ICE Raids Against Workers in Omaha and Oxnard

Lee Paley

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents raided meatpacking plants in Omaha, Nebraska on Tuesday (6/10), abducting about 80 workers from their factories. Raids hit Tyson, JBS, Glenn Valley Foods, and LALA Branding Products. Glenn Valley Foods, where the workers resisted most, was particularly targeted, with 70 workers abducted despite the bosses’ pleas to the agents and to monopoly media that all the workers’ legal status was checked using the E-Verify system.

The facade of immigration enforcement over the reactionary crackdown on the poorest workers in the country was only loosely maintained, as agents abducted any worker who could not prove legal status on the spot, according to monopoly media reports.

At Glenn Valley Foods, the workers and activists resisted the raid, with video showing multiple workers, family members, and other demonstrators blockading the federal vehicles, including by throwing themselves onto the hoods of the vehicles. Agents threw people off the hood of a car by braking abruptly, only to speed off while at least one woman was still on the hood.

According to monopoly media reports, the gathered crowd attempted to free the detained workers from the ICE vans, smashing at least one vehicle window and landing kicks and blows with rocks and sticks on the retreating agents’ convoy. The report continues that one youth pushed to the ground by an officer stood up and spat in his eye in retaliation. There were no reported arrests during the confrontation.

The Department of Homeland Security bragged on social media that the June 10 raids were “the largest worksite enforcement operation” in Nebraska under Trump.

The same day, ICE and FBI agents raided farms in Ventura County, CA during peak strawberry harvest season, with video circulating on social media of ICE agents chasing and abducting workers through the fields they work.

United Farm Workers officials told monopoly media that ICE had previously left farm workers alone, though ICE has recently targeted farm worker union leaders and union activist workers across the country. At least 35 workers were abducted during raids at farms across Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, according to the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project.

Democrats from the mayor of Oxnard in Ventura County to California senators condemned the raids on social media, continuing the Democratic mafia’s talking points that the ICE raids are spreading mistrust and discontent among the masses against law enforcement and the state. They ask for calm and for the masses to not rebel, while agricultural monopoly groups called the raids senseless harm to the hardworking people they cruelly exploit and to critical businesses.

The targeting of farm workers, among the deepest section of the US proletariat, is part of the Trump administration’s reactionary plans to overcome the general crisis of imperialism. It aims to pit worker against worker, break union efforts, and drive down wages through anti-worker terror and the desperate action of destroying the overproduced means of production, which includes labor.

Californian workers harvest and process the majority of produce in the US, and according to the University of California, about half of California’s quarter-million farm workforce is undocumented workers. Farm labor is backbreaking, seasonal, and not legally protected under the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act, meaning child labor is legal and farm workers have no legal unionization rights.

Photo: ICE agents chase and abduct farm workers in California.

---

The Worker is an entirely volunteer-run revolutionary newspaper free from and radically antagonistic to corporate influence. We rely on the support of our readers to sustain our editorial line in service of the working class and the reconstitution of its party, the Communist Party. Make a one-time or recurring donation to our newspaper today: