Last week, ICE escalated enforcement starting with raids of Home Depots, restaurants, warehouses, and garment factories in Southern California. Some protests were organized in response, which California Governor Newsom has stated was mostly peaceful and specifically that local enforcement was capable of handling. President Trump sent in the National Guard, which is yet another overreach of power because the state did not ask for help.

Throughout the week, personal accounts on social media have verified that journalists had been escorted out of the area by police and protestors had been blockaded in and then arrested for being in the streets past the city curfew.

The push to detain more people has led to the unlawful detainment of teenagers on their way to school and children, the detainment of individuals on their way to immigration appointments, and in the past week workplace raids of restaurants, farms, and construction sites.

An ICE raid on a meat production plant in Omaha, on Tuesday June 10^th, detained 75-80 people. Glen Valley Foods was surprised by the raid because they believed themselves to be in compliance with labor laws. The president of the company said that they use a federal database, E-Verfiy, to check employee’s immigration status. Federal agents had a warrant for 107 people they believed were working under fraudulent documents. At least 400 people in Southern Omaha gathered in protest to support the people detained. Nebraska news outlet, The Reader, quoted Omaha Welcomes the Stranger saying: “We should have been expecting it, but it still was a shock,” and Omaha Latino activist Ben Salazar, saying: “All we can do is what we’ve been doing for years, which is assisting and advocating and counseling and advising our community members, which is what everybody here on the street was scrambling to do.”

While resistance and protests of ICE in “sanctuary cities” like Boston and Los Angeles is to be expected, ICE raids in rural areas dependent largely on agricultural industries are going to be impact disrupting often the sole base of their local economies. Small cities, towns and schools, even in areas that voted for President Trump, have mobilized when families and children have been detained by ICE fighting to have people released, like Marcelo Gomes da Silva in Massschusetts, Ximena Arias-Cristobal in Georgia, and Sackets Harbor Central School students and their mother in upstate New York. A large-scale disruption of the migrant workforce will impact food production and cost.

On Thursday, June 12^th, President Trump acknowledged that his immigration policies are hurting the farming and hotel industries: “Our farmers are being hurt badly …  they have very good workers, they have worked for them for 20 years. They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be, you know, great.” He acknowledged that the “very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”

It might already be too late. It seems President Trump has already forgotten that just five years ago meat processing and other food production workers – more than half of who are immigrants, refugees, and other non-citizen residents – were deemed essential workers. They were disproportionately impacted by the spread of covid raising awareness of workplace conditions that treat workers as expendable. Migrant workers (those who work in agricultural and food production and other seasonal work) sustain the industries despite the de-unionization of labor, low wages, and ever-increasing production – hard labor that workers take pride in but that continues to be devalued and taken for granted.

Just five years ago, we were “all in this together” and food production was “essential”. But, for the last six months immigrant communities, and anyone who might be mistaken or assumed to be an immigrant, have been on alert for ICE who can now come to schools, hospitals and churches, and who have been taking people without warrants, and detaining and deporting them without due process. Last week, Marshallese deported back to the Marshall Islands arrived in a US military aircraft escorted by armed immigration officials (instead of by a US marshall as in the past). We will have more information (like how many people arrived) after President Heine’s office posts their press release.