‘Terrible place’: WA activist shares his story of 4 months in ICE detention

Editor’s note: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained farmworker and labor activist Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino, 25, of Sedro-Woolley, Wash., on March 25 in Whatcom County. He was temporarily held at an ICE detention center at nearby Ferndale, Wash., before being transferred to the privately-operated Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.

Juarez Zeferino moved with his family from Mexico to California as a child. He moved to northwest Washington at age 12, when he began working the fields in Whatcom and Skagit counties. The reason for Juarez Zeferino’s arrest appears to be based on his failure to appear in court in 2017 for an immigration-related hearing. Juarez Zeferino says he didn’t appear because he was never notified of the hearing.

Juarez Zeferino remained at the Tacoma facility for almost four months before ultimately deciding to request voluntary departure. A judge granted his request July 14, and he has since returned to Mexico.

Media access to Juarez Zeferino was extremely limited during his detention. The Bellingham Herald recently invited him to tell his story, and he agreed to an interview. He spoke with us for about 90 minutes via Zoom on Aug. 11. The following is a retelling of his account of the last five months. This article also is available in Spanish, and we’ve published transcripts of our full interview with Juarez Zeferino in English and Spanish. Normalcy shattered

When Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino left his apartment on March 25, he didn’t know it would be a morning that would alter his life.

The 25-year-old had pulled out onto the street just after 7 a.m. to drive his partner to work from their residence in Sedro-Woolley. About five minutes later, an unmarked car pulled onto the road behind him. He didn’t think much of it until he saw the flashing lights.

Juarez Zeferino pulled over, put the car in park and rolled his window down a few inches. He thought it was an unmarked police vehicle. But when an officer got out of the car and began to approach, he realized it wasn’t the police at all — it was ICE.

Juarez Zeferino, who spoke to The Herald over Zoom from Oaxaca, Mexico on Aug. 11, said the ICE agent didn’t concern him initially. He said he didn’t have any problems with the law, and guessed that they were probably looking for someone else.

As the agent approached Juarez Zeferino’s window, another unmarked car arrived. Then another.

The ICE agent asked to see Juarez Zeferino’s ID, so he went to take his driver’s license out of his wallet.

“Why did you pull me over?” Juarez Zeferino asked the officer.

The agent just told him to hand over his ID.

“I’ll show you my license,” Juarez Zeferino replied. “But give me a reason why you pulled me over.”

The agent then asked Juarez Zeferino to step out of the car. Juarez Zeferino refused and asked the agent again why they’d pulled him over. Instead of answering, the agent used a device to break the window and reached inside to try to unlock the car.

Juarez Zeferino’s partner was really scared, so he agreed to step out of the car to help calm her. A different agent took Juarez Zeferino’s driver’s license, and he was pushed against the car and handcuffed. Agents still wouldn’t tell him why he was being taken into custody.

It was only a day later, when Juarez Zeferino had access to legal counsel, that he learned from his attorney that there was an order for his removal. He said he had unintentionally missed an immigration hearing in Seattle in 2017, as the notification went to an address where he no longer lived.

Juarez Zeferino said he also believes he was targeted in part because of his activism. Juarez Zeferino was one of the founding members of farmworkers union Familias Unidas por la Justica, which grew out of the 2013 strike at Sakuma Brothers Farms in Burlington. Juarez Zeferino was only 13 years old during the strike.

Since then, Juarez Zeferino has helped advocate both locally and at a larger scale for the rights of immigrants and farmworkers. He initially became involved as a spokesperson because of his fluency in English, Spanish and Mixteco, an indigenous language spoken in southern Mexico.

“Any of this work that I’ve been doing made me a big target,” Juarez Zeferino said. Life in detention

After Juarez Zeferino was taken into custody, he said he was driven to an ICE detention facility in Ferndale. He told The Herald that the agent he spoke to there said they didn’t know why he was being detained, as he had no criminal record. Juarez Zeferino asked to be released and, when he was denied, requested to be seen in front of a judge.

“I don’t want a deportation,” Juarez Zeferino told the agent. “I grew up here.”

