SEATTLE — Early in the morning of March 25 Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino, a leader of the farmworkers union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, was stopped by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Skagit County as he drove his companion to work at a nearby tulip farm.
Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker and organizer who works with Familias Unidas, told radio station KUOW, “He tried to defend himself by not speaking to them and refusing to get out of the car, and they broke his car window.”
Alfredo Juarez, now 25, was a teenager in 2013 when more than 200 berry pickers walked off the job at Sakuma Brothers Farms near Burlington, protesting low wages and abusive management. Over the next four years they built Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and fought for better pay and conditions. Juarez helped lead the effort, in the fields, in outreach activities and by helping translate for fellow workers in English, Spanish and Mixteca, the first language of many of the union members.
They won solidarity from other unions. The United Steelworkers opened their hall for the farmworkers to meet in, the longshoremen refused to load Sakuma berries onto cruise ships, and many other unionists attended their rallies, marches and other activities.
In September 2016 Familias Unidas won a union representation election by 192 to 52 at Sakuma Farms and then won their first contract the following June, only the second farm in Washington state to be organized by a union.
ICE agents took Juarez to a lockup in Ferndale, in the northwestern corner of the state. As soon as word got out about his arrest, a protest of more than 100 people was organized there.
Faviola Lopez and other members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 3000 joined the demonstration. “We are seeing an attack on union leaders who are in the immigrant community. We won’t stand for workers being attacked,” Lopez told the online Salish Current. “We should all stand together to make sure people’s rights aren’t infringed on, and we all have our right to dignity in our workplace and in housing without being scared for our own safety.”
Tara Villalba, with Community to Community Development, an organization that has stood with Familias Unidas from the beginning, also spoke with Salish Current. “He’s part of all the organizing that happens in the farmworker community. He worked with daffodil and tulip cutters, and he works at Sakuma.”
Juarez was then taken to ICE’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. The Washington State Labor Council sponsored a rally of more than 400 there March 27. The action protested ICE’s detention of Juarez as well as that of Lewelyn Dixon, a University of Washington lab technician and Service Employees International Union member. Dixon, a 50-year resident of the U.S. who has a green card, was detained when she returned from visiting her family in the Philippines.
“We are here in this moment because the stakes are clear,” Cherika Carter, secretary treasurer of the State Labor Council, told the crowd. “Our freedom to protest, to speak, to organize and to win are under attack. And when you target one of us you target all of us.
“This is about immigrant workers who are detained by ICE, but it is also about a system that punishes us for raising our voices, a system that fears organized people more than it fears injustice,” she said. “A system that depends on fear silences resistance. The system is not broken, it’s working exactly as it was designed — to protect corporate power.
“But we won’t let it happen and we are not afraid,” she said. “When working-class people stand together we are a force that can’t be stopped.”
Community to Community Development is collecting funds for the defense of Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez. To contribute go to https://www.foodjustice.org/donate-1.