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ICE Returns to Intimidation Tactics from the First Trump Term [1]
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Date: 2025-05-27
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.”
Targeting immigrant labor organizers is not a new tactic for ICE, however. Migrant Justice, a Vermont grassroots organization founded and led by farm workers, faced targeted retaliation from ICE in 2016 over their human rights organizing.
“Over the course of two years, they surveilled the organization, both physically and electronically,” Will Lambek, a representative from Migrant Justice, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder.
ICE also recruited and placed confidential informants in Migrant Justice to attend meetings and report back to ICE officials. These informants spread disinformation in an attempt to sow discord and break down trust in the community. Eventually, roughly two dozen community members involved in Migrant Justice were arrested, including some of the most high-profile leaders, according to Lambek.
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.
Rural immigrant communities feel the impact of deportations deeply, creating an environment of fear and isolating migrants from each other and the rest of their community.
“During the period of targeting, there was a chilling effect on people,” Lambek recalled. “People correctly wondering, well, if I go to this community assembly, if I go to this meeting, and am I going to be targeted next?”
Lambek noted that during that period, people realized that being part of an organized community was the best protection against deportation, especially after they won the lawsuit and were granted reprieve from deportation.
“That built a lot of faith in the power of organizing, and community members understood that actually coming together and showing power is the way to keep ourselves safe,” Lambek said, though some of the old fears returned after Trump was elected.
“A lot of farm workers in Vermont are scared about what’s happening and seeing what’s on the news. So, particularly in the first couple of weeks after the inauguration, a lot of people were staying indoors, not going grocery shopping or going for medical attention,” Lambek said, noting that people quickly realized they wouldn’t be able to spend the next four years indoors and returned to gathering and organizing.
On Monday, April 21, Border Patrol arrested eight farm workers on a farm in Franklin County, Vermont, in one of the largest single immigration arrests of farmworkers in the state’s history.
This came two weeks after federal agents stopped and detained Arbey Lopez, a long-time farmworker and community organizer who helped launch the Milk with Dignity Program.
Lopez is currently being held in detention and is at risk of deportation.
Despite the alarming uptick in detentions, Lambek remains positive. “The experience of immigrant communities out of the first Trump administration has built a lot of knowledge and strength on how to combat political targeting this time around,” Lambek said.
Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, activist and union leader arrested by ICE in March, is still being held in the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma and is likely to remain there after an immigration judge denied his bond on May 8, 2025.
Judge Teresa Scala ruled she did not have the jurisdiction to issue a bond, a claim that has become the subject of a federal class action lawsuit after it resulted in nearly all bond hearings in that court ending in a denial. Juarez Zeferino’s lawyers plan on filing an appeal in addition to the class action suit, but it’s unlikely to be heard for at least six months.
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