family safe, to get informed, to educate themselves about knowing their rights,” said Galarza.
Galarza has also seen that housing dedicated to temporary farmworkers is no longer occupied by families, as it was a few years ago.
“Before, they were inhabited by entire families with children … This year when we went, entire families were no longer coming, and through the conversations we had with certain workers, they told us: ‘Well, the family stayed behind because we want to stay safer,’ for example.
“In my perspective, it’s because of the anti-immigration that is happening, the laws that are changing, that you hear about raids here or there,’” said Galarza.
La Casa Hogar in Yakima is offering workshops to help families prepare for separation or other types of emergencies. The plans designate a temporary caregiver in case parents cannot care for their children if they are detained or removed from the country.
The workshop is based on a family safety plan developed by the Legal Counsel for Youth and Children, and includes assistance in filling out the forms and free notarization of them.
“The biggest fear that our community is experiencing right now is the immigration process. The fear that families will be detained or separated for different causes, but the main cause that we see is about immigration status, about the fear of separations and deportations,” said Consuelo Rodríguez, Citizenship and Civic Engagement assistant at La Casa Hogar, who leads the workshop.
Bishop Joseph Tyson, of the Yakima Diocese, has spoken out about family separation as detention and deportations have grown. The Yakima Diocese covers 39 parishes in seven Eastern Washington counties, with most parishioners attending mass in Spanish.
The integrity of the family is important in Catholicism, he said.
Tyson has called on federal authorities to release José López, who was stopped on South First Street in Yakima as he was leaving Home Depot to pick up supplies for his family’s construction business on Sept. 11. His truck windows were smashed.
Tyson has urged his parishioners to bring someone with them to ICE appointments, and to have a plan in case of family separation.
“Our own Catholic social teaching stresses the right of people to migrate in order to support their families,” he said in a homily after Lopez’s arrest. “Migration is not criminal behavior.”
What might be next
A new ruling could drastically change the course of mass detentions and deportations. On Sept. 10, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision of a lower court that prohibited immigration authorities from detaining people without reasonable suspicion and solely because of their job, language, race, or ethnicity. The ruling, while focused on California, could be used by immigration agents in other states, Contreras said.
“It will not only affect the immigrant community, but it will affect all of us who have brown skin and who have low-wage jobs. It will affect us all because, because of the color of our skin, they can stop us, question us, and detain us,” she said.
Contreras says it is important for the community to pause and recognize that “we are in a very dark moment and that there are many injustices, and at this moment it is really important to find the light of hope to overcome it and to look for resources that exist in your community to support you.”
Organizations like YIRN have redoubled their efforts to respond, within their capacity, to the growing needs of people affected by detentions and deportations.
“When you tell someone: I see you, I see what is happening to you, I am here because I don’t think it’s right, but I am here to support you even if you are behind a fence and you are chained, handcuffed, and shackled, boarding a plane, being deported, but even so I see you. And that is really important,” said Danielle Surkatty, a volunteer with YIRN.
“That kind of basic recognition of our shared humanity and compassion for others. It is vital.”
Questen Inghram of the Yakima Herald-Republic and Renee Diaz of NWPB contributed reporting.
This is part three of “Harvest at a Crossroads: How immigration changes are affecting Northwest farming and communities,” a collaboration between Northwest Public Broadcasting, El Sol de Yakima and the Yakima Herald-Republic. This project is funded by the Poynter Institute.
Read part 1: Immigration policies and labor needs: A look at the growing reliance on H-2A workers in the Pacific Northwest
Read part 2: Displaced in the fields: Domestic farmworkers and the cost of immigration shifts in the Pacific Northwest
