Nearly one year ago, Jaime Alanís García quickly climbed a greenhouse roof to escape a violent immigration raid. He died from the fall. Alanís was one of more than 360 farmworkers detained when a massive force of federal agents descended on Glass House Farms in Carpinteria and Camarillo on July 10. More than 360 farmworkers were detained and 14 children were taken into custody in what is now one of the largest single-state ICE worksite operations in American history. As that anniversary approaches, his story, and those of the hundreds detained alongside him, would not be told without the community’s own insistence.
The silence that pervades local and national coverage about ongoing ICE raids is not coincidental.
As director of a research center at UC Santa Barbara focused on poverty and inequality, and as a scholar who has spent years embedded in the communities now living under this enforcement surge, I have watched the gap between what is happening and what is being recorded grow wider by the day.