Immigration Raids at Two California Glass House Farms Cause One Death

Militarized federal agents raided Glass House Farms cannabis sites in Camarillo and Carpinteria, California. Cannabis is legal in California but the federal government still classifies it as a Class I drug.

News reports could not agree on which federal agencies participated. Various reports said the agents were from Immigration & Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, other portions of Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Administration (part of the Department of Justice), U.S. Marshals, and the National Guard.

Santa Barbara local law enforcement did not participate but received numerous calls reporting the raids. California Highway Patrol cleared  the road for passing vehicles. Labor unions put out a call for citizens to protect workers at the farms.

The raids began just after 10:00 local time using dozens of unmarked military-style vehicles and some helicopters. Video of the raids rapidly spread on social media. Some agents wore full military gear. Others wore plainclothes under vests.

Crowds of community members and public officials gathered.

At Carpinteria, agents formed a line to keep the crowd from crossing the road to get to the site being raided. VIdeos showed protesters standing in front of the line, raising their hands and chanting “peaceful protest” when shots were fired at them. Witnesses said an agent threw a flashbang (stun) grenade and smoke canisters without warning, tossing them at a mother and baby.

The crowd stayed several hours despite being assaulted with less-lethal rounds and tear gas before a convoy of federal agents got past them on dirt roads. Some of the crowd tried to stop the van from leaving. They threw rocks, breaking vehicle glass. The crowd did not disperse until nighttime.

At the front lines Congressional Representative Salud Carbajal attempted to gain entry for inspection. He is entitled to do that without prior notice. Access was denied in an interaction caught on video. Agents laid hands on him. Carbajal later said,

Today, I was at Casitas Pass Road in Carpinteria where ICE was conducting a raid using disproportionate displays of force against local farm workers and our agricultural community. As a member of Congress and representative of the Central Coast, I have the right to conduct oversight and see firsthand what ICE was doing here. As soon as I walked up, I was denied entry and was not allowed to pass. This was completely unacceptable. There’s been a troubling lack of transparency from ICE since the Trump Administration started, and I won’t stop asking questions on behalf of my constituents. I will be demanding answers from the Department of Homeland Security to find out who they detained and where the detainees are being taken. And let me be clear: these militarized ICE raids are not how you keep our communities safe. This kind of chaos only traumatizes families and tears communities apart. They are also a gross misuse of limited resources and a betrayal of the values that define us as Americans.

Carpinteria County Supervisor Roy Lee and City Council members Julia Mayer and Mónica Solórzano also attended. Agents reportedly shoved and threw a smoke grenade into the crowd, making Solórzano to fall. Her right arm was injured and bloody.

Solórzano said, “They were pushing toward each of us, and we were standing. They pushed us as a group into the ground.”

At Camarillo, agents reportedly fired rubber bullets, flash bangs and smoke canisters into the crowd.

Up to 319 people were arrested, some of whom appeared to be USA citizens. At least 10 of those arrested were children, the youngest of whom was 14.

Jaime Alanis, who had worked on such farms for about a decade, fell about 9 meters (30 feet) from a roof during the raid. He suffered a broken neck, broken skull and severed artery. He later died in a hospital. DHS claimed it bore no responsibility for his death, saying it was his fault. He was the sole wage earner for his family. They set up a GoFundMe campaign to send his body back to Mexico for burial and help his family.

Multiple people required hospital treatment for their injuries during the raids. United Farm Workers later reported numerous missing farm workers, some of them USA citizens. Workers at the farms who were citizens were held for more than eight hours, and were released only after being forced to delete from their phones all evidence of the raids such as photos and videos. Workers who were not released, including citizens, remained “totally unaccounted for.”

Some news reports repeated federal claims that at one site, a protester fired a gun at agents. That claim was unsubstantiated and appeared to be intended to excuse federal violence. Protesters’ claims that the agents were needlessly violent were amply documented by videos.

Click here for local coverage.

Click here for Canadian coverage.