WA: ICE Arrests Farm Workers Union Leader In Politically Motivated Deportation Attempt

Samuel Messidor

In an attack on immigrant and workers’ rights, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino, 25 year old farm workers union leader and immigrant rights activist, in northwest Washington on Tuesday (03/25). Agents stopped Zeferino while he was driving his partner to work in the fields, according to a fellow union activist speaking to monopoly media. When stopped, Zeferino refused to exit his vehicle or speak to the ICE agents, asking to see a warrant first. The agents broke his car window and violently arrest him in response.

According to the same activist, Zeferino has no criminal record. She believes he is being targeted for his organizing of farm workers and immigrants as he is a prominent local activist, pointing out that he sits on an immigrant affairs board of the Bellingham, WA government. Despite serving a government body, his activism and organizing have put him at odds with the imperialists’ bloody interests in crushing and dividing foreign-born and native-born workers, and “good” immigrants from “bad”.

Zeferino was a founding member of the farm workers’ union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, when he was 13 or 14, according to a spokesman for the union.

ICE’s arrest of the prominent union activist, and their recent arrest of immigrant rights and union activist Jeanette Vizguerra, join the Trump administration’s use of politically-motivated deportations of students active in the solidarity movement with Palestinian national liberation. Like the students, Zeferino has not been charged with any crime. He first came into ICE custody in 2015 for a minor traffic infraction and has an old deportation order from 2018.

Farm workers’ unions are not protected under the National Labor Relations Act, giving farm workers relatively fewer rights. Child labor is common in the fields—Zeferino began working in Washington fields at the age of 12. Agricultural work is among the most dangerous and lowest paid in the country, and along with construction it is the industry with the highest rate of foreign-born workers without documentation.

According to the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) local 3000, Zeferino was detained in the same unmarked ICE facility in Ferndale, Washington that he helped expose as part of his immigrants rights activism. Later in the same day as his arrest, Zeferino was transferred to an ICE facility in Tacoma, WA.

The Community to Community organization with which Zeferino works has a donation form for his legal defense fund here.

image: Zeferino at a demonstration, Community to Community social media

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