How the current conditions of immigrant detention and Trump Administration policies impelled a farmworker organizer to return to Mexico.

When I spoke with Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, known as “Lelo,” while he was imprisoned in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, he had to be very careful about what he said. Calls to detainees are monitored. “My freedom of speech here is very limited,” he warned me. Lelo had been held there since his detention in March, and I interviewed him in July.

Two weeks after our conversation, Lelo agreed to “voluntary departure” — the term used by immigration authorities for self-deportation. In early August, by telephone from Santa Cruz Yucucani, his hometown in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, he was able to describe the conditions in this enormous immigrant detention center, which today holds more than 1,500 people awaiting deportation.

“It’s a really terrible place,” Lelo told me. He said bad food was probably the worst problem: The Geo Group, a private corporation that runs the detention center, is supposed to provide three meals a day, but often the last meal would come at one or two in the morning. “The rice was hard, like it never touched hot water, and the beans were never cooked all the way,” Lelo said. “That was the main food they gave us. Chicken was so undercooked that sometimes it dripped blood, and people got sick during the night. One time, everybody turned in their trays and we wouldn’t take the food.”

The second week he was there, Lelo started having vision problems because the lights were always on at night, making it hard to sleep. He signed up for the “sick call” list to get eye drops. “I waited a long time to see a doctor,” he recalled, “and finally an officer told us to go back to our unit. They only had one doctor, and we weren’t going to be seen. After that I didn’t sign up again, but other folks in my unit would wait hours and hours and still not get seen. I’d share an apple or something sweet for people who were diabetic. But day after day it was the same thing. Sign up and maybe tomorrow somebody will see you.”

The Tacoma immigrant detention center is run by the Geo Group, founded as a division of the Wackenhut Corporation, with ties to U.S. intelligence agencies going back to the Cold War. Since discovering in the 1980s the huge profits to be made in federal contracts, the company has become one of the two largest corporations running immigrant detention centers in the United States. Much of those profits are earned by keeping operating costs at a minimum; as a result Geo has been repeatedly charged with short staffing at the prisons it runs. “Geo does this on purpose to make it hard for folks, while maximizing their profit by not having more employees,” Lelo said. Bad conditions serve to coerce people detained at the Northwest Detention Center into self-deportation.

Self-deportation is an important arm of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. According to Mark Krikorian, executive director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, “Any successful strategy to cut the illegal population significantly will have to combine two things: ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arresting and removing illegal aliens, and other illegal aliens leaving on their own. … Preliminary data suggest nearly one million illegal aliens have departed the country since President Donald Trump’s Inauguration.”

That number is highly questionable, and the center provides no data to support it. It is undeniable, however, that the government is pressuring people to self-deport. Fear of deportation and family separation, as well as hopelessness about any prospect for legal status, has led many people to leave the United States.

In a highly-publicized immigration raid at Glass House Farms on California’s central coast, chaos and fear were deliberately used as weapons to terrorize workers and their families. One man, Jaime Alaniz Garcia, fell to his death desperately fleeing ICE agents. The terror produced by the raids is also a weapon to get people to leave on their own. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official in charge of the Southern California region, responded to criticism of the Glass House raid. “Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self deport,” he said. “Now we’ll help things along a bit.”

“They are trying all they can to get folks out of the country,” Lelo said, “whether through deportation or asking folks to self deport.” Inside the Tacoma detention center, ICE agents took another tactic. “They went to my unit three times, saying that if people gave up their right to fight their case and self-deported, they’d send them $1,000 after 60 days. People got really mad because a lot have lived here for many years. We have families and we’re part of the community. What is $1,000 compared to 20 years of your life?”

Nevertheless, the constant pressure took its toll on his family, and eventually on Lelo himself. In early March, his family decided to return to their hometown, Santa Cruz Yucucani. At that point, Lelo had not yet been detained. Later, as he languished inside, he described their reasons.

“It was a hard decision because my parents had lived in Washington for 18 years,” he explained. “My siblings were born in the United States. They were going to school there. All their friends are there. But as we saw ICE begin to round up more and more folks, we did not want to put my family through the trauma of separation. So we decided they would leave, which they did on March 16 from Santa Maria, [California, a town from which many people leave to go back to Mexico] on the bus. It’s hard to describe the feeling. We always had this plan for my siblings to go to school and have a better life, more opportunity than my parents had. It was like we had to start all over again.”

