Farmworkers’ Lives Matter: Standing Up for Jaime
A GoFundMe account has been set up in memory of Jamie Alanis following his death fleeing ICE agents in Ventura County, California.
By Bob Hennelly
The tragic death of Jaime Alanis, a farmworker, who was frightened into hiding when federal ICE agents laid siege to a state-licensed cannabis farm in the agricultural area of Ventura County, needs to prompt more of a response from organized labor that registers nationally.
It hasn't happened yet for at least two reasons we can't ignore.
First, even within the rank and file labor movement as well as within the law enforcement unions, there's support for what Donald Trump is doing. Secondly, despite sky-high positive polling numbers for the labor movement, just over ten percent of working Americans are even in a union.
That's down by half of what it was in the early 1980s when then-President Ronald Reagan summarily fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers who had identified the major problems in their sector that endure to this day.
Alanis's death was totally foreseeable considering the violent trajectory of the Trump junta's anti-immigrant push that's being enabled by the U.S. Supreme Court and a compliant corporate news media that describes it as Trump merely keeping a campaign promise.
The death of authenticated local news via corporate consolidation, along with decades of Ruppert Murdoch and Fox News mass media misdirection, has millions of union workers and retirees believing that their very well-being is at risk from undocumented immigrants with brown skin.
Please pay no attention to the oligarchs who've bought our politics like Elon Musk, while accumulating vast amounts of personal wealth that supersedes nation states with a concentration at the top eclipsing the vast inequality that defined the Gilded Age that sparked the labor movement itself.
No manner of economic studies or academic white papers that confirm the vital role that this beleaguered immigrant cohort play in American life can alter this mindset that's informed by a racist world view terrified of America's evolving multi-racial majority.
During the campaign, President Trump called for deporting immigrants who had committed crimes. Now, anyone who is undocumented is defined as a criminal.
Green card holders—even citizens—can be caught up in this frenzy that can land some of them in a foreign country with which they have no connection with no access to legal counsel.
Just six months into Trump's second term, heavily armed masked ICE agents are indiscriminately rounding up thousands of individuals, the overwhelming majority of whom have committed no crime but often work as essential workers in healthcare, agriculture and construction.
Thousands of federalized National Guard troops and U.S. Marines were sent into southern California over the objections of local and state officials. In full Fallujah military battle gear, heavily armed ICE agents descended into fashionable neighborhoods to abduct restaurant workers. Outraged local residents responded by videotaping the surreal incursions with such vigor, ICE agents felt they had to deploy flash bang grenades to make their exit.
Last month, masked ICE agents arrested David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union California and beat him so severely he had to be hospitalized.
In a matter of months, the Trump junta has detained and charged elected officials, including Rep. LaMonica McIver, for doing their job of exercising oversight. In the so-called "Big Beautiful" budget bill the GOP Congress stripped healthcare from 17 million Americans, many of them essential workers who risked their lives during COVID to keep the country functioning.
In the same legislation, Republicans gave ICE $45 billion dollars to hire an additional 10,000 officers to supplement the 20,000 already on the job. This multi-billion dollar ICE windfall makes the organization the largest law enforcement agency in the nation.
"Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal law enforcement agency primarily tasked with carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, now has a larger budget than most of the world’s militaries," reported the Independent. "Through the president’s signature domestic policy, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ICE’s annual budget is expected to increase from $8.7 billion to approximately $27.7 billion, with $75 billion allocated for the agency over the next four years."
According to USA Today, female ICE detainees are being held in substandard accommodations in conditions described as "near hell."
"Chained for hours on a prison bus without access to food, water or a toilet. Told by guards to urinate on the floor. Held 'like sardines in a jar,' as many as 27 women in a small holding cell. Sleeping on a concrete floor. Getting one three-minute shower over three or four days in custody," according to the newspaper.
"We smelled worse than animals," one detainee told USA Today. "More girls were coming every day. We were screaming, begging them, 'You can’t let them come.' They didn’t have space."
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) recently got to tour the controversial Florida state immigrant detention facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
"They want to ethnically cleanse this country of certain kinds of immigrants, because here's the thing they are not going for every single person that is undocumented because when I was in that internment camp in the Everglades I didn't see any northern Europeans who overstayed their visa," Frost said. "I saw nothing but Latino men and Haitian men. As we look around these operations around the country they are targeting specific types of people and it's the type of people that look like me."