Welcome to the Hot Dish, comfort food for rural America. I'm Joel
Heitkamp. Heidi couldn't join me today, but you'll hear later with
Sonia Parras Konrad, an immigration attorney in
Iowa. They had a great chat about her experience
dealing with the ridiculous and harsh administrative
policies like we're seeing now. And I got the joy of chatting
with Bryan Little, Director of Labor Affairs for the California Farm
Bureau. We talked about all things agriculture and
labor and learned about the labor perspectives on
all this. We're excited to hear from you. So let's get started with
my conversation with Bryan Little. You know, we
listen to your feedback here on the Hot Dish. We oftentimes ask
what you're interested in, what you want us to bring to you.
One of the things that's talked about is farm labor, what the current
policies are doing to farm labor, how it is affecting those of us
in the rural areas. Of course, that's one of the focuses
of One Country and the Hot Dish. Well, Bryan Little is somebody who
understands farm labor. In fact, what he does
is best explained by him. He's our guest now. Bryan,
good to have you on the Hot Dish. Thanks, Joel. I appreciate it.
Actually, I joke at times that I spend 75% of my time working for Farm
Bureau and 75% of my time working for Farm Employers Labor Service.
And I was just a poor dumb poli-sci major and even I can figure out
how that math worked. But there's a lot to do in California. We employ
around 800,000 people that do some ag work at some point in the year.
And during our peak harvesting seasons, we're employing about 480,000 people on
any given day. So there's a lot there to chew on in terms of how
the state of California likes to regulate employment. And California loves
to regulate everything that moves. So there's a lot there that we have to
worry about. And then that's what I do for Farm Bureau is dealing with the
legislature and dealing with our very active regulatory community
that's part of California state government. And then the other half of my
job is I run a small for profit company that California Farm Bureau owns
that tries to help agricultural employers understand and do all the
things that the state and the feds want them to do in their capacity as
employers. And that's a lot. We actually sat down and counted one day last year
that farmers in California are expected to post 54 different
things in their workplace to inform their employees about their
various rights and other things like that that farmers are required to inform
Them of and we have a product designed to make it easy for them to
do that. So we try to be the easy button for farm employers. In California,
I don't know what terms you use, but here in the Midwest we use bulletin
board. So I don't know where you put 50 postings on a
bulletin board. How big is the bulletin board? It's
big. That's one of the problems we've been trying to get around. So we have
this piece of agricultural equipment in California that we invented in
2010 or so called the Shade Trailer. It's a two wheel trail
that's basically a picnic table on a trailer that has wings that
fold up to provide shade for people to sit on the trailer. Because of our
Heat Illness Prevention standard requires employers of outdoor
employees to provide shade for them to get into on a hot day.
A lot of times you'll see ag employers will hang those posters underneath those
wings so when they're folded out providing shade for people sitting at
the picnic table, they can look up and see the posters. The requirement is
that the posters have to be somewhere where employees can see them without having to
ask to see them. So we've tried a lot of different things over the
years and there really is no way around the fact that it just covers a
lot of a lot of space and people are running out of places to
put it. And yet our legislators and regulators keep adding
new things that we have to provide postings on. Well, as a former
legislator and someone who served in the North Dakota Senate for 14 years,
you would not have a hard time making an argument with
me that you need to get rid of some of those
posters. It wouldn't be a hard argument to make at all.
Bryan, want to talk a little bit about your background when it comes to labor?
I think this is universal, albeit the different commodities you
raise versus what we raise here in the middle of this
country. The shortage, just the need,
the qualification, the ability to do that level
of work every day. You know, a lot of people don't think of
agriculture culture when they think of California. Where are you at when it
comes to labor? Well, California is the largest ag
production state in the United States. Now given that California is a
huge state, I mean it's 800 miles from the Oregon
border to the Mexican border. So it's a big state and a lot of rural
area people think of California, they think of the Bay Area and they think of
the LA Basin. Maybe Fresno comes to mind occasionally, but
for the most part that's what they think of. And Surfing and the beach and
all that stuff. But we grow everything. We grow 400 different
commodities in California. So we grow everything from avocados to zucchini.
