Maria's husband spent the past 15 years pruning citrus trees on farms across California's Central Valley. In that time, he'd become skilled enough to earn more than the state's $11-an-hour minimum wage trimming branches for Sun Pacific, the company that takes the Cuties brand of mandarin oranges to grocers and tables across the United States.
After dropping off his kids at school Monday in Porterville, the father of five, who'd been arrested in 2014 for driving under the influence, was pulled over and detained by federal agents. The arrest was one of hundreds in a flurry of raids this week across the state as part of the federal government's crackdown on illegal aliens.
The conflict peaked politically this week after Oakland, Calif., Mayor Libby Schaaf warned residents last Saturday of an imminent sting, giving those without papers time to evade the sweeps. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it had arrested 232 people over a four-day operation through Wednesday who were in violation of federal immigration laws, of which 115 had felony convictions.
Thomas Homan, the agency's acting director, estimated earlier this week that more than 800 "criminal aliens" remained at large in the Bay Area and blamed the mayor in part for some of those misses, likening her warnings to "a gang lookout yelling 'police."' The enforcement action is a direct response to California's sanctuary policies, in which local agencies don't cooperate with immigration enforcement.
"It's outrageous that a mayor would circumvent federal authorities and certainly put them in danger by making a move such as that," White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday at a briefing.
Schaaf blasted the agency and the immigration policy of President Donald Trump's administration as racially biased.
Trump's opponents and some Trump supporters in California can agree on one thing: Raids are bad for business. Reports of sweeps and high-profile detentions are terrifying the state's illegal aliens -- estimated at 2.6 million in 2015 -- who are scared to leave their homes.
Their absence threatens segments of the largest state economy, including retailers, restaurants and the Central Valley's $47 billion agricultural industry, which provides more than half of the fruits, nuts and vegetables in the country. That broad, 450-mile stretch of California yields an eighth of the country's agricultural output.
The farm industry is already struggling to find workers like Maria's husband. More than 55 percent of 762 farmers and ranchers surveyed in a California Farm Bureau Federation report from October said half of their land continues to go untended because of an ongoing labor shortage directly related to U.S. immigration policy.
Of the state's more than 2 million farm laborers, 1.5 million are illegal aliens, according to Tom Nassif, president of the Western Growers Association, a 92-year-old industry group representing farmers in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Although Nassif and the association have supported Trump since the early days of his campaign, he says the raids and decades-old immigration policy for farmworkers are harming the industry and state economy.
"We know that a majority of our workers have presented false documents in order to gain employment, so [the raids] are always a concern to us, especially at a time when we have significant labor shortages and no hope that the federal government is going to pass legislation which allows us to have a legal workforce," Nassif said. "We're not so much married to a particular proposal. We just have to have protections for our existing workforce."
James Schwab, a spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, declined to comment on Nassif's assertions.
Maria declined to give her full name or her husband's for this article, citing concerns immigration agents will find her and send her to the same jail in Bakersfield where her husband is waiting to be deported to Mexico. Maria has three school-age children, a 4-year-old with cerebral palsy and an infant.
Congress is currently weighing a proposal to amend its seasonal workers' visa program by capping the number it issues every year at 410,000. The legislation would attempt to force all illegal-alien workers to return to their native countries and apply for visas. Only a fraction of those who apply would be allowed to return.
Business on 03/03/2018