‘They always get picked up on their way to work’
When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested a longtime Oxnard worker, Albino Mandujano Eutimio, in May, the sudden action changed the lives of his family, who continue to reel and adjust in his absence today.
“He called me from the detention center and asked if I could take my brothers, Nico and Lalo, to handle his jobs while he’s detained,” his daughter, Adriana Mandujano, told SFGATE. Leaving no time to grieve, she had rides to arrange, bills to pay, and urgent plans to make to support her father, now held at the Desert View Annex in Adelanto.
Her father was detained in the morning, on his way to retrieve a machine he had left at a job site the day before. It was a strategy that ICE has used before.
“They always get picked up on their way to work,” said Elizabeth Ramirez Barragan, the immigration attorney representing the Oxnard worker and a California immigration legal fellow with the Mixteco Indígena Community Organizing Project, or MICOP. The morning Mandujano Eutimio was arrested, she said, was no accident, adding that “ICE usually conducts raids as early as 5 a.m. because they know that’s when people are heading out to work.”
Mandujano Eutimio, who is undocumented but has been in the country for over 25 years, has built his livelihood by servicing restaurants, shopping plazas, commercial buildings and apartments across Camarillo and Los Angeles, removing graffiti, pressure washing, cleaning windows, deep cleaning, doing carpentry and whatever else clients needed.
https://www.sfgate.com/centralcoast/article/california-family-separated-by-ice-20386381.php