Then, on March 25, as he was driving his compañera to work in the tulip fields of the Washington Bulb Company, in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle, he was stopped by immigration agents. When he asked for a warrant, they broke the car window and dragged him out. Within hours he was in the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, and in line for a flight back to Mexico. Only a wave of public outrage, including calls from U.S. Rep. Rick Larson, Democrat of Washington, and Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson, also a Democrat, kept him from being loaded onto a deportation plane.

Those protests acknowledged that Lelo’s arrest was not random. ICE later said he had been detained because of an earlier deportation order, but Lelo called the charge a pretext. “Before my detention, I had no idea that there was a removal order for me from 2017, under the first Trump Administration. If they’d really wanted to remove me, they could have, but they didn’t. They waited until Trump was president again to go after me. I was never given the opportunity to respond or fully defend myself. There was never any due process.”

Lelo was targeted because of his history as a farmworker organizer. He was a cofounder of Washington’s new union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and helped organize many of the campaigns by Community to Community, the state’s advocate for agricultural workers. One of these was for a cap on rents, and another for the Keep Washington Working Act to protect the rights of farmworkers.

But it was his public criticism of the H-2A contract labor program that earned Lelo the greatest hostility among growers. That program allows growers to recruit workers in Mexico for a season’s work, after which they must return. Workers are very vulnerable, and can be fired and blacklisted for organizing, or simply for failing to meet production quotas. Almost one-third of farmworkers in Washington state have now been replaced by contractors using the H-2A program.

“Growers like WAFLA [the Washington Farm Labor Association — a large labor contractor] know me very well,” he recalled, “and were very upset at our opposition to the H-2A program. I would talk to local workers about losing jobs because of it, and to the H-2A workers themselves when they called to report abuses. That made me a big target. But I don’t regret anything I’ve done. It was all supporting workers.”

In the end, however, months in detention took their toll. In mid-July, Lelo decided to leave the country voluntarily. He and many others faced the same situation, worn down by the impact of dehumanizing conditions and hopelessness for any solution to their cases. “It’s very hard to bring legal cases from within this place,” he explained during our conversation while he was still in Tacoma. “There are many people here and they’re all losing [their cases] and getting deported. Two people even won their cases, and they’re going to be deported anyway. A lot of people here have legal status. They have good jobs. They’ve been paying taxes for many years. But at the end of their last hearing, they get removed from the country anyway.”

In that sense, Lelo’s case was no different. “Winning from within just doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “Even if I went through all the legal steps and had a decision in my favor, there is no guarantee I will be released after that. Signing the voluntary departure is the only option I have.”

At the end of the ordeal, however, Lelo found himself in Santa Cruz Yucucani, an Indigenous Mixtec community that he only remembered as a child, but which still remembered him. “I went to town a couple of days ago and people recognized me and invited me to eat,” he told me. “I’ve had a lot of really good food here. There are other families in Santa Cruz that have come back as well, and folks are excited that we’re back.”

Lelo’s family are farmers, and on his return he began going out to the fields with his father and grandfather, where they plant corn, green beans, pumpkins and bananas. “My grandpa sells a little bit of it, but it’s mostly just for the family. We clean the fields and take care of the crops.”

As a union organizer of farmworkers in the United States who labors for wages in industrial agriculture, it has been a revelatory experience. “The big difference is that here we don’t work for anybody, because the fields belong to the family,” he says. “We can take a break whenever we want, and when it gets hot we just go find shade. It’s a huge change from being a farmworker working for a boss.”

But he doesn’t forget the union and the community from which he was taken by force. “I haven’t stopped feeling part of an immigrant community that’s trying to defend itself. As a farmworker, it’s heartbreaking to see pictures of the military chasing us in the fields. We’ve never been able to legalize, and now we have to leave. It’s not right. People have to pay attention to what’s happening and speak up. Don’t look the other way.”

In the meantime, though, Lelo simply has to live. “Tomorrow I’m going to the banana field. It’s going to be the first time in 18 years,” he says.

A former union organizer for thirty years, David Bacon’s photo essays and stories seek to capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world.