


Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were caught on camera chasing produce workers at a farm in Ventura County, California, on Tuesday in one of the latest raids by the Trump administration to deliver record-breaking deportations.
ICE agents have been targeting illegal immigrants in various cities, including at locations such as a well-known Italian restaurant in San Diego, in Home Depot stores in Paramount, and at garment factories and warehouses. There has also been an increase in federal immigration authorities targeting farms where half of the workers are migrants.
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Farm workers told ABC 7 Eyewitness News that ICE agents arrived at an Oxnard farm around 6 a.m. Tuesday.
“We saw a car when we were on the side, the car was coming, and ICE was following the car,” said one of the workers who asked to remain anonymous.
Another worker told the outlet that “sometimes out of necessity, it forces us to show up wherever there’s work.”
“Because of everything that is happening, it is a bit difficult for us,” he said.
It is unclear how many people were detained during the operation.
Daniel Larios, a spokesman with the United Farm Workers Foundation, slammed ICE’s ramped-up efforts.
“They’re just taking innocent people who are trying to build their own American dream,” he said. “This is not law enforcement. It’s a campaign of fear against people whose only ‘crime’ is living and working in the U.S.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that it reviewed a video showing a worker running through a field in the morning fog, at least one agent running behind the worker on foot, and a Border Patrol truck racing along an adjacent dirt road. Eventually, the worker was caught.
In Tulare County, near Richgrove, immigration agents showed up near a field where laborers were picking blueberries, causing a panic that resulted in some workers fleeing. In Fresno County, workers reported federal agents, some in Border Patrol trucks, in the fields near Kingsburg.
At least half of the estimated 255,700 farmworkers in California are illegal immigrants, according to UC Merced research.
Elizabeth Strater, vice president of the United Farm Workers, told the Los Angeles newspaper that the aggressive tactics are sowing fear into the community.
“These are people who are going to be afraid to take their kids to school, afraid to go to graduation, afraid to go to the grocery store,” Strater said. “The harm is going to be done.”
Maureen McGuire, CEO of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, reported that immigration agents visited five packing houses and at least five farms in the agriculturally rich Oxnard Plain.
At Glass House Farms, a cannabis greenhouse, agents attempted to enter but were turned away after being told it was private property. McGuire said the agents then fanned out into the surrounding area, trying to access additional properties without judicial warrants.
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She also claimed that agents stopped people on their way to work, suggesting the enforcement efforts appeared to single out non-white individuals driving older, worn-down vehicles — a practice she described as racial profiling.