We're the largest dairy production state in the United States. So there's a
lot going on here agriculturally. And that's why I was telling you about earlier
that we have about 800,000 people that do at least one job at some point
during the year, because that's how their employers report their taxes.
And then during our peak harvesting seasons, which will kick off in about three weeks
here, we'll be employing about 480,000 people every day doing
something. And that will continue through about the middle of October.
So there's something happening in California just about every day of the year,
growing something. Wine, grapes, tree fruit,
tree nuts, vegetables, leafy greens,
fruit and vegetable, all berries. I mean, berries like you wouldn't believe. They're
all over the place. We're doing our best to try to automate
and as much of it as we can, because California agriculture is
different from agriculture in the Midwest, where my brother in law
will periodically send us video of himself watching South Dakota State
Jackrabbit's football on his laptop and his combine was
combining his beans. Well, you know, we don't, we don't have those kind of
commodities and that kind of machinery in California that lends itself to that
kind of automation, although we're working on it as fast as we can. But
try to imagine what kind of machine would be required to harvest strawberries.
That, that machine has not been invented yet. And I don't know if we'll ever
get there. Yeah, well, just two points there and what you just
said. Number one, North Dakota State University beat
South Dakota State University in the national championship this year. But I don't want to
be petty and bring that up. Also
zucchini, we raise it too. And the one time of
year you lock your car is when it's zucchini season, because you
don't want a bunch of people dropping it off in your car. And then you
got to deal with it. Bryan, I want to talk the serious issue though, that
we ended up bringing up here, which was just
the harvest, the seasonal harvest. How many of these workers are
day workers or week workers? Most of
them are going to be employed. It depends on the situation. Some
commodities have relatively short harvest periods. To give you an example,
sweet cherries in Lodi, which is about 25
miles south of Sacramento in Central Valley, that's about a three week
harvest. But the people that are doing that work, they live
in Lodi and Stockton and Elk Grove and the other communities right
around there. And they do that work for two or three weeks, and then they
go find other ag work to do in other parts of California. The people who
do ag work in California, that's mostly what they do for a
living. They might do several different things over the course of the year,
but when there's something available close by to where they live, they'll
usually take those jobs and work those jobs for as long as they last. And
if they're done harvesting cherries, then they're probably going to get a job working
on the tomato harvest somewhere else in the Central Valley and then move on
to tree fruits and some ground growing vegetables like melons and
cucumbers and things like that. So we grow again, we grow so
much stuff in California that's not hard for people to put together
Many, many weeks of ag employment if they are a little bit
diligent about it and they maybe are willing to drive a little bit in
order to do those jobs. Ag workers in California, on average, work
about 36 weeks in agriculture out of a year.
So it's not something that you can do 52 weeks a year
because the work, just a lot of time isn't available during the winter months. But
during the rest of the year, there's something going on in California pretty much every
day. Okay, I want to talk a little bit about my
background on some of that as well. Before we raise sugar beets
here and before we got to the point where we
could apply chemical to kill a lot of the weeds that would stop some
of the sugar beet roots from growing, we hold them
in my summers, you know, we got paid to hoe. And what I know is
the migrant workers, the immigrant workers that came to the north
to do that, could do a quarter of land and what it took us,
you know, about three weeks to do one. In other words, they were
better, they worked harder, and they were quicker. My,
my suspicion is when comes to your seasonal work,
many of the individuals that you need are
Hispanic. That the people that come
are very good at what they do, but they might be
first generation immigrants. And, you know, I hope we can have
a conversation here about whether or not some of them are even here
legally. And so is my suspicion right?
You're partly right and partly wrong. The part where you're not right
is that a large part of our population have been residing in
California. Yes, they are Hispanic. Many of them immigrated from
Mexico and other Central American countries. But in many cases,
that was 20 and 30 years ago. So they've lived in California
for decades. Many of them, they have families here.
They have spouses who either may be immigrants themselves
or they may be green card holders. They may be citizens. They
have children who are United States citizens because they were born here.
