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WHY DID THIS FARMWORKER DIE IN AN IMMIGRATION RAID?  
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David Bacon
July 17, 2025
The Nation
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_ With Trump and Stephen Miller cheering on ICE’s terror tactics,
Jaime Alanis Garcia’s fatal fall in the raid on Glass House Farms
was the most recent example of a death foretold. Inspiring terror, as
a tactic, is openly acknowledged. _

Community and immigrant rights organizations rally in Oakland’s
Latino Fruitvale district protesting immigration raids. One sign says
“For my father, who was deported. Watch me from Heaven, Papa. This
is our war!” (David Bacon),

 

Jaime Alanis Garcia died of a broken neck in the Ventura County
Medical Center on Saturday. He fell 30 feet from the roof of a Glass
House Farms greenhouse, where he’d climbed in a desperate effort to
get away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and
National Guard soldiers during an immigration raid on Thursday.

In announcing his death
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Alanis’s family called him “not just a farm worker a human being
who deserved dignity. His death is not an isolated tragedy.” The
raid, they said, inspired “chaos and fear” among hundreds of
farmworkers in the company’s two cannabis farms in Camarillo and
Carpenteria, an hour north of Los Angeles.

ICE announced
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319 people had been detained in the raid, and Homeland Security
Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin denied
responsibility
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Alanis’s death. “This man was not in and has not been in CBP or
ICE custody was not being pursued,” she claimed.

Of course, Alanis _was_ being pursued. All the workers were, by
dozens of agents in battle gear who fanned out inside the greenhouse.
That pursuit was the reason he climbed to the roof.

Another worker was recorded in a video during the raid after climbing
a tall scaffolding. “Do what you want. Say what you say. I’m not
coming down,” she cried out. “They say they will come and get us.
They are saying whatever they want to get us down. We ask them who
they are but they won’t answer.” The video was uploaded onto a
website
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@mrcheckpoint, used to track raids. The woman’s fate is still not
known.

Chaos and fear are deliberately used as weapons to terrorize workers
and their families. At Glass House Farms, agents arrived in unmarked
tan troop transports whose license plates had been removed. They were
dressed in military camouflage uniforms reminiscent of the Afghan and
Iraq wars, with balaclavas covering their faces.

Arrests were indiscriminate. After a security guard
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US citizen and US Army veteran—was detained, his family couldn’t
even find out where he was being held. US citizen Jonathan A.
Caravello, PhD, a professor at the California State University’s
Channel Islands campus in Camarillo, was also arrested by ICE. A judge
finally ordered him released from the Los Angeles Metropolitan
Detention Center on July 14.

After the raid, President Trump claimed that the agents were under
attack, and gave ICE “Total Authorization
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whatever means is necessary.” A few days earlier, after sending
mounted agents and National Guard soldiers into Los Angeles’s
Macarthur Park, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said
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these military-style deployments. “You have no say in this at
all,” he told Mayor Karen Bass. Miller has given DHS a quota
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3,000 arrests per day

Immigration authorities knew that a death like Alanis’s would happen
sooner or later. There is a long history of people dying while fleeing
from ICE. Santos Garcia and Marcelina Garcia were two indigenous
Mixtec farmworkers killed when their car overturned
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they tried to escape from ICE agents in Delano in 2018. Agents had
been staking out roads to stop laborers from going to work—a terror
tactic during Trump’s first administration, but not one he invented.
Five migrants were killed in the 1992 crash of a van
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the Border Patrol in Temecula, and two years later another seven died
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another truck pursued by agents in the same area.

Inspiring terror, as a tactic, is openly acknowledged
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Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official in charge of the Southern
California region, said, “Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self
deport. Now we’ll help things along a bit.” Bovino led a January
raid the day after Trump’s election victory was certified, targeting
farmworkers in roadblocks and Home Depot parking lots in the San
Joaquin Valley. “Self-deportation” is the euphemism used by
immigration authorities when people are made so fearful that they
leave their homes to return to their countries of origin, or simply to
another safer place.

But the military deployment of ICE agents is also a response to rising
protest that is defying this campaign of intimidation. Within minutes
of the arrival of agents at the greenhouses, calls on cell phones
brought family members and community activists to the sites. They
were met with tear gas
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flash-bang grenades, and smoke bombs.

Immigrant communities have been preparing for raids since Trump’s
election. For months, young people (mostly documented and US citizens
born here) in the state’s farmworker towns have organized marches to
defend their parents, in an inspiring demonstration of courage and
determination. The conduct of the raids, by armed soldiers in combat
fatigues, is an effort by ICE and Homeland Security to intimidate them
into halting any action that might interfere.

In many communities, activist groups like Union del Barrio and the
Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles have formed
teams
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monitor the movements of ICE and Border Patrol agents. They carry
bullhorns, and warn community residents not to open their doors when a
raid seems likely. White House border czar Tom Homan was explicit
about consequences. “The rhetoric keeps rising and rising and
rising—someone’s gonna get hurt,” Homan told NBC News
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month prior to the Glass House raid. “If this violence isn’t
tamped down, someone’s gonna die, and that’s just that’s just a
cold fact of life.”

