With Detention of Beloved Farmworker Organizer, ICE Comes for the Labor Movement

On the morning of March 25, farmworker organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez was forcibly detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who stopped his car while he was driving his wife to work in Skagit County, Washington. People to whom Juarez has spoken say he requested to see a warrant, and when he attempted to get his ID after being asked, the ICE agents smashed his car window and detained him.

Twenty-five-year-old Juarez helped found Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, an independent farmworker union in Washington State, in 2013, when he was just a young teenager. He has advocated around issues like overtime pay, heat protections for farmworkers and the exploitative nature of the H-2A guest worker program. Juarez is a beloved member of the Indigenous Mixteco farmworker community, and there’s been an outpouring of support for him across Washington State and the entire country.

Juarez is currently being imprisoned at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. His detention comes as the Trump administration escalates its assault against immigrants and workers. Union members and immigrant rights activists have been detained. The administration has also intensified its attacks on foreign-born students who have spoken up for Palestinian rights, such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk.

To learn more about Juarez’s situation, Truthout spoke with Edgar Franks, the political director of Familias Unidas, about the farmworker organizer and his detention, the outpouring of support for him, and more. Franks, who also spoke to Truthout last November about the challenges facing farmworkers after Trump’s reelection, has worked closely with Juarez — who goes by “Lelo” — for over a decade.

Derek Seidman: To start, what’s important for readers to know about Lelo?

Edgar Franks: The most important thing is how much he cares about farmworker issues and how much he has advocated for farmworkers, especially the Indigenous Mixteco farmworker community that he’s from. One reason he organizes is because there are so few organizers in the state that speak to the issues of Indigenous Mexicans from his community. He’s very committed to his community and all the issues that affect farmworkers and immigrants. He’s always available, anytime people call him, because he believes so much in the cause.

He was one of the main people who helped start our union. When we first began, it was hard to communicate with some of the workers who still used their native language and didn’t speak Spanish well. Alfredo was key to bridging that communication gap because he spoke English, Spanish and Mixteco. With him, we were able to really get information from the workers about what they wanted and help them organize.

He also helped us lobby for the overtime rules for farmworkers and the rules on climate around heat and smoke. All our recommendations came straight from workers that Alfredo spoke with. He was always talking to workers. He’s also been calling attention to how exploitative the H-2A guest worker program is and how growers use the H-2A program as a tool to take power away from farmworkers. He’s also been lobbying on issues like housing and rent stabilization.

He’s a member of our union who’s been around since the beginning. He’s sort of like a shop steward. Everything that the union has done has Alfredo’s fingerprints all over it.

How do you understand his detention? What’s your analysis of what happened?

ICE is harassing and intimidating people and not even showing warrants.

We believe his detention is politically motivated because of his organizing in the farmworker and immigrant community. We believe he was targeted. The way that ICE detained him was meant to intimidate. They hardly gave him any chance to defend himself or explain. He wasn’t resisting, and he just asked to see the warrant. They asked to see his ID, and right when he was reaching for it, they broke his car window. The ICE agents escalated really fast. From what we heard, it was less than a minute from the time he was pulled over to him being in handcuffs.

I think the intent was to strike fear and intimidate Alfredo, but also to send a message to others who are speaking out against ICE and for immigrant rights, that this is what happens when you try to fight back.

In past years, we’ve seen people getting pulled over and asked for their documents, but now it’s becoming more aggressive. ICE is harassing and intimidating people and not even showing warrants. It’s free rein for ICE to do whatever they want. When you have federal agents with no real oversight, it empowers them to be violent and coercive over everybody. The tone being set by the Trump administration gives ICE agents and Border Patrol the feeling that they’re unstoppable. That’s really concerning.

Can you talk about the outpouring of support for Lelo?

It’s been great to see the huge support for Alfredo. It speaks to how much of an impact he’s had in the state and all over the nation. It’s been really nice to see the solidarity from people that probably never even met him or knew anything about the farmworker struggle, but who know an injustice has happened.

There was a rally on March 27 organized by the Washington State Labor Council, which represents all the unions in Washington. They showed up at the detention center calling for Alfredo and another union member, Lewelyn Dixon, to be freed. For us as a union, it’s most important to see our labor family stepping up. During the presidential campaign we saw how workers and unions were being used by Trump, but now all of our labor folks are seeing what’s really happening here, which is that Trump is using immigrants to attack workers and unions. It’s been great to see labor really stepping up on the side of immigrant workers.