Their kids are going to the local schools. And these people are
not, by and large, raising their kids to be farm workers. They're raising
them to be public defenders and school teachers
and lawyers and plumbers and engineers and all
kinds of things, because we have a very comprehensive state university system in
California and community college system that offers
great education for not a lot of money. So there's a lot of
things these people can do, a lot of professional opportunities for their children to
be able to do things other than agriculture, which is one of our problems here
as an industry, is that our workforce is getting older every day,
just like I am and just like you are. And doing agricultural
work in California is a great job for a younger person, maybe not so
much for someone who's as old as me. And then to answer your other question,
yes, you are right, a great many of them did not emigrate to the
United States legally back in the 1980s and
1990s when they came here and settled here.
California Farm Bureau and American Farm Bureau, too, have been advocating
for decades. I mean, I worked at American Farm Bureau back in the 1990s, and
we were advocating then for a path to some sort of status that would allow
our workforce who originally came to the United States not
legally, because there was no good way to do that at the time,
to allow them to be able to earn a status, to allow them to work
legally in the United States, and then to make some improvements to make
our temporary ggricultural visa worker visa program
more affordable, more usable, and more readily
available so that we could rely on that when we need to.
Has ICE or the Trump Administration as a whole
uh crackdown on finding out whether or not some of these workers
are here legally? Because, you know, there was this
exemption that was supposedly given to ag and given to
hotel workers. And so I'm curious, are
these workers, whether they're here legally or not, working in
fear? So one piece of that that
need to back up and make sure that we're clear about is that one thing
you commonly hear, you hear these people refer to as undocumented workers.
Nobody is undocumented. Everybody has documents. You
can buy all the documents you need at a flea market anywhere in
California to do work up virtually any job that you can
qualify for, for $1,000. It's just, it's just
not that hard to do. Usually that's going to consist of a California
driver's license and a Social Security card, or it could consist of a Social
Security card that you can then and a confident birth certificate that you can then
take the California DMV and get a California issued
driver's license. So there are a lot of different ways you can get all the
documentation you need to be able to offer documents to an
employer so that your employer can complete the i9 process before
they hire you. And I only emphasize that because I think there's
a lot of misconceptions out there that farm employers
commonly hire people who they know are undocumented. And that just is not
true. You know. Now, what was your question, Your, your
original question, Joel? My original question is whether or not they're
legal workers or not, which clearly you've
pointed out, some are, some aren't. Because if you're going to a flea market
to do that, clearly you've brought documentation
that isn't accurate. So do they work in fear?
Do they work in a way where any
given day they're looking over their shoulder wondering or not they're going to be the
one deported? So a funny thing happened on
the way to the President's Inauguration back in January,
the week before the Inauguration, whoever it was that runs the Border
Patrol office in El Centro, California, decided he was going
to maybe he wanted to make sure he kept his job in the new Administration.
I don't know what was going on there, but he initiated an Enforcement Action in
Bakersfield and started going out and picking up -
officially, he said he was picking up criminal
illegal aliens. So the kind of people we've heard talked
about in the course of all the conversation around all of this in
the last six months or so. And from what I could discern,
that's a lot of what was happening there. They were actually doing that.
But the funny thing that happened, and it's happened over and over and
over again since January, is that when any
law enforcement agency seems like does anything from a
sobriety checkpoint to the Department of
Homeland Security's Homeland Security Investigation Service taking down
the child pornography ring in Winters, California. It's about
25 miles from Sacramento going toward San Francisco. It
gets reported in local social media like Facebook and
Instagram and all that stuff as, oh my God, ICE is here
and they're arresting farm workers and they're doing enforcement on farms.
So far I have yet other than what happened in Ventura county,
in the wake of the LA riots, I haven't been able to find
an instance. I keep getting reports that these things are happening. And
I always go and check contact people I know, because I've been
doing this job for 16 years, I know people all over the state, contact
people I know in those areas and say, what's happening? What
do you. What have you heard? What's going on? And very often the first
thing that I get is, well, yeah, we're hearing that ICE is doing enforcement out
here and then they poke around a little bit and learn a little bit more.
