The women crouch down motionless, kneeling between endless rows of fruit bushes, almost hidden from view.
“Are you from ICE?” one of the women, a farm worker in a hat and purple bandana, asks us fearfully.
After assuring her that we’re not with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has been raiding nearby farms and arresting workers over the past week, she straightens her back, rising slightly out of the dirt. “Have you seen any ICE vans? Are there patrol cars out there?” she asks, still unsure if we can be trusted and she can emerge. The woman, an undocumented migrant from Mexico, has been picking berries in Oxnard, California since arriving in the US two years ago. It’s a town which boasts of being the “strawberry capital of the world”.
As her work shift ended on Wednesday, she and her co-workers hid in the fields, waiting to be picked up by a friend and unsure whether it was safe to venture out into the parking lot.
On the previous day, nine farms in the Oxnard area were visited by ICE agents, say local activists, but without search warrants they were denied entry and instead picked up people on the nearby streets, arresting 35. The workplace raids are part of President Donald Trump’s goal of arresting 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day. On the campaign trail he had vowed to deport noncitizens accused of violent crimes, a promise that received widespread support, even among some Hispanics.
But in Los Angeles there was a public backlash and street protests that sometimes turned violent, prompting him to controversially send in the military to the second largest city in the US. “They treat us like criminals, but we only came here to work and have a better life,” says the woman, who left her children behind in Mexico two years ago and hopes to return to them next year. – BBC
