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Senate mulls bill to protect farm workers after ICE arrests
By JIM RUTLEDGE
D.C. Correspondent
 
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As farmers across the country face the threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) swooping in and removing  undocumented farm workers, a handful of federal lawmakers have filed legislation to protect them and millions of other illegal immigrants.
 
Although there is no federal accounting of how many undocumented farm workers have been arrested lately, media accounts over the past three months have reported sporadic detentions. In late April, ICE agents raided a mushroom farm facility in Chester County, Pa., taking 12 farm workers, but none were the four they were searching for, although those detained were charged with “administrative immigration violations.”
 
The arrests sent shock waves across the area, following two other raids in one of the country’s largest mushroom meccas, a farm community that produced more than $500 million of the edible fungi last year.
 
ICE agents made additional arrests in other parts of the country, including upstate New York, nabbing five apple orchid workers; 10 people were taken from two vans of workers heading to work in Salem, Ore., to pick ornamental shrubs; and three dairy farmhands, two of whom are also farm worker advocates for Migrant Justice, were also arrested.
 
Agents made a sweep across five Midwest states, including Iowa and Minnesota, detaining 86 undocumented workers, but federal officials did not identify what industry in which they worked. Farm World reached out to Midwest ICE spokesman Khaaid Wells from the Detroit office for clarification, but he did not reply to email or a telephone inquiries. ICE spokesman Shawn A. Neudauer from the Boston and St. Paul region replied in an email, however, “ICE has no means of tracking the professions or job skills of the aliens we arrest. As such there is no reliable means of documenting illegal aliens who are farm workers.
 
Neither is there a specific policy in reference to illegal farm workers.”
 
In various ICE statements the government said, “ICE does not conduct random sweeps, checkpoints or raids that target aliens indiscriminately. All ICE operations are targeted based on an investigative lead.” In an additional statement, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly “has made clear, ICE will no longer exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”
 
All these workers picked up in the past three months were undocumented Latinos. Neither the immigration service nor farm advocacy groups – including Farmworker Justice, the National Farm Worker Ministry and United Farm Workers – have an accounting of the number of immigrant farm worker arrests. 
 
Last week on Capitol Hill, five Senate Democrats, including Dianne Feinstein of California and Patrick Leahy of Connecticut, introduced the Agricultural Worker Program Act. It is cosponsored by Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Kamala Harris of California.
 
The bill calls for the introduction of a “blue card” for undocumented farm workers.
 
To be eligible, a laborer would have to have worked at least 100 days for each of the past two years. Those who maintain a blue card for 3-5 years (depending on hours worked) would then be “eligible to adjust to a green card or legal permanent residency,” per a statement from the senators.
 
In a conference call with reporters, Feinstein said, “Wherever I go in California – I was just up in the wine industry – when I talk to dairy farmers, when I talk to small farmers in the Bay Area, even some in the Central Valley, they tell me they can’t find workers.
 
“Workers are scared, they’re afraid they’re going to be picked up and deported, that they have disappeared” altogether from farming. 
 
Feinstein told reporters growers are looking to set up operations in Mexico, but “that’s not the answer,” she asserted.
 
“The people who feed us should have an opportunity to work here legally.”

She filed a similar bill in 2013 but it died in the House. The chances of the current legislation passing are in doubt, with strong opposition to any immigration reform in the GOP-controlled Senate, House and the White House.
 
Rep. Luis Gutierrez, (D-Ill.), who also participated in the briefing, has introduced a companion bill in the House. He said Americans face a choice of admitting foreign workers to grow food domestically, or importing food from abroad.
 
“It’s pretty simple,” he said. “Foreign hands in foreign countries or foreign hands in our own.”
 
Feinstein’s bill would leave in place the existing H-2A visa program, which allows employers to hire agricultural guest workers to address labor shortages of citizens and legal immigrants. 
5/17/2017