And it turns out that it's the. Like the story I told you before about
Homeland Security investigations taking down a child pornography ring
or a human smuggling ring, or in the case of. We got a
text from a county Farm Bureau executive a couple of weeks
ago saying that she had heard that ICE was in Thermal
and Mecca, which are farming communities in eastern Riverside county,
that ICE was out there doing farm site enforcement. Turns out what
was actually happening was that the National Guard and DEA
were suppressing an illegal Chinese pot grow in the desert.
But that got reported as ICE out there doing stuff. So ICE wasn't
in every case I've investigated and followed up on.
ICE has not been doing farm site enforcement. It's always been
somebody doing something else that gets reported that way
in social media. And then that echoes off legacy media,
which then in turn echoes off the social media. And the more
spectacular and lurid you make these reports,
the more likes and clicks and shares you get
in the social media driven world that we live in these days. Which
is, I guess, okay if you're trying to get likes and clicks and shares.
But it's pretty tough on our employees in our
industry who are trying to make a living and support their families, just like you
do and just like I do every day, who don't
know if it's safe for them to go to work. And
there have been some pretty colorful and alarming stories about
people who should not have been detained, who were actually. People who were
actually US citizens being detained. I don't have any
firsthand knowledge if any of that is true, but if any of it is
true, it certainly is concerning. And that is causing
agricultural employees in California, to the extent that they can
in some cases, to elect not to go to work. I know of at least
one strawberry producer in Ventura County who lost about 60% of
his crop because he, in the wake of the LA riots,
because the ICE and Border Patrol were up in Ventura County
doing whatever it was they were doing, you might have seen last week they
conducted a raid on a cannabis production
facility in Ventura County. So because we have adult
use cannabis legal in California,
it's still not legal federally. And so ICE was going out
and picking up people who were here on visas. This is
just last week picking up people who are here on various visas
on temporary protected status, green card holders,
a variety of others. There's a whole variety of visas that people
have been able to get last several Administrations. The problem
is that if you are engaged in cannabis
production, that's a federal felony. And if
you engage in a federal felony, then if you are here on a
visa, you're immediately deportable and ICE can pick you up and deport
you right away. If you're a green card holder, it would prevent
you from ever being able to apply for citizenship if that's what you want to
do. And a great many green card holders will do that eventually. So
it's. And because cannabis production in California
happens cheek by jowl with food production in California. It's all
co-located, they're all right next to each other. It
has the effect of really scaring our workforce
in California. And they try to avoid going out and going
to work when this stuff is going on around them. And that makes it really
tough for food production. You know, in California, we produce about half
the fruits and vegetables the rest of the United States consumes. So
it's just going to make it really tough for us to be able to produce
strawberries and blueberries and all the other delicious things that
we grow in California that folks all over the country want to eat. Well,
National Farm Bureau is usually an organization with an
Administration like this that would have a connection or two issue
in both the ag department and all the way up to
the top. And so as anybody spoke to them, as anybody spoke
to the Administration and said, you know, other than a press release saying
that, you know, you're not going to target
farm workers, you know, if they're working in fear and the strawberry farmer
is losing a huge part of his workforce, how do you get word
out other than through the Administration itself saying, look, you're
okay? That's a very good question.
And to be honest, all the back and forth with
this Administration about we are going to target, we're not going to target, we are
going to target, maybe we will target, you know, has
caused a lot of confusion and a lot of consternation. And
so that has made things more difficult than it
than they really needed to be a little more clarity about
what their policy is and what the direction is they're going in could
have been very helpful. Now, in a lot of
ways, the genie is kind of out of the bottle and it's going to be
very difficult to put it back and it's going to be difficult to convince people
that they can. Well, for example, one of the things they're talking about trying to
do is to have farmers
this Administration is talking about trying to do is to have farmers be
able to vouch for the long term work for me
on my farm and that employees would be able to
exit the country and touch back. The idea being they go back to where they
came from and then they can re enter the United States legally.
In theory, that sounds great. The problem is that most of these people have been
here for 20 and 30 years and so they have no home to
go back to. And with all that's happened in the last
six months, I'm not sure that you would have a great many people who
would be willing to trust that that program will actually work the way
that it's being sold to them. So I think you might have difficulty
getting people to participate in that program. Yeah. And
there's examples I think they could go to to justify some of that.