When he was able to make a phone call, Juarez Zeferino reached out to Rosalinda Guillen, the founder of Community to Community (C2C). The Bellingham-based nonprofit advocates for farmworkers’ rights, food justice and other causes. Guillen and Juarez Zeferino met during the farmworkers’ strike in Burlington, and Juarez Zeferino has remained involved with the organization.

He told Guillen that he’d been detained by ICE, but it turned out she already knew — and had rallied a group of supporters to protest his detention outside the Ferndale facility.

Demonstrations continued after Juarez Zeferino was transferred to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma and denied bond by a judge, who said she did not have jurisdiction to do so.

Juarez Zeferino’s immigration attorney, Larkin VanDerhoef, argued that the judge did have jurisdiction, and said many immigration judges are using that argument in denying bail while they await the outcome of a separate court case that is expected to decide that issue.

Elizabeth Benki, directing attorney at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP), said her organization believes judges in Tacoma are “improperly applying the law” when they find that certain individuals aren’t eligible for bond hearings.

She said NWIRP filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court about this with a named plaintiff and won. However, Benki said NWIRP is waiting for the federal court to rule on whether the decision applies to similarly situated individuals at the Northwest ICE Processing Center.

On his third day in the Tacoma detention center, Juarez Zeferino said ICE tried to put him on a plane and either take him to a different facility or deport him from the U.S. entirely — something Benki said has happened to others in the facility. Juarez Zeferino only learned he was on the list of people getting removed because he asked an officer about it, and was able to call his lawyer to avoid being sent away. Others without legal representation weren’t so lucky. ‘Is this common?’

Juarez Zeferino remained in custody in Tacoma until opting for a voluntary departure from the U.S. to Mexico on July 14 — nearly four months after his arrest.

He said he didn’t want to leave, but after dealing with the conditions of the detention center for nearly four months, he didn’t think he had any other choice.

He recalled a dinner he was served at the facility about two weeks after he was transferred there. The three meals a day that they were supposed to receive were often late, with dinner sometimes coming as late as 1 or 2 a.m.

This particular dinner — a chicken drumstick — was supposed to be the best one the facility had to offer, though the other detainees warned Juarez Zeferino that it still wasn’t great. He was hungry when the food was finally served, and was second in line to grab a tray.

The first man to take a tray sat down and started looking at his food, Juarez Zeferino recalled. Then he said, “What the hell is this (expletive)?”

Juarez Zeferino, seated at a different table, examined his own food. He said there were still some feathers on the meat, so he lifted the skin up. There was blood dripping from it, and a pool of it had formed underneath the chicken on the tray.

It wasn’t the only uncooked food that Juarez Zeferino said he was served. He was able to supplant his diet with noodles he purchased from the commissary with money his family and community members deposited into his account. Many other detainees — especially those from other states nationwide — didn’t have the same outside support.

“It was very hard for us to get any sleep, especially when we were all very hungry,” Juarez Zeferino told The Herald.

So they ate the often uncooked food, even if it made them sick sometimes. But getting medical attention wasn’t much of a possibility, either.

Juarez Zeferino said the near-constant lights in the facility started to hurt his eyes, and he was told to report to the doctor. About 30 to 40 others showed up in the freezing waiting room, hoping to be seen by a single physician. Only two or three were actually seen. The rest — including Juarez Zeferino — were told to try another day.

“Is this common?” Juarez Zeferino asked other detainees.

“Yes,” they told him.

Juarez Zeferino didn’t bother to sign up again when he was sick. He said he, like many others, just tried to sleep through the suffering and hoped that it would be better when he woke up.

Benki has heard clients in the Tacoma facility describe the doctors as “offering Band-Aids on longer-term health issues … instead of addressing the root issue.” She said there are also detainees with “serious medical issues” who aren’t receiving proper care.

Many of the problems are due to understaffing and overcrowding, Benki said. The Northwest Processing Center’s population has doubled since January, and the GEO Group, the private company that runs the facility, doesn’t have enough people to meet the needs.

