Alfredo Juarez Zeferino spent a harrowing few months in Ice jail – and, under threat of deportation, chose to leave

Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino spends much of his days outdoors, harvesting bananas and hiking vast, bramble-laden trails. But for more than a quarter of 2025, he barely saw the sun. After being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in March, the farm-worker activist was placed in a detention center in Washington state, where he remained until he agreed to voluntarily leave the US.

“I probably would say five times, in the three months and a half I was in there, they offered me to go outside,” he explained on a Zoom call from his family farm in Guerrero, Mexico, where he has been for over a month.

Juarez Zeferino is among the thousands of people who have agreed to leave the country after arriving without documentation – a group that is reportedly growing.

His arrest was officially based on a deportation order about which he says he never received a notification.

Between January and July, Ice data shows that more than 11,000 non-citizens reported that they self-deported, but many others have likely done so without registering their departure with the government. The data does not make clear how many people, like Juarez Zeferino, chose to exit the US after being arrested.

Colleagues, friends and supporters of the 25-year-old organizer believe he was targeted by the Trump administration for his success as a farm worker organizer. Juarez Zeferino said he agrees with that assessment.

“I would say definitely,” he said when asked if he believes he was targeted. “I would say yes.”

Ice did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reached for comment in July, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that allegations of Ice politically targeting Juarez Zeferino were “categorically FALSE”, calling him “an illegal alien from Mexico with a final order of removal from a judge”.

The weeks-long stretches indoors were just one major problem Juarez Zeferino faced during his time in the Northwest detention center in Tacoma, Washington, a massive facility which holds more than 1,500 people who are being threatened with deportation.

Another was the food: meals would often arrive well after midnight, and at times featured “dangerously undercooked” meat. On several occasions, he said, detainees were served nearly raw, bloody chicken; those who ate it often suffered upset stomachs and painful cramps.

“I asked the guards why a lot of the foods were undercooked, or what’s happening in the kitchen,” he said. “The general answer they would give is that they were understaffed.”

The understaffing caused other issues, too. When Juarez Zeferino and others would attempt to receive medical care, for instance, they were often turned away after long, arduous waits.

“When I got sick, I just tried to sleep,” he said. “I stopped even bothering signing up to see a doctor, because I really had no hope of getting in front of one.”

The facility did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Juarez Zeferino’s most harrowing experience in the immigration jail came within his first week in the facility. At about 10pm, he saw a guard walking around with a list of detainees set to be placed on a deportation flight that night. He saw his name highlighted, and in a panic called his lawyer, who was able to have his name removed.

“But the only way we were able to stop it was because I saw my name,” he said. “If I didn’t see my name, they would just have pushed me out, put me on a flight.”

Despite these uncomfortable and sometimes torturous conditions, Juarez Zeferino struggled deeply with his decision to self-deport.

“It was very hard, especially with all the work that I have done, the relationships I’ve built, to decide to leave” he said. “I wasn’t sure how I was going to reconnect, or how I could continue the job of organizing.”

During his 18 years in Washington, Juarez Zeferino fought for labor protections for undocumented agricultural workers like himself, with a remarkable success rate. As a teenager, Juarez Zeferino helped win a farmworker union and organized an international boycott against berry giant Driscoll. He also played an integral part in winning statewide heat protections for outdoor laborers, a cap on rent, and guaranteed overtime pay.

Now, from Mexico, he is continuing to organize with Familias Unidas por la Justicia, the union he helped found, and Community to Community, the food justice group with whom he organizes. Every week, he attends remote meetings.

In recent months, he has been pushing Washington and other states to pass bills authorizing officials to regularly inspect Ice detention centers unannounced.

He is also still organizing for farmworker justice; one top priority is ending reliance on the H-2A contract labor program, which allows farmowners to recruit foreign agricultural laborers to work on their farms temporarily and then return to their home country.

Nearly a third of all Washington state farm laborers have now been replaced by guest workers via the program, which Juarez Zeferino has for years staunchly criticized, arguing it crowds out domestic workers in favor of foreign laborers who can be far easier to exploit and mistreat.

Juarez Zeferino believes the industry’s desire to “replace all local workers with imported guest workers” has fueled the Trump administration’s war on farmworker activists. Since his arrest, border patrol agents in May arrested farmworker organizers on a Vermont dairy farm, and in May, Ice arrested workers on a New York farm who were involved in a seminal labor case. In August, Ice raided the same New York farm again.

“They really want to push out all those folks that know their rights,” he said.

Juarez Zeferino is now pursuing a legal path to come back to the US, where he had lived since he was eight. But in the meantime, he is enjoying his time back in Santa Cruz Yucucani, the village where he is living for the first time since he was a child. He is staying with his parents and siblings, who left the US just days before he was arrested, and his partner.

Though he is still working on a farm, it belongs to his family, so he can take breaks whenever he likes.

The best part of being back in Mexico, he says, is picking plants to eat – not from fields, but from mountaintops where they grow wild.

“Just gathering the food is a whole experience,” he said.

Source: www.theguardian.com