Bryan, great conversation. Could do it all day long. Keep
sending those vegetables, those nuts, everything you raise
to the middle of this country as well. Thank you, Bryan. Thank
you. And now I'm going to turn it over to Heidi and Sonia
Parras Konrad. They'll take it away. Heidi?
We've been getting a lot of questions about the effects of the
Administration's immigration policies on what's
happening in rural America. Who's out there? What are the status
of so many of the folks who are providing assistance
in meatpacking plants or working picking vegetables
or working in the local hotel. And we all know that there is an
acute labor shortage many times in rural America.
We wanted to invite an expert and that's exactly what we did.
So Sonia Parras Konrad, she's an
activist, attorney and educator on legal remedies for immigration,
survivors of gender violence and labor trafficking. She's founded
numerous nonprofit organizations and she has been
providing immigration technical assistance to frontline
advocates and attorneys. Never more than
now has that assistance been needed. Sonia,
thank you so much for joining us on the Hot Dish and thank you so
much for the work that you're doing. I think to start out, if you could
just give us a sense of the continuum because you didn't start this
work with this Administration. You've been working in this area a long time.
What changes have you seen both in terms of
process and the work that you do, but also so the
attitudes of your clients and the concerns of your clients?
Well, thank you so much for having me. It is my pleasure to share
information with you in this very important topic that
affects not only us as community, but also, you
know, anyone that we welcome into our
communities. Obviously, I've been doing this work for almost
29 years. And the difference
between doing this work with other many Administration, including
the prior Administration, is that we had a sense of
trust, even though we are in opposite sides, for
instance, with the Office of Chief Counsel
or with ICE. We knew that they were
tasked with doing a job following a series of rules that
everybody was familiar with. The way that we're practicing
today is very, is
terrifying because nobody knows what the rules are going to
be tomorrow. So we are preparing for what we know today. But
tomorrow we have yet another regulation, another change in
policy. The way that
my colleagues, because we see each other in the community,
ICE agents and US officers and judges
are now working in silent
and losing our communications and
gatherings where we, we used to exchange what problems are we
facing and how we can solve this together to provide
fair services or do our jobs following the
rules. That's no longer here. We are
in very
uneasy waters and
not in a trusting way working
against each other. Very divisive, very
isolated. Yes. Right. So if you can
just help me kind of understand your clients, because most
people say, oh, all of these people are alike. They all have the
same status. And you work a lot with refugees. You work a lot
with people who, you know, by, prior to this Administration, were
in the country as we saw it legally or were given some
status that enabled them to work. But a lot of that
now has been turned upside down because the
Administration has revoked a lot of those
permissions. And so could you just kind of start from. These are the
kind of range of legal statuses that you
deal with. Okay. So my expertise,
my dedication is on humanitarian
immigration relief. So I work a lot with children.
We have all these juvenile visas for kids that are
unaccompanied and came alone into this country.
I do U-visas for victims of human for
victims of certain crimes of violence. I do
T-visas for trafficking survivors. I also do
family, family petitions. And I work a lot with people
that have mixed immigration relief. So they may have
TPS because they are from Venezuela.
Can we get, TPS is Temporary Protected Status, right?
This is an area that's rife with acronyms that I know a lot of our
listeners really want to be educated because we're told
that all of these people are in the country illegally, that simply crossing over the
border, but that's not true a lot of them have been given
status under federal law. A lot of them
have paperwork to come to this country before they ever cross the border.
Very good point. So, for instance, we had a group, we have
thousands of people that were told, wait for your turn.
Go to this app, apply to enter
legally with something called CBP One. We'll parole
you into the country. You will have an Employment Authorization for
a year. Then you can apply for Asylum or for whatever
protections. So that program has been
suspended and canceled, and all these people are trapped
now in the country with huge uncertainty
and in fear of obviously
getting arrested and deported. So this is just one program.
Another program was the Family Reunification for
Venezuelans or for Cubans. So people apply from their
countries of origin to legally enter the country,
reunite with their family members, and that has been canceled and
suspended. As you know, or you may not know this,
but
925,000
people have lost their temporary protected
status as of right now since the Trump
Administration canceled about nine TPS
programs. Venezuelans, 472,000
Venezuelans have no status now.
