The recent ICE raids have stoked fear in the Tri-Counties immigrant community. The raids are also on the verge of creating a crisis for the region’s more than $4 billion agricultural industry.
Undocumented farmworkers play a key role in growing and harvesting the food we rely on every day.
William Barmore is an avocado farmer in Carpinteria. He said the raids make no sense.
"It accomplishes nothing, and does no good for me as a farmer," said Barmore. "I rely on that labor, and now it's just not safe for the workers to come out here, and I don't want to ask them to do that. Thankfully, we picked fairly early in the year. But this is actually the time of year when avocados are being harvested. A lot of farmers are having a hard time finding picking crews. What I am doing is the bare minimum, keeping my watering going and my fertilizing. I'm hoping that will keep the trees going until this mess gets worked out."
Barmore said he was so worried about the situation that he gave his farmworkers an extra week of paid vacation. They were off last week when the big raid hit Carpinteria, just down the road from his property.
"I didn't want them getting caught up in this," he explained. "They work hard and break their backs for me. What they do here is amazing. The least I can do is give them time off to stay safe."
The avocado farmer thinks the federal government has no clue as to what it’s doing to the nation’s agricultural industry.
The Trump Administration maintains that the raids will continue.
"There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way," said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
Speaking about the raids several days ago, Rollins claimed the immigrant farmworkers are replaceable.
"We move the workforce towards automation, and 100% American participation. Again, with 34 million...able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly."
But many people in the agricultural industry are scoffing at the idea that enough American labor can be found to do the often backbreaking work. They say Americans don't want the jobs and haven't wanted them for decades.
"It's frustrating, because obviously the secretary doesn't know anything, that people could come in and do this hard, backbreaking work. Not everybody can do it," said Democratic Congressman Salud Carbajal of Santa Barbara. "That's why they never could recruit people (Americans) to go into the fields and do this work. She's out of touch."
Barmore said this isn’t the first time the idea of Americanizing farm labor has been pushed. He said historically, it hasn't worked. "We tried that. After we ended the Bracero Program (a guest worker program from the 1940s to 1960s, in which Mexicans were allowed to work in the United States), we devised a program where high school students went in to try to do the farm labor. What ended up happening is that after half an hour to an hour, they quit. So, we've tried it before. I guess we are going to need to learn that lesson again."
Some farmers think it’s still too early to gauge the impact of immigration raids on the labor force.
Meanwhile, many farmworkers face the fear of raids and deportation every day.
They have no choice. They work to feed their families.
