OPINION |
By Paul Johnston
Trump’s mass deportation efforts are failing so far. Too few enforcement staff are targeting too few people with too little success. Only many more enforcers deployed in “sweeps” through concentrated immigrant neighborhoods or workplaces can produce the much larger number of deportations demanded by the Trump agenda.
But neighborhood sweeps present their own problems, as increasingly organized communities learn to refuse warrantless searches and some threaten disruptive protests. So workplaces are the most inviting target. But workplace raids have the most painful economic impact and trigger the strongest political pushback from employers and elected officials.
It would be in character, however, for Trump to target workplaces… in blue states like California. Perhaps more precisely, in the farms and fields of the “blue regions” of blue states. Like the blue Salinas, San Benito and Pajaro valleys here on the Monterey Bay.
When it comes, will we be ready?
Greenfield’s neighborly response
A 2001 ICE raid in the Salinas Valley town of Greenfield offers some perspective on what could be coming. During the decade after the Reagan-era amnesty allowed many long-time undocumented farm workers to become legal residents, many moved out of the fields and into urban jobs creating a vacuum in the agricultural labor market. By the late 1990s, that vacuum would be filled by undocumented, indigenous immigrants from southern Mexico. Among them, hundreds settled in the small town of Greenfield.
The raids began on March 30 when, acting on complaints from a school district employee and a Monterey County deputy sheriff, ICE agents rounded up six men standing on a Greenfield street corner after work.
Then on April 6, a larger INS team arrived in town. They sealed off the pool hall, accosted those within and swept the surrounding area, apprehending several immigrants. Then they moved to an apartment complex elsewhere in town where the main concentration of Indigenous Triqui families were known to live. Acting without warrants, they forcibly entered three homes, apprehended all the men, and pursued and apprehended other men who were observed fleeing the area. A total of 39 more men were detained by the INS and immediately deported to Mexico.
The impact of the raid was dramatic. Women and children fled into the fields, many hiding under a nearby bridge until they were taken into the home of a local union organizer. Over the following weeks, unions and community groups provided food and housing and other support to traumatized families. Community meetings drew increasingly large numbers of local residents and public officials. Local papers, including the Salinas Californian, condemned the raid. Prominent among the defenders of the raid was the (then) Monterey County sheriff, who repeatedly called Indigenous workers “sexual predators;” in contrast, Greenfield’s own chief of police cited his department’s good relationship with that community and argued that any law enforcement concerns could have been handled by his department.
The controversy peaked at two city council meetings, attended by hundreds of Greenfield neighbors, including around 50 indigenous residents. Most speakers were Mexican-American U.S. citizens, all of whom opposed the raid. The strongest voices came from union members — United Farm Workers and Teamsters together. At the second meeting, the city council adopted what may have been the first and certainly was among the strongest sanctuary resolutions that would ever be adopted in the U.S. (Those measures were not commonly adopted for another decade, as communities resisted the use of county jails to hold mostly non-criminals for deportation under Obama’s ironically-named “Secure Communities” program.) Among other measures, the council directed the chief of police to immediately notify council members if he learned of planned ICE activity within the city.
Immediately after the council’s action, then-congressman Sam Farr sat the INS regional director down with local elected and union and community members; There, he extracted an apology and a promise to refrain from similar raids in the future. But only days later, ICE agents again conducted a raid, this time at a workplace outside town. They apprehended five men who were among the original deportees and had already returned across what was then a more porous border.
That triggered a quick flood of protest from Farr and from other local leaders. The INS regional director ordered his staff to immediately release the men and drive them home to Greenfield. And they did.
Our neighborly response
Now a new showdown is likely on the horizon. If it comes, of course, action will unfold on a much larger scale than in 2001. And to be sure, we do not know what form it will take. For now, we live with uncertainty. But images from Greenfield — of agents breaking into homes and charging through apartments, and panicked families fleeing across the countryside and hiding in ravines and under bridges — are warnings of what may be in our future. They should haunt us like a prophecy.
If it does come, it will come after Trump has mobilized on a military scale. And by then we will have been tested on other fronts: punished by federal funding cuts, frightened by ominous Trump advertising and social media, perhaps struggling to respond to new “registration laws.”
Greenfield can also inspire us, however. Now as then, but on a far larger scale, we would be called to respond as a whole community in defense of our neighbors.
Already now we are getting ready. Now, unlike 2001, for example, faith leaders across the region are preaching the neighborly Samaritan ethic, and congregations are gathering and training themselves to respond. Also unlike 2001, our schools and state and local government are promoting “Know Your Rights” events and “Child Safety Plans.“ Many employers large and small are sympathetic as well, preparing, for example, to exercise their own right to deny access to warrantless intruders.
Not only those under threat of deportation, then, but also thousands of other neighbors are beginning to organize and meet and plan to respond. Some of us can help families make plans for the children who, if worse comes to worst, might be left behind; some can serve as legal observers; some can gather in protest; some may even clog the highways; some can offer shelter; some can contribute to bail funds; some can offer support and care to our traumatized neighbors.
An obligation to respond
Because to us in this region, so long dependent on the workforce that is now under fire, the unfairness of Trump’s agenda is glaringly obvious.
We know that in agriculture, as in several other industries, undocumented workers have long been the productive core of profitable industries that bring wealth into our communities. And as generation after generation of farm workers have left the fields for better lives in the cities, our local employers have demanded many thousand more to fill their places. But for decades, our elected leaders have failed to reform our immigration system in a manner that is responsive to the cross-border realities of this labor market and the cross-border lives of these families.
There was a time when Mexican migrants could work here and still return home often to their beloved communities in Mexico. But rather than reforming our immigration system to make such cross-border employment possible, our politicians locked down the border, forcing our new neighbors to stay here and settle. To be sure, this has enriched our communities even more; most of all because those new families raised children to become productive citizens — in many cases, community leaders.
Now that Trump aims to make undocumented lives unlivable, is it right that these families — not the employers, the consumers, the sheriffs and other politicians who for so long looked the other way — should pay the price?
So now we on the Central Coast are a constellation of “mixed status” communities. About 80,000 of us are Trump’s likely targets for abduction and removal. Many more are members of mixed status families, and many more enjoy the friendship and depend on the work of our new neighbors.
Soon, we may be tested: Will we respond as one community to help those unfairly persecuted among us?
Neither Greenfield nor Salinas, the center of gravity for immigrant life in our region, nor any town should face this threat are alone. We are obliged — by our interdependence, by our humanity — to respond with regional solidarity.
So when and if the raids begin we can gather not only in the south Salinas Valley and the neighborhoods of Salinas. The moment the word goes out, we can gather from Hollister and Gilroy and Santa Cruz and from Seaside and the Monterey Peninsula and all the points between. We can descend upon the deporters and insist on justice.
Maybe together, as in Greenfield 24 years ago, we can slow and even turn the tide.
Paul Johnston is a sociologist, community organizer and a member of the Santa Cruz Welcoming Network, an all-volunteer network dedicated to receiving and accompanying asylum seekers and other refugees.
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