Haiti, 348,000 and so forth.
So we have people that came in legally,
that had certain rules applied, that abide by the rules, that
are now up in the air concerned
for their livelihood, their safety, and potential
swiftly removal from this country. Okay, well, I want
to make the point that you work in Des Moines, you live in
Iowa, which obviously we know that there
is a lot of immigrant workers, whether
they're undocumented, came across the border, did not
have any kind of protected status when they did, or whether they had protected
status. And that was a legal difference prior to this
Administration. So what are you hearing from
employers? Are you getting calls from Chambers of Commerce
employers saying, what can you do to help the workers
who work in the meatpacking plant or the workers who
basically are helping custom combine? Well, so there
is a huge disconnect between the demand and the needs of the
rural community and the policies,
policies that not only don't respond to the needs and
the reality of our situation in
rural areas, but that are going to make it even harder.
If it was difficult before now, it's going to be very,
very hard and scary. We have meat
packing plants, we have the agricultural
folks, we have mom and pop shops,
farmers that have to milk their cows. And this is a
fact and everybody knows it. They rely on
immigrants to do the job. And we're talking about thousands.
For instance, did you know that we bring about
6,000, 6,000 agricultural
workers just in Iowa to pick up our crops, and that's
every year. So imagine that these are people that legally come into the country
through this agricultural worker program. They
have their H-2A visas that is now
slowing down and harder to get. While the
crops don't understand about politics. Our
chickens either, and the cows, poor, poor cows, they
need to be milked. There is a huge
disconnect between the policies that are getting
harder under these Administrations and the reality of the community
and the people that need. That need the help. I
think the other argument that's been presented are
the people who they are moving against are the worst of the worst. They're
criminals. They've done violent crimes, that if they're
hardworking, they have nothing to fear from
immigration officials. What's been your experience in
Iowa, all the people you represent in deportation hearings,
they're all hardened criminals. Are they? Well, I just said
that my forte is humanitarian relief.
So I work with survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault,
children. We just had a swiftly removal of
a kid that had
a Juvenile visa.
And I do have a policy within my
contracts because I may have a conflict of interest. I only
represent survivors and people that are not violent or
don't have bad records. A lot of my clients are in
deportation proceedings, and a lot of my clients are going through the
process. But also a lot of the rules
are changing quickly, and this is going to affect
everyone, regardless of your criminal background or your
victimization history. You want to tell
us about the latest rule change as it relates to bond?
Yes. So one of the strengths of
our Constitutional rights, obviously is due process and
your right to go in front of a judge and request bond
to be outside, reunited with
your family members and able to defend your case
in front of a judge. So this is one of the pillars
of our legal system and our constitution.
And so if we talk about ever changing rules,
recently on July 8, we were
presented with a memorandum that is going
to change the interpretation of
that due process right and rights to bond, making
it very, very hard for people to actually
post bond and go outside of jail
and continue with their immigration defense under the
current Administration and the current laws. So
how many of your clients are saying, I'm done. I don't see that
I'm going to be able to fight this. Let's just figure out some
way. You know, the Administration rolled out a voluntary
deportation exit program. How many
of your clients have actually taken the Administration up on those? Well,
I just had one. But it was
extremely hard for my client to actually apply for the program.
So hard that she said, I'm done, and up in the plane and
left. This is a client that will have a path to
legally return within 10 years of departing.
So because she is so exhausted
and anxious about every day waking up and not
knowing if this will be baby, she is going to be
arrested and separated from her loved ones. She has chosen
the imaginable, which is to actually
self deport and leave and leave back to a country
where she has no ties anymore because she has been in the
US for a long time and only most of her
family is here in the States and has no way
of, you know, just, just providing herself with
the basics. But this is how desperate and terrifying
people are. We are, our
calls right now are
not anymore about how is my case going,
but am I going to be arrested and what should I do
if I get arrested and what's going to happen to my children if I get
arrested. So these are frantic calls nonstop
into my office and every attorney's office.
So again, the narrative has
shift from how is my
case going? And collaborating with the progress of the case
to, 'Should I take my children to
the hospital, should I take my kid to school, can I
go to church?' Because we no longer have sanctuary
or protected areas. This is
how much in church, in hospitals, in schools,
anywhere. Anywhere you're no longer protected, safe.
