SANTA MARIA, CA — Farmworker advocates have joined with industry growers across California’s Central Coast to stand up for immigrants in the fields and on the streets.
The Central Coast agricultural region spans from Santa Cruz to Ventura County, with 35,000 workers in a $4.4 billion industry producing a significant share of the nation’s fruits, vegetables and almonds. Crop production accounts for the largest share of these agricultural jobs.
With recent escalations of workplace arrests and raids locally and nationwide, a coordinated response in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties is now bringing growers into efforts to protect farmworkers from being detained and, in some cases, rapidly deported.
Central Coast Alliance for a United Economy (CAUSE), a regional nonprofit supporting Central Coast farmworkers and immigrant communities, has rallied these efforts in response to tactics not seen under the first Trump administration, as unwarranted Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid targets have included federal courthouses, schools, businesses, churches and community spaces.
Across California and the country, pressure from the agricultural industry is already making itself felt. On Thursday, June 12, President Trump ordered ICE officials to largely pause raids on farms alongside hotels, restaurants and meatpacking plants.
“ICE is indiscriminately attacking immigrant communities including in Oxnard and Santa Maria, trying to find anyone they can to meet their politically driven quotas,” said Hazel Davalos, co-executive director of CAUSE.
The united response reflects, from an alliance of groups that don’t always see eye to eye, a shared interest among agricultural employers and farmers to protect vulnerable workers.
Lucas Zucker, who serves with Davalos as co-executive director of CAUSE, said the efforts of the Farm Bureau in Ventura County have also contributed to preventing the indiscriminate arrests in an area where immigrants form the lion’s share of the crop production and distribution workforce.
“Our best defense is employers knowing their rights,” said Zucker.
Agents cannot enter private property unless they have a warrant, yet agricultural fields and packing plants have been broadly targeted for these raids.
“Workplace raids are bad politics, and they’re bad for the business community,” Zucker added.
“Family separation is not a distant crisis,” said Patricia Solorio, assistant director at The Fund for Santa Barbara, a social justice philanthropic organization. “It’s happening in Santa Maria, in Oxnard, in Ventura, across this nation.”
In workplace raids across Oxnard and Santa Maria on Tuesday, June 10 alone, ICE agents detained 40 immigrant workers, mostly of Mexican descent as well as from other Central American countries.
Yet, the number of detentions would have been much higher if the 805 Undocufund Coalition had not worked with local communities to prevent ICE agents from entering workplaces without judicial warrants to conduct the arrests.
At nine of the farms that ICE attempted to enter, the farm supervisors denied them entry and gates were kept closed during the work shifts. At the end of the day, volunteers arrived to give over 100 farmworkers rides back home.
“The community response and defense was very effective, demonstrating the power of brave nonviolent resistance to ICE’s tactics of terror,” said Primitiva Hernandez, executive director of 805 Undocufund.
CAUSE joined with 805 Undocufund — the regional lead of California’s ICE raid Rapid Response network — and a cross-sector coalition of nonprofits to spotlight the impacts of these raids at a press conference held in Santa Maria on Thursday, June 12.
At the event, Maria Salguero, an attorney with the Santa Barbara Immigrant Legal Defense Center criticized the Santa Maria City Council for voting to allow an ICE facility in the majority-Latino town.
She contrasted the community’s position with the controversial actions of DHS, saying, “We have due process, we have the Constitution, we have community on our side. And we have years and years of resistance on our side.”
Several speakers at the press conference then called upon elected officials to act on behalf of immigrants under attack by the Trump administration.
In a press conference held in Los Angeles that same day by Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), she maintained that ICE agents were targeting the “worst of the worst.”
“We’re going after people that are in worksites, that are trafficking drugs, that are trafficking human beings,” Noem said.
The workplace raids escalated nationwide in early June, after Trump administration officials pushed ICE to make a minimum of 3,000 migrant arrests per day, up from the initial quota of 1,800 set by the administration last January. The vast majority of workplace arrest detainees have no prior criminal record.
At the Santa Maria press conference, Solorio, representing The Fund for Santa Barbara, said that in response, Central Coast communities should “invest in immigrant community support, legal defense and rapid response,” pointing to counties that provide these resources, including Santa Clara, Sonoma, Marin, Contra Costa, San Mateo, San Diego and Alameda County.
Zucker, representing CAUSE, said at the event that the California state budget is facing cuts in resources for immigrants — $3.5 billion in state cuts overall, including a freeze on Medi-Cal for undocumented immigrants — who now more than ever need a safety net of housing, healthcare and other supports.
“Our communities are unified” against “essential workers under siege,” added Davalos. “Growers and farmworkers are standing together to fight back against violations of our civil liberties by an authoritarian with no regards for due process or our human rights.”
