Last August, a van carrying seven farmworkers in rural Marion County was stopped by immigration agents. OPB reported on the arrest of the farmworkers, including a man identified as LJPL in court documents. He was arrested even though he had no criminal record and had a pending asylum application.
That case and others involving the arrests of workers at dairy farms in Wisconsin and Vermont and a beef processing facility in Nebraska are described in a recent article by Investigate Midwest. The investigation offers a rare glimpse into how the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics are playing out in rural farming communities in different states.
It found, for example, that these arrests happen even when immigration agents know that the individual has no criminal record. Attorneys also face obstacles getting access to their clients to challenge their detentions before they’re moved across state lines or deported. Meanwhile, the immigration raids are leaving employers such as family-owned farms and meatpacking plants scrambling to fill shifts or find reliable, non-immigrant labor for these jobs.
Sky Chadde, senior reporter at Investigate Midwest, joins us to share more details.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. This past August, a van carrying seven farmworkers in rural Marion County was stopped by immigration agents. OPB reported on the arrest of the farmworkers, including a man who was arrested even though he had no criminal record and had a pending asylum application. That case and others involving agricultural workers across the country are described in a recent article in Investigate West. It offers a glimpse of how the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics are playing out in rural farming communities. Sky Chadde is a senior reporter at Investigate West. He joins us now with more details. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.
Sky Chadde: Thank you for having me.
Miller: Can you tell us what happened outside of Woodburn in the early morning of August 7?
Chadde: Yes, a group of farmworkers were on their way to work. They were going to pick berries, and as the van is heading to this field, ICE officers surround their van and pull it over. It’s a little unclear on the timeframe after this, but soon after they are pulled over ICE agents break the driver’s side window of the van and pull the driver out. Still, it’s unclear why the van was pulled over. The officers submitted their summary of events, and this is included in court records in the case. They make no mention of the van speeding or making any other kind of illegal maneuver. It’s also unclear whether the driver was actually the man that they were looking for.
Miller: Am I right that it seemed that ICE agents had been looking for the owner of the vehicle, but then they just ended up arresting some of the passengers instead?
Chadde: Yes, that’s correct. So what happened was the officers ordered the farm workers out of the van and they began asking them about their immigration status. And so there was one man identified only by his initials in court records, LJPL, to protect his privacy, was going through that asylum process. He said he was fleeing Guatemala because his brother had been murdered and he worried that he or his family would then be targeted by the same men. So when he was arrested, the ICE agents told his partner, who was also in the van, that they were going to check whether he had committed any crimes, and they told his partner if he has no criminal record, he’s going to be released. However, the officers knew he didn’t have any criminal record, but he still was not freed.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the long detainment odyssey that this one man went through?
Chadde: Of course. After his arrest, he was moved to a very large detention facility in Texas. In fact, I think it’s the largest in the country, right outside El Paso. His lawyers filed what’s called a habeas corpus petition to try to get him released, and as this process is going on, the judge in his case ordered him to have what’s called a reasonable fear interview, which is a step in the asylum process. But when the interview was happening, ICE denied him counsel, which is what the judge said. But because his counsel wasn’t there and he was feeling very desperate, he declined to move forward with the interview. So then he was placed on a plane to be deported.
And he was going to Guatemala, but the plane stopped over in El Salvador, and it was only there that he was told there was kind of a clerical issue with what’s called an A-Number, which every alien in this country has. It’s kind of like a Social Security number but for aliens, but there was an issue with that A-Number. And so from El Salvador he was actually flown back to Texas. And so during all this time he’s very confused about why he’s being moved around. He’s not really sure what’s going on. He later tells attorneys that his anxiety was so bad that his chest was hurting.
Several weeks after that attempted deportation, he’s woken up in the very early morning hours and put on another plane, and he’s worried he’s going to be deported again, but he was actually sent back up north for another court date and the judge again orders a reasonable fear interview. I must say, and this happened about two to three months after his arrest, that the trail runs a little cold here. His lawyers, citing his privacy, declined to say whether he’d been granted asylum or if he’d been deported, so we’re not really sure what happened to him after that second order for his reasonable fear interview.
Miller: How does this one case fit into the larger picture you were able to piece together about immigration enforcement in rural areas and in agricultural areas?
Chadde: First off, very few of the immigrants being arrested have any kind of criminal record against them, much less allegations of like violent crimes. So for instance, the latest ICE data shows that about 75% of immigrant detainees in ICE custody have no criminal record. That’s according to ICE’s own data. It also appears that the prospect of criminality is being used to arrest as many workers as possible, but once someone is in the immigration court system, they don’t need to be charged with a crime to be deported. There’s no need to prove in a court of law that someone has committed a crime, so it’s all kind of moot once they are in the system.
For instance, we reported on this case in Vermont where eight farm workers were arrested on a dairy farm. Border Patrol had alleged that human trafficking was occurring in this area, but none of the workers were charged with human trafficking. They were never asked, like, ‘Were you human trafficked?’ There doesn’t seem to be any investigation going on there, but ultimately most of those eight workers were deported.
Miller: It really does seem like a kind of bait and switch. The administration detains people and at that moment they talk about crimes that those people have committed, but then when they’re put into the immigration court system, which is a civil system, not a criminal one, the questions are purely about legal status. What have sweeps of agricultural workers across the country, most of whom don’t have any criminal records, what have they meant for their employers?
Chadde: It’s meant employers really have to scramble to find new workers. Agricultural jobs are dangerous. They’re very tough. In the summer when the heat gets really high you can get heat exhaustion, if you work in a meatpacking plant you could slice your hand, and then also just like the same motion over and over really does damage to your system. So these are very tough, dangerous jobs, and if you have other options, you don’t want to work them. So a lot of these jobs have been filled by immigrants. So even in the best of times, farmers complain about not having enough labor, and now with farm workers being arrested and others afraid to show up to work, they’re really in a bind.
Miller: I was struck by what you heard from a Republican sheriff in rural Lincoln County in Nebraska, a county that you note voted overwhelmingly for Trump each time he’s run for president. What did you hear from the sheriff?
Chadde: Yeah, so he runs the jail where ICE placed about 60 immigrants in his jail after they raided a meatpacking plant in the state. And what he told me was he had a really hard time understanding why these people were in his jail in the first place. He said many had been in the U.S. for decades. They had no criminal record. The way he put it was, maybe some paperwork processing had been not gone through the right process, but what he said was, “Instead of going to all this expense and upending lives and tearing families apart, why don’t we just get somebody to help them with their paperwork, get it filled out right, and get them back to work, let them feed their families? That’s all they ever wanted to do anyway. They didn’t come here to hurt anybody. They took up jobs that some other lazy white guy didn’t want.”
Miller: Just watching this, this is a white guy who’s talking. Seen from the picture.
Chadde: Yes, if you see the picture on our website, I think he’s out of Sheriff central casting.
Miller: Sky Chadde, thanks very much.
Chadde: Thank you.
Miller: Sky Chadde is a senior reporter for Investigate Midwest. You can find a link to his article on our website OPB.org/thinkoutloud.
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