The Trump administration was careful to target a marijuana-growing
operation because it provides headlines appealing to its MAGA base,
while not threatening its Big Ag supporters. Fox News accused
California Governor Newsom
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receiving big campaign donations from Glass House cofounder Graham
Farrar. Like most big marijuana operations, Glass House Farms donates
to state politicians from both parties because it depends on their
votes for the license to operate. Marijuana is still illegal under
federal legislation, and federal law enforcement has long
made California cannabis a target
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ICE even claimed that its raid had “rescued
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a handful of minors. A statement by the United Farm Workers
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that “detaining and deporting children is not a solution for child
labor.”

The Trump administration, however, has been careful not to conduct
raids targeting big corporate farms. California’s central coast,
where Glass House Farms is located, is the nation’s biggest
strawberry-growing area. While fear in the coast’s farmworker towns
is endemic, the strawberry crop is getting harvested. In Washington
State’s Wenatchee River Valley—the largest apple-growing area in
the United States—Jon Folden of Blue Bird farm
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says, “We’ve not heard of any real raids.” The Border
Patrol’s Bovino says
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“For us, targeting agricultural workers at their job, absolutely
not.”

The Glass House raid didn’t even make it into the news section of
the website of the Western Growers Association, which includes the
country’s largest growers of fruits and vegetables. Their silence,
in fact, is deafening. There is no WGA statement opposing raids, and
its website reassures growers, “While enforcement activities have
not targeted agriculture, here are some prudent proactive steps to
respond appropriately to potential visits.” Among them, it
advertises “Western Growers H-2A Services available to support
growers during this complex labor environment…helping members secure
a capable, reliable and legal workforce.”

Last year, growers recruited 384,000 H-2A workers (a sixth of the
country’s farm labor workforce), mostly from Mexico, under temporary
work contracts. These laborers can only work for the grower who
recruits them, and can be fired
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deported for protesting, organizing, or simply working too slowly.

In the fields surrounding Glass House Farms, central-coast
strawberries are picked because growers increasingly rely on this
program. According to the Employer Data Hub
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the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, agribusiness has brought
8,140 workers to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties, about a
quarter of all the farm workforce.

Trump has promised to make this program even more grower-friendly, and
Big Ag has supported him overwhelmingly. The current secretary of
agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told Congress
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she’d modernize the H-2A program “to do everything we can to make
sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of
business” by immigration enforcement.

At the end of June, Trump scrapped the Farmworker Protection Rule
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regulations put in place by Julie Su, Biden’s secretary of labor,
that provided minimal protections for H-2A workers. By getting rid of
it, growers can now bar outsiders (community groups or unions) from
labor camps, give workers contracts in languages they can’t read,
retaliate against workers who complain of bad conditions, and even
stop using seat belts in the vehicles transporting laborers to the
fields. In 2019 Trump froze the minimum wage for H-2A workers,
and growers are calling on Congress
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support a bill that would do that permanently.

Pushback against ICE, however, continues to win in court. The day
after agents arrived at Glass House farms, US District Judge Maame E.
Frimpong in Los Angeles made permanent two temporary restraining
orders
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would limit the ways ICE can conduct immigration raids. One prohibits
agents from stopping and detaining people based on skin color,
language, or other general factors used to profile immigrants. The
second mandates legal representation for detainees held in the
notorious B-18 jail in downtown LA.

DHS’s Tricia McLaughlin attacked Judge Frimpong for “undermining
the will of the American people,” and asserted that “enforcement
operations are highly targeted.” That was certainly how Jaime Alanis
must have felt before he fell.

So who gained and who paid in the Glass House raid? The Trump
administration hyped up the MAGA base once again with images of
extreme force deployed against immigrant farmworkers. Big Ag growers,
meanwhile, seem immune, continuing to pay wages at the bottom, with
government-sponsored access to a labor program that has been described
as “close to slavery
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Terrorized farmworker families risk deportation if they try to
organize and raise those wages, while living in fear that parents will
be picked up when their kids are in school.

The brutality of entrenching an agricultural system based on poverty
and fear of deportation is the real price of raids.

_[DAVID BACON is author of Illegal People—How Globalization Creates
Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (2008) and The Right to Stay
Home (2013), both from Beacon Press. His latest book, about the
US-Mexico border, More Than a Wall / Mas que un muro, is coming in
May 2022 from the Colegio de la Frontera Norte.]_

_Copyright c 2025 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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to The Nation for just $24.95!_

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"THE MILITARY RESPONSE TO SANCTUARY CITIES AND IMMIGRANTS' RIGHT TO
WORK
Letters and Politics:  Mitch Jeserich interviews David Bacon:
KPFA, June 10, 2025
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IMMIGRANT WORKERS AND THE RECENT HISTORY OF IMMIGRATION RAIDS
A presentation by David Bacon at the UCLA Latin American Institute,
with photographs and transcript.
3/11/25
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David Bacon @photos4justice on the daily lives and ongoing struggles
(both personal and political) of farmworkers -
interview -Against the Grain with C.S. Soong

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Pushing Forward: Organizing in a Post Trump Reelection US
November 22, 2024 by A Public Affair
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On today’s two part show, Esty Dinur speaks with photojournalist
David Bacon who has a long history of documenting and fighting for
immigrant rights.

 

* Jaime Alanis Garcia
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* Farmworker death
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* ICE
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* homeland security
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* DHS
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* Immigration
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* Deportation
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* deportations
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* mass deportation
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* Stephen Miller
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* Donald Trump
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* Trump 2.0
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* Fascism
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* immigrant communities
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* Big Agriculture
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