And these places are in jeopardy. Children, pregnant
mothers, people in need, emergency situations.
Every policy
has a trickle effect and a lot of not
sure if intended or unintended consequences. Yeah,
I mean, the sense
of intimidation, like I'm exhausted, I'm tired,
or they may deport me to a country I don't have any
relationship to. So how is that going to work? Or I may be
sitting in alligator Alcatraz, which
by all reports seems fairly
primitive and dangerous. And I'm going to start out,
Sonia, with just my story because I want you to respond to this.
So all of this is so complicated and it really, you know when people
say, just want to take broad brushstrokes and say,
these are the people you want to say. Every story is different. And
you know that, Sonia. Every person's experience in this country has been
different. But here's an example of, of unintended
consequences. We have a dad who's in the country. He's undocumented,
but he's working, getting health insurance from his
work. His wife is pregnant. She has three, she has
triplets who are all in distress. She's in the NICU
in a hospital probably 50 miles away
from where mom and dad live because this is rural America
and you aren't going to get knee neonatal treatment in a rural
hospital. And he's driving to go see her every
night and he gets stopped by ICE agents and he now
is apprehended and on his way for deportation.
So everybody who says, oh, you know, these people are costing the
government. Well, what is going to cost the government more than her
not qualifying? I mean, she's an American citizen, she qualifies for
Medicaid, she no longer has the support of her husband
financially or emotionally. He's being deported. And
now the government is going to pay the cost of
those children's health care. So I
know that you have hundreds of stories like this of
hard working people, but when you look at
taking away all due process and not having a
judge or someone adjudicate circumstances,
you get a lot of unintended consequences, it seems to me. And
so how do we better educate the public?
Sonia, on number one, who's
being hurt, whether it's employers and the
economy, whether it is spouses who are
American citizens, whether it's children who have
either been deported with their mother or are left
behind by a parent who was apprehended.
How do we tell those stories in a more comprehensive
way? Well, obviously
I see a lot of US
citizens that reach out to me when
they are living or going through situations like this and
they're witnesses to the atrocity and the impact of the
policies. So these are people that regardless of
their politics and their party
alliances, all of a sudden see themselves
connected to a human being.
It's no longer a case about immigration
policies. 'Deport them all,' 'criminals out,' it's that they
are all of a sudden inside of this wave
of terror and desperation finding out
that our system doesn't work. These are
real examples of people that become allies
and become voices for
those who are in the shadows. So talking to
your representatives, writing to the
newspaper, voicing what you're experiencing and
seeing in your neighbors, in the
friends of your children, in your workplace,
I think it's very important. We are all witnesses
and we cannot be silent.
You know, I think that is such an important
point. We are all witnesses at this point in time. And
you know, no one, when you look at polling and you look at public
opinion, we've got real life stories and you're seeing,
you know, broad criticism, you know, which has been driven, I
think by some of the stories that have been told. And so that's why it's
so important that, yes, there's legal process, but that legal process
is changing all the time, as you said. And it's
getting narrower and narrower and harder and harder for you to help your clients.
And if there isn't a political change of heart, and
we won't see that in the Administration, I don't think. But if it's not
political change of heart, we need to have a public
change of heart or at least education. So what is any of
your groups doing to kind of educate the American
public about your clients and their current
situation related to, to deportations
and actions that are being taken
by the federal government? To be honest, not
enough. And it's because we have our head in the
hole, because we are fighting so hard and
so busy trying to, first of all, open
our computers and say, what changed today and how many
of our community members is going to be affected by this?
And kind of like trading water every single day
that we're losing the momentum of including educating
and talking to people that can be, again, a voice
of change and witnesses to what is happening right
now, even though we are
trading water and exhausted. And
when I say we, I mean the immigration bar. We're only.
Let me give you an example. In Iowa, we're just like barely 40 immigration
attorneys in the entire state of Iowa.
Imagine the lack of capacity to respond
to the major
injection of funding to get ICE
agents going into communities and terrorizing
communities and arresting people. We
are often talking in churches.