What affects everybody else affects immigrants. At the end of the day, we all want food and housing and good schools. Immigrants have nothing to do with the rising costs of housing, or gas or eggs. The difficulties that are really affecting people’s lives are not caused by immigrants. They’re caused by the system and by billionaires like Elon Musk. The frustrations that people feel are real, but their anger is being pointed at immigrants, and that’s not where the anger needs to go.

How is Lelo doing? What have you heard?

He’s obviously upset. He misses his family and friends. He’s also been very moved by all the actions that are happening. But when some of his supporters went to go see him last week, you know what his message was? To keep fighting and keep organizing. That gives us strength and confidence to move forward. Lelo wants us to fight, so we’ll fight. If he’s fighting on the inside, we’ll keep fighting for him on the outside.

He now has legal representation, which was also a big concern for us. We can fight as much as we want on the outside, but we really need fighters in the legal system to help Alfredo. We’ll be there for whatever the legal team needs to uplift his fight, including creating pressure in the streets.

Lelo’s detention is coming amid a larger crackdown in the U.S. Do you see connections?

Lelo is concerned about others who are being detained. Lewelyn Dixon is a University of Washington lab technician and a SEIU 925 member. She has a green card and has been living in the U.S. for 50 years. She’s at the Tacoma detention center.

From the beginning, we thought Project 2025 and its plan for mass deportations was meant to get rid of all the immigrant workers who are organizing and fighting back for better conditions, and to bring in a workforce that’s under the complete control of their employer.

There’s the case of immigrant rights activists Jeannette Vizguerra in Denver. There’s the case of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University and other students being detained who speak out about Palestine. It’s not a coincidence anymore. This is the trend now, and it’s really concerning. The U.S. talks a lot about repressive governments in Venezuela or Cuba, but we have political prisoners right now in the U.S.

Do you think Lelo’s detention is part of a larger plan to attack farmworker organizing?

From the beginning, we thought Project 2025 and its plan for mass deportations was meant to send a chill among farmworker organizations that had been gaining momentum. It was meant to silence the organizing, deport as many people as possible, and to bring in a captive workforce through the H-2A program.

We think that might be the ultimate plan: to get rid of all the immigrant workers who are organizing and fighting back for better conditions, and to bring in a workforce that’s under the complete control of their employer with basically no rights. It’ll make it even harder to organize with farmworkers if more H-2A workers come. It wouldn’t be impossible, but it’ll be more difficult. All the gains that have been made in the last couple of years for farmworkers are at risk.

What are you asking supporters to do?

Alfredo’s big on organizing. Wherever you are, there are similar struggles that are happening. Whether you’re in New York, Florida, Texas or California, there’s organizing for immigrant rights and workers that needs just as much support as he does. We should go into our local communities and support those organizing campaigns.

We should see Alfredo’s case as an example of how effective he is and how much that threatens the establishment. But at the same time, he wouldn’t want people to stop organizing because he’s detained. He would want people to organize even more.

You’ve worked closely with Lelo for over a decade. What are some memories that come to mind that tell us more about who he is?

When we first started organizing in 2013, he was only around 14 years old. A lot of farmworkers didn’t know how to speak English, and so these workers, who were grown adults, would ask Alfredo to present their case. He was just a young teenager, basically a kid, and he was given the responsibility to represent farmworkers at speaking engagements with hundreds of people. And when he went, he spoke eloquently for over an hour about the life of being a young farmworker and why farmworkers needed a union. The campaign was maybe two months old, but he had already captured the idea of why unions were important at such a young age.

I remember all this because I would have to drive him around since he was too young to drive! So I would take him to talk to churches, or unions, or other groups around the community. He was doing all this when he was 14 years old. I was amazed. I couldn’t speak for two minutes without getting nervous, but here was this 14-year-old who could talk for an hour!

He was also asked to go to the 2022 Labor Notes Conference to present on the work of the union, and I just remember how excited he was that Bernie Sanders was going to be there. He got the opportunity to give Bernie a letter about our campaign to oppose the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. He was so excited about meeting Bernie Sanders.

He’s still like a little kid (laughter). He likes Baby Yoda and likes to watch animated cartoons. He tries to enjoy being young. He’s really humble. He’s 25 now, so almost half of his life has been toward organizing. It’s amazing just how much he’s been able to accomplish even as just a young man.