Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Grassroots immigrant rights activists challenge federal claims about the circumstances of the ICE raid that lead to the farmworker’s death

Jaime Alanís succumbed to injuries sustained amid an ICE raid at Glass House Farms, where he had labored for over a decade

On July 10, 2025, while being pursued by ICE agents during a violent raid at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, California, 57‑year‑old farmworker Jaime Alanís fell nearly 30 feet from a greenhouse roof and succumbed to his injuries two days later. 

A devoted husband, father, and the sole breadwinner for his family, Alanís had labored at the farm for over a decade. On July 12, the worker became the first known casualty of the Trump administration’s intensified ICE raids.

His death ignited a fierce public outcry. While the Department of Homeland Security maintains he was not actively being chased and climbed the roof on his own accord, his family, as well as immigrant rights activists, contend he was fleeing from the violence of Trump’s ICE agents, who have terrorized immigrant communities across the country.  

The Department of Homeland Security denies that Alanís was being pursued at all, although this does not explain why the worker ended up climbing 30 feet onto the roof of a greenhouse. DHS also claims that the raid resulted in the rescue of children from “potential exploitation, forced labor, and human trafficking.”

To some immigrant rights activists, Alanís’ death has become a poignant symbol of the human cost of aggressive immigration enforcement tactics, and the policies that make them possible. 

On July 9, the US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that there would be “no amnesty” for undocumented farmworkers, and that the Trump administration is seeking a workforce composed entirely of those from the US. Rollins plans to accomplish this via automation and mobilizing the “34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program.” 

Trump has recently signed legislation that would create the first-ever federally mandated work requirements for those covered by Medicaid, the US’s public health insurance program. According to a May report by the healthcare policy group KFF, 92% of those on Medicaid under age 65 and not receiving SSI or SSDI benefits and not covered by Medicare, were either working full or part-time, or not working due to caregiving duties, illness or disability, or attending school.

Peoples Dispatch spoke to Ventura County activist Elaine Yompian, part of the immigrant rights coalition VC Defensa, for more on the fight for justice for Jaime Alanís and the millions of immigrant workers with targets on their backs.

“We understand that even though this wasn’t an immediate death, his injuries and the danger that he was put in is a direct result of the ICE operation and the brutality in which agents were conducting this raid,” Elaine told Peoples Dispatch. “We’re calling it the first murder that has happened in an ICE operation.”

Read the full interview here:

Peoples Dispatch: Can you describe what took place during the raid at Glass House Farms and the surrounding events?

Elaine Yompian: The same day as the raid, there was a huge protest that broke out in defense of the community. We kind of put out a call for people to immediately show up. 

That’s been one of the key things that we’ve been doing, mobilizing people to take action wherever ICE is present so that their actions don’t go unnoticed or unchecked.

We didn’t know how big the raid was when it started. We put out a call for emergency mobilization to that location, and soon we saw that the National Guard was coming in. We kept making calls for people to just show up to declare that we wanted ICE out of the county, and away from our neighbors and family members.

We were there for over six hours, standing basically in front of the ICE agents, hoping that they wouldn’t pass, hoping that they wouldn’t take more people. Amid the chaos, we have heard of four US citizens that were taken, two of which were our volunteers, and one is a person that we know. 

All four have been released so far. One of them was our volunteer, she’s a mother, and she was held for over 10 hours. She was beaten up, then taken to the hospital. And when she was taken to the hospital, we called for a protest there, for them to release her, and ICE agents actually tried to enter the hospital and were pushing the hospital staff to try to get in. A lot of the staff held their ground because of HIPAA compliances and everything, and the ICE had no warrants. 

Eventually ICE agents did get in, apparently someone let them in, and then they took her again and she saw all kinds of really horrible things while in their custody. They tried to intimidate her, but eventually they released her with no charges. 

The other US citizen that was detained, Jonathan Anthony Caravello, is a labor organizer and a volunteer of ours. He is math and philosophy professor at California State University, Channel Islands, and he was also taken and detained for several days. They released him recently.

Another US citizen who was detained is a US Army veteran, George Retes, who we met during the first raid that happened in June, and he was also detained and freed yesterday. 

We stayed back at the site of the raid for a very long time, even after the agents had left, to help those who were hiding with farm workers, to get back to their cars or get back home.

After the raid, our hotline was getting back to back calls of families who were looking for their loved ones. We had a family search team, trying to find where they were taken, if they were taken, or if they were just missing – whether they had been detained or were still hiding somewhere, and we needed to go find them. We were doing all that work, as well as doing food distribution for families that have been affected.

With Jaime Alanís’ family in particular, we got in contact pretty quickly because the news reports were saying that he had died during the raid. The family was pretty upset that the media was saying that he had already passed away when he was still on life support. 

When I spoke to his niece, who was his immediate family member in the US., her goal is to eventually sue the DHS for his murder. 

PD: How does the violence deployed during the ICE raid in Camarillo compare to tactics used in other Trump-era ICE raids, such as militarization or arrests of noncriminals? How do these raids compare to raids under past administrations?

EY: Raids have always been a form of human torture. It’s always involved family separation, and the level of trauma and impact that it has on our communities has never really shifted, depending on whether it’s a Democratic president or a Republican president in office. It’s always been something that has caused incredible amounts of pain to the families and to the people being taken. 

The use of force has also always been brutal. The conditions within detention centers have always been truly horrific. There’s no other word to describe them other than torture.

Now with Trump, it’s definitely intensified, we’re not going to deny that. 

PD: DHS is justifying this raid by claiming that children were rescued from potential violations of child labor laws and human trafficking taking place at the farm. What is your response to this justification? 

EY: It’s a common tactic for the US to claim that they’re doing this for the safety of the community, for the well-being of children. Let’s even say that the farm had conditions that DHS claims. However, these conditions are also caused by systems of injustice. The reason why so many people go into jobs that have these extreme amounts of physical labor for very low pay is a result of capitalist exploitation.

But the solution for that would never be a one time intervention on one farm in one county in the middle of California. That is not going to solve the larger issue.

So if the government wants to say we’re doing this because we were trying to protect children from working these conditions, the finger should be pointed right back at the government itself and the capitalist system, because that’s what’s causing these conditions and that’s what’s allowing for this to happen.

Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.