Which is a great place to talk about what are the issues
that are affecting their communities and how they can be helpful
to their communities. We are doing
TikToks, which is very fashionable. We're doing things
like this. You know, thank you so much, you know, from my heart, you know,
for this opportunity to talk about these issues. We're
writing, we're training the Iowa bar. Recently, we put on
a panel of the 40 immigration
attorneys to educate our own peers on how is
this affecting you as a criminal lawyer, as a family
lawyer, as a judge, so we can all understand
how, again, how difficult
immigration is and how war is getting and
impacting all of us at different levels and capacities.
There's a bunch of people listening to this who want to say, what can we
do to help? I mean, they're not lawyers. They may just be people who
care desperately about fulfilling the obligations under
the Constitution. They may be people who just feel like
this is a humanitarian crisis, that they can't walk away from. So
this is your chance to ask them for something. So have
at it. Well, so remember that
behind every case in the papers,
every statistics, you know, every
roundup raid, there is a human life. And it could
be your neighbor, it can be your nanny, it can be that person that
is taking care of mom and dad that have
Alzheimer's or that is cleaning your house. So
don't see statistics, see human lives.
It's very easy to lose side of the people at the
center again. The father that is picking up those
tomatoes, the people that
pick up your children from school, etc. So immigration
law is an abstract. It's about real
hopes, fears, sacrifices. Our
ancestors once were there as well.
Two, our laws can bend towards
justice too. It's not just black or white.
Rules are shifting, they're changing overnight.
But our history shows that when community
gets together and we
rise our voices, farmers, faith groups,
schools, of course, attorneys,
people working [from] their kitchen tables, they can bend policy
toward fairness. Even police officers that
are listening today to us have that
capacity to say, okay, I need to make sure that the laws
are followed, but do I really need to tell this person because I
think he may be an undocumented person. Do I really have to do
that? And who am I hurting or helping at the end? So every
public comment that we do, every letter that
we can send to a Congress party person, every
lawyer who takes a pro bono case, and yes, every
volunteer that wants to help us lawyers to take more pro bono cases,
chips away that injustice and reminds
policymakers that they're just not numbers. We gotta
get away from numbers and policies and all
criminals rhetoric. But look at
families woven into our own towns, our own communities.
And finally, because I can keep on talking, we all
have a role to play, right? You don't need to have a law
degree to make a difference. And I would just
say when you see something on social media where a child
who with cancer has been deported, share it with your network
and say, this isn't what I expected. I expected that people
who commit violent crimes would be deported, not children
with cancer. And so I think share that
with your federal, especially your federal
elected officials, whether that's a Congressman or whether that's your
two Senators, whoever that is. And so if
you're interested in this work, donate to people who are providing this
pro bono service and encourage other lawyers that you know, or
if you are a lawyer, encouraged to maybe do some pro bono
work in this, in this space, because it is, it
is an all hands on deck humanitarian crisis.
And you know, none of us are defending anyone who is a violent criminal
who came into this country to create mayhem and
commit crimes. No one. No one is there. The real challenge
here is that you can't say it's somebody else's job.
Yeah, it's all of our jobs. Absolutely. Yeah. We need
to stay together. Whether you're a lawyer, farmer, healthcare
worker, teacher, everyday citizen, I think that at
the end, defending human rights, which is what this is about,
follow the rules, defend human rights in
this ever changing legal landscape is not a
solo act, but it's a community effort.
Thanks so much, Sonia. I think hearing firsthand how
people are helping immigrants feel safer in their communities
is incredibly heartwarming, but that's certainly something
they need right now. We hope you learned something about the horrendous
consequences the Trump Administration policies have had
on rural immigrants and communities. And if there's something
you think we need to talk about, please let us know. Email us your
thoughts. Our email address is
podcast@onecountryproject.org. That's
podcast@onecountryproject.org. And check us
out on Bluesky and Substack. Thank you for joining
us.
Thank
you for joining us today on the Hot Dish, which is brought to you by
the One Country Project, making sure the voices of the rest of us are
heard in Washington. Learn more
at onecountryproject.org. We'll be back in two weeks
with more Hot Dish, comfort food for rural America.