Trump’s rhetoric is strong and unequivocal — “Anyone who enters the U.S. illegally is subject to deportation,” according to the president-elect’s website — but it also runs up against his campaign promises to bolster the American economy, especially in terms of agricultural production.
In Santa Barbara County, where 700,000 acres of agriculture are the number one contributor to the economy — with a commodities gross of $1.49 billion in 2015 — nearly three-quarters of the estimated 17,000 farmworkers are undocumented. In the past 13 months in Santa Maria, agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — the law enforcement wing of the Department of Homeland Security — carried out two major “paper raids,” checking farmworker Social Security numbers against federal records.
The first, in December 2015, reportedly forced Adam Brothers Family Farma, co-owned by County Supervisor Peter Adam, to lay off roughly 300 fieldworkers, a number not denied by Adam in a previous interview. The second ICE raid, in March 2016, led to layoffs of 291 farmworkers with Bonita Packing Company, more commonly known as Bonipak.