farmworkers

The targeting of farmworkers by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement lays bare the true intent and interests motivating the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy agenda. It also exposes the fundamental contradictions that shape the US political economy. The nature of the state’s abductions, caging, and deportations of those doing the backbreaking work of harvesting fields, is not only revealed by the fact that those detained are not “criminals.” It is the paradox, in which farm sustainers—pillars of the food system whose livelihoods feed communities within and beyond our borders—are being systematically expelled.

While ICE raids rage on in neighborhoods across the country, they are also notably taking place in the very heart of the food system: in labor camps and homes, fields and orchards, packing sheds, outside of schools and labor centers, and across small towns whose economies depend entirely on the people the state targets. ICE is taking advantage of the fact that farmworker communities are often rural and structurally marginalized.