A lot of undocumented immigrants — and their employers — remember when the siege began. Federal immigration agents equipped with tactical gear and rifles descended on downtown Los Angeles in armored trucks on June 6, arresting dozens of workers at an apparel factory. Within hours, another group of agents raided a Home Depot a few miles away, arresting day laborers who were looking for work.
Those operations quickly became a flashpoint, sparking spontaneous large-scale street protests. But President Donald Trump’s administration doubled down, and more high-profile raids followed as the White House sought to make good on the president’s promise to conduct the largest mass deportation program in the nation’s history.
Immigration agents have since conducted sweeps at construction sites, restaurants, factories, car washes, and farms, upending life for undocumented workers nationwide. California estimates that nearly 1.5 million undocumented workers call the state home.
As militarized crackdowns have become more common in many parts of the country, employers and unions alike have taken new steps to protect their workers. In industries ranging from farmwork to garment production to food service, they have begun organizing defenses to make it harder for ICE to identify, detain and deport unauthorized immigrant employees who help keep their workplaces in business.
While the strategies vary, they share common goals: to find ways to inform immigrant workers about threats and, when possible, to shield them from detainment and deportation.
Adopt a Corner
On Aug. 6, day laborers gathered in front of the same Home Depot in Los Angeles that had been raided two months earlier. Tensions were still high in the city with ongoing ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) actions, but the workers needed some income.
Suddenly, the back door of a Penske rental truck slid open from the inside to reveal nearly a dozen CBP agents in body armor lying in wait. They surged toward unsuspecting laborers, many of whom scattered in fear.
The raid, dubbed “Operation Trojan Horse” by the Department of Homeland Security and captured on camera by a Fox News reporter embedded with the agents inside the truck, resulted in the arrests of more than a dozen undocumented immigrants.
Similar raids earlier in the year inspired the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a labor group that advocates for improved working conditions, to create the “Adopt a Corner” campaign.
Jose Madera, the director of the NDLON-affiliated Pasadena Community Job Center, said that the campaign encourages volunteers to go to places where immigrants regularly gather in search of work, to teach people about their rights. So far, volunteers have visited more than 100 locations across the country, Madera said.
The group’s volunteers hand out “Know Your Rights” materials like red cards, which are pocket-sized cutouts that explain what anyone — regardless of immigration status — can do when confronted by an immigration officer. But since ICE officers frequently violate immigrants’ rights, Madera alleged, people who adopt a corner can help workers in a more immediate way.
The Pasadena Community Job Center also tells people in the community to record actions by authorities on cell phones so that when there is a raid, “there can be someone documenting the abuse, the violence, people’s constitutional rights being violated,” Madera said.
Organizers hope that documentation can serve both as evidence in lawsuits or in immigration courts, and as proof to show the public how the Trump administration is conducting immigration enforcement operations.
“Many Americans do not want to see this type of violence — masked men in unmarked cars, armed to the teeth, going into communities and causing this terror,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to Capital & Main’s requests for comment.
In the Fields
Federal agents staged massive immigration raids on a pair of California cannabis farms in the cities of Carpinteria and Camarillo on July 10, blocking roads with armored vehicles, launching tear gas and firing crowd control munitions at protesters.
Amid the chaos, Jaime Alanis Garcia — who had worked at Glass House Farms for a decade — was fleeing from immigration officers when he fell 30 feet from the roof of a greenhouse, fracturing his neck and skull, according to NBC. Two days later, he died.
At those raids, federal agents arrested 361 people including American citizen and U.S. Army veteran George Retes.
More than a quarter of the state’s large agricultural workforce is undocumented — and nearly two-thirds are immigrants, more generally — leaving hundreds of thousands of laborers vulnerable to immigration crackdowns at work.
Since even before the Glass House Farms raids, the United Farm Workers union has been reaching out to employers to suggest ways to protect their employees.
Elizabeth Strater, vice president of UFW, told Capital & Main that one of the simplest things farmers can do is put up gates and fences to keep intruders out. For large fields that are too difficult or costly to encircle, Strater recommends a more impromptu tactic that, ironically, is sometimes used by law enforcement.
“If you’re out in flat, open fields where you can’t put a gate, what you can do is have the foreman, or whoever, park their vehicle so that it prevents access (by) someone who may not have your workers’ best interest at heart,” Strater said.
Such physical barriers are critical,