On California farms, workers say threats to deport them are on the rise
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In many years on dairy farms, the worker often labored for 10 hours with no breaks.Sometimes, he said, a boss asked him to clean milk tanks using harsh chemicals without protective gear.
He was electrocuted when he stepped into a puddle created by a broken water pump, he said.At his latest job in Kings County, he stayed silent, fearing he could lose his job.Last summer, at the height of federal immigration raids in California, the boss issued a warning, according to the worker: If anyone tried to take legal action against him, he’d make sure they ended up in Tijuana.For the dairy worker, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico in his mid-50s who requested anonymity to speak about the incident, this felt like the final straw.
After more than two decades working on dairy farms, most recently earning about $1,800 every 15 days, he packed his things and quit.“What if they sent someone after me, or they wanted to get rid of me all of a sudden?” he said in a video interview from a farmworker advocacy group’s office shortly after leaving his job.“I couldn’t bear living there anymore.”Amid President Trump’s mass deportation campaign, immigration-related threats from supervisors in the fields are on the rise, farmworkers and advocates say.Farmworkers who turned to advocacy groups for help spoke to The Times about their experiences but did not want to be identified for fear of retribution from their employers and the federal government.
They described instances in which bosses threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement on them, sometimes because they complained about workplace violations.In a state where roughly 60% of farmworkers are undocumented, according to surveys by UC Merced Community and Labor Center, many already feared being deported or separated from their families.But the intensity of Trump’s campaign has increased the frequency of such threats...