The facility — which has a maximum capacity of 1,575 people — had an average daily population of 1,138 detainees as of Aug. 4, according to data analyzed by Syracuse University. The number has been steadily growing since January.

U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, an Everett Democrat whose 2nd Congressional District includes Bellingham, toured the facility in June and met with Juarez Zeferino.

“They aren’t staffed up fully to be able to serve these people every day with even basic services. They say they’re trying to do their best but still falling short,” Larsen said in a video statement outside the facility after the tour.

The large number of detainees also makes it difficult for people to meet with their attorneys, as there are only seven attorney visit rooms. NWIRP attorneys have had to wait five or six hours to meet with a client, Benki said. While difficulties with attorney access at the facility aren’t new, Benki said it’s become “much worse” in recent months.

When Benki and other attorneys are able to speak with their clients, they’re often told of subpar hygiene conditions at the facility and an inability to access resources like the law library or family visit rooms because there aren’t enough guards to escort them. Once, a detainee was told they had to choose between getting a meal and seeing their lawyer.

Juarez Zeferino said he and other people at the detention center were often denied access to the outside. In the nearly four months he was there, Zeferino Juarez said he only got five or six chances to go to the recreation yard. Each time he or other detainees asked the guards about this, the officers said they would look into it — but nothing ever changed.

When asked about these allegations, an ICE spokesperson said they were false.

“All detainees are provided with proper meals, potable water, medical treatment, to include sick call as needed, frequently sanitized and vermin-free environments, along with opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers in accordance with strictly enforced national detention standards,” the spokesperson said in an email to The Herald.

They said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is working with states and local governments to help with detention space capacity, and acknowledged that a greater capacity is necessary as more “criminal aliens” are detained.

Data analyzed by Syracuse University shows that as of Aug. 10, less than 30% of ICE detainees have past criminal convictions, many of which are only minor offenses.

“Despite a historic number of injunctions, DHS is working rapidly overtime to remove these aliens from detention centers to their final destination — home,” the ICE spokesperson wrote. Losing hope

Juarez Zeferino said it was hard to see other people struggling like him in the detention center. He talked about other detainees who had won court cases or whose families had paid their bonds only to be kept in ICE custody. Many of them were losing hope.

Juarez Zeferino worried that even if he won his case, the same thing would happen to him, and he’d be “stuck in that terrible place.” So on July 14, he asked a judge for voluntary departure, which felt like “the only bit of justice (he) could get.”

Benki said she’s seen more people opting for voluntary departure recently, even though they may want to have their day in court and present their case before a judge.

“Detention has a chilling effect on an individual’s decision of whether to fight their case,” Benki said. “They’re just so desperate to get out.”

Juarez Zeferino’s request for voluntary departure was granted, and he was flown back to his home city of Guerrero, Mexico. That doesn’t mean he can never come back to the U.S. — or that he doesn’t want to return to Whatcom County.

“I want to come back to Washington,” Juarez Zeferino said. “Keep organizing. It’s benefiting everybody, not just the farmworkers, when we get more rights, or when our rights are respected.”

Juarez Zeferino has kept in contact with organizations like C2C and searched for ways to continue to provide support from abroad, especially for immigrants and their families.

He and other detainees would watch the news about ICE raids and immigration policy changes on TV at the Tacoma detention center, and he would update others about local news from community advocates and relatives who visited him.

Some of the detainees were from or worked in Whatcom County, including those taken into custody by ICE at their job at Mount Baker Roofing in Bellingham in April.

“That happens to many, many families, where they’re heading to work and they don’t come back home,” Juarez Zeferino said. “To find advice to give to those folks, it’s hard. What do you say to a family like that? Or to a kid whose parents are going to work, and they don’t come back?”

He said he would tell others to stay strong, persevere through the remainder of the current administration and know they aren’t alone.

“I know I’m not alone,” Juarez Zeferino said. “There are communities out there. We all support each other.”

Senior Editor Scot Heisel and reporters Jack Belcher, Rachel Showalter, Kali Herbst Minino contributed to this article.