Immigration agents target community organizers involved in protecting the rights of farm workers. Activists say the tactics are meant to undermine the trust of migrants in organizations trying to help them.
Early one late March morning, Farmworker activist and union leader Alfredo Juarez Zeferino was taking his partner to her job on a tulip farm in the picturesque Skagit Valley, Washington, when the couple was stopped by immigration enforcement.
According to reporting in The Stranger, Zeferino called Rosalinda Guillen, a long-time organizer and founder of Community to Community (C2C), at 7:23 am on March 25, 2025. In the background, she could hear Zeferino’s partner crying as Zeferino told ICE officers to leave her alone, before the chaotic phone call abruptly ended.
Zeferino was arrested that day and has remained in a detention facility in Tacoma, Washington, despite the efforts of activists and legal aid.
At 25, Zeferino is already an accomplished organizer; he was a founding member of local farmworker union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, won a Peacemaker Award from the Whatcom Peace & Justice Commission, and sat on the now-defunct Bellingham Immigration Advisory Board.
Zeferino’s detention seems to be a part of a pattern of targeted immigration enforcement against immigration labor movement leaders. Fabiola Ortiz Valdez, the director of organizing for the Food Chain Workers Alliance, an organization that connects immigrant labor organizers across the US and Canada, has seen an increase in immigration and labor activist detentions by immigration officials.
“We have seen ICE and immigration enforcement targeting workers; we also see harsher targeting for organizers as well,” Ortiz Valdez said, adding “I think that our members and organizations understand that the immigration laws in this country have always meant to do what they’re doing right now, which is create a more exploitable workforce within the United States. So it’s not surprising, but it’s definitely very alarming.”
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Migrant Justice filed a lawsuit in 2018 to stop the targeting. In 2020, they settled successfully with ICE, which dropped their deportation cases against the plaintiffs, paid restitution, and committed to not targeting Migrant Justice and its membership in the future.
But apparently they are still doing exactly that!
