Hiding in the fields – farm workers fearing deportation stay in California’s shadows

Women squatting motionless, kneeling between endless rows of fruit bushes, almost hidden in sight.

“Are you ice?” One of the women, agriculture in a hat and a purple bandana, asks us in a frightening way.

After having assured it that we are not with the forces of immigration and customs (ICE), which made a descent into the neighboring farms and stopped the workers last week, she straightened up her back, raising slightly dirt.

“Have you seen ice vans? Are there any patrol cars there?” She asks, still not knowing if we can trust each other and she can emerge.

The woman, a undocumented migrant from Mexico, picks bays in Oxnard, California since her arrival in the United States two years ago. It is a city that boasts of being the “capital of the strawberries of the world”.

While her work work ended on Wednesday, she and her colleagues hid in the fields, waiting to be picked up by a friend and not knowing if he was sure to venture into the parking lot.

The day before, nine farms from the Oxnard region were visited by ice agents, according to local activists, but without a search warrant, they were refused entry and rather picked up people in the neighboring streets, arresting 35.

The workplace raids are part of President Donald Trump’s goal to stop 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day. On the campaign track, he had promised to expel the non-citizens accused of violent crimes, a promise that received wide support, even among some Hispanics.

But in Los Angeles, there was a public reaction and street demonstrations which sometimes became violent, which prompted him to send the soldiers controversial to the second largest city in the United States.

“They treat us like criminals, but we came here to work and have a better life,” said the woman, who left her children behind her two years ago and hopes to return there next year.

“We don’t want to leave the house anymore. We don’t want to go to the store anymore. We are afraid they can catch us.”

Large -scale raids in the workplace in the agricultural heart of California have not been seen for 15 years, explains Lucas Zucker, community organizer of the Central Coast region of California.

But that seems to have changed last week.

“They simply sweep communities of immigrants like Oxnard without discrimination, looking for anyone they can find to respond to their politically focused quotas on a political level,” he said.

More than 40% of American agricultural workers are undocumented immigrants, According to a report in 2022 of the American Department of Agriculture. In California, more than 75% are undocumented, According to the University of California, Merced.

Raids in farms and companies that depend on the agricultural industry in California and the country have increased this month.

The arrests have raised fears of the shortages of the American food supply, if the migrants are arrested or forced to hide, afraid of coming to work.

This impact was not lost in the White House. Although he won the elections decisively after promising mass deportations, Trump recognized Thursday the difficult period that his repression inflicted the agricultural sector.

“Our farmers are badly injured. You know, they have very good workers. They have worked for them for 20 years. They are not citizens, but they turned out to be, you know, great.”

In April, he said that some migrants may be allowed to continue working in the United States, provided they have an official recommendation from their employer and leave the United States for the first time.

The result of a raid Tuesday in Oxnard, a 60-mile (100 km) municipality from downtown Los Angeles, can be seen in a video published on Instagram by a local flower merchant.

The short clip shows A man flowing in a vast field of cultures, through a fog of thick morning fog, while the agents continue on foot and in the trucks. It is then seen to fall to the ground, among the rows of plants, while the agents move to stop it.

When the BBC visited Oxnard on Wednesday, an American customs truck and border protection (CBP) was seen parked outside a biological trucking company. A security guard insisted that his visit was not linked to immigration, saying: “It is not ice. We would never leave the ice here.”

Many tractors and trucks were inactive surrounded by acres of agricultural land, because an unknown number of workers has chosen to stay at home.

The impact has training effects on other companies. Looking in the Mexican restaurant of his family, Raquel Pérez saw masked CBP agents trying to enter the farms of Boskovich, a center of packaging of vegetables and herbs on the other side of the street.

Now, his business, Casa Grande Cafe, has only one customer during the normally loaded lunch time, because agricultural workers stayed at home. She believes that at least half of her normal customers are not documented.

“No one has come today,” said his mother, Paula Pérez. “We are all on board.”

Raquel says that she is now more concerned for the future of the restaurant – serving chilaquiles, blank and other Mexican specialties – than she was while her customers continued their work as usual, keeping the nation provided with fresh food.

“They do not make the domino effect that it will have,” she said about raids. Other companies that surround it based on agriculture have already been affected. The adjacent activity company and the sale of wooden pallets is closed, and also a local car mechanic.

“If strawberries or vegetables are not picked, it means that there will be nothing in the packaging. This means that there will be no trucks to take the things.”

A migrant selling strawberries from his truck on the side of the road indicates that the raids have already had a devastating effect – on his business and his hopes of becoming a legal resident of the United States.

“Fewer people go out for trips, and they buy me less,” explains óscar, who comes from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala and, although undocumented, has children born in the United States.

“I’m afraid, but I can’t stop going out to work. I have to support my family,” he said.

Óscar says he worked to finalize his immigration status, but with ice agents who are now waiting outside the courthouses for migrants seeking to treat the paperwork, he is not sure what to do afterwards.

“There are no more ways left to stay here legally.”