When President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office on Monday, the U.S. Border Patrol is poised to play a central role in his promised immigration crackdown. On Thursday, Californians got a preview of the tensions likely to play out as undocumented migrants get rounded up in places that rely on their labor.
On one side, a Border Patrol chief posted a video on social media showcasing sweeps last week in California’s Central Valley. Named Operation Return to Sender, the effort involved dozens of arrests. “They think I’m hiding in the shadows, but I am the shadows,” a voice whispered during the video, echoing a popular Batman movie.
On the other side, United Farm Workers officials held a news briefing, describing the fears the operation had caused in immigrant communities. They suggested the arrests signaled that “rogue” law enforcement agents, inspired by Mr. Trump’s plans, could take matters into their own hands.
“This is part of a new political climate of people in some of these agencies feeling emboldened,” said Antonio De Loera-Brust, a spokesman for the organization, a labor union.
The Biden administration and the Trump transition team did not reply to messages seeking comment. U.S. Customs and Border Protection would not answer questions about the effort, saying broadly that agents conducted “targeted enforcement arrests of individuals involved in smuggling throughout our areas of operation as part of our efforts to dismantle transnational criminal organizations.”
Details about the sweeps have primarily come from the social media channels of Gregory K. Bovino, a Border Patrol chief in Southern California. In a series of posts, he called the three-day operation an “overwhelming success” that resulted in the arrests of 78 people, all of whom were in the country illegally and some with “serious criminal histories.”
The United Farm Workers and some farmers in the area suggested the sweeps were much wider.
“Agents were asking people in parking lots for their documents, and if they were in the country legally,” said Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Nisei Farmers League, which represents more than 500 growers and packers in the state. “They were then just taking them away in vans.”
What’s clear is that about 60 agents in marked and unmarked cars drove hundreds of miles from their headquarters near the border in Imperial, Calif., converging in and around Bakersfield, a vast agricultural area that relies on immigrant labor. The agents staked out a Home Depot, gas stations and other locations frequented by undocumented people.
The posts by Mr. Bovino, a near 30-year veteran of the agency who serves in a nonpolitical role in its El Centro sector, said the effort had yielded “two child sex predators” and other “aggravated felons,” including a Chinese citizen suspected of defrauding a U.S. dementia patient “to the tune of $70K.”
He called the sweeps a “targeted operation,” saying agents “go where the threat is.” In addition to the arrests, he said, agents seized marijuana and methamphetamine.
When a social media commenter noted on Jan. 10 that Mr. Bovino would be “extremely busy” in 10 days — the number of days until Mr. Trump’s inauguration — Mr. Bovino replied: “The El Centro Sector stands ready to take it to them. ”
In other posts, he said that unauthorized immigrants should simply get papers: “Undocumented means just that. I recommend returning to the country of origin, obtaining proper documents, and doing it the right way. If not, we will arrest.”
Mr. Trump has vowed to conduct mass deportations. Since his election, he has continued to use social media to share his views on the border, writing in late November that “thousands of people are pouring through Mexico and Canada, bringing Crime and Drugs at levels never seen before.”
Unlawful crossings have plunged in recent months, following new asylum restrictions introduced by the Biden administration and stepped-up enforcement by Mexico and other countries on the migrant route. Some 46,000 people crossed the border illegally in November, the lowest number during the Biden administration and lower than when Mr. Trump ended his term in 2020.
Thomas D. Homan, a former senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who has been appointed “border czar” by Mr. Trump, has said enforcement under the new administration would target immigrants with outstanding deportation orders and criminal records, but has left open the possibility that others would be arrested during roundups.
Bakersfield straddles State Route 99, a heavily trafficked highway for trucks transporting the bounty harvested in the Central Valley, California’s agricultural heartland. But it is also a key corridor for smuggling illicit substances.
Shootouts have become a feature of life there, as gangs battle for control over lucrative drug sales. Working-class neighborhoods are accustomed to law enforcement conducting operations to track down and arrest those involved in the drug trade.
Chris Magnus, who served as Customs and Border Protection commissioner for the first part of the Biden administration, said unauthorized immigrants who had committed serious crimes should be apprehended.
“However, mass roundups of day laborers and field workers through profiling do not improve public safety and waste law enforcement resources,” Mr. Magnus said. “These roundups create widespread distrust of law enforcement and discourage many community members from reporting crimes as victims or witnesses.”
Indeed, arrests of random people who had been interrogated about their immigration status generated panic in Bakersfield and surrounding Kern County.
Between 30 and 40 percent of the labor force failed to report to the fields on the days after the raids, Mr. Cunha of the Nisei Farmers League said.
Near Bakersfield, Pete Belluomini, a citrus farmer, said that about two-thirds of his harvesting crew did not show up for two or three days. “This wasn’t the first time stuff like this has happened, but in this political climate, it was a bigger splash,” he said.
It is an open secret that most people who harvest America’s food are unauthorized immigrants, mainly from Mexico and Central America, many of them decades-long residents of the United States. Often the parents of American-born children, they have lived for years with the cloud of deportation hanging over them.
Alejandra and her partner, Pedro, undocumented immigrants from Mexico, had just started picking lemons on the first morning of the sweeps, Jan. 7, when their supervisor warned them that “la migra” — slang for the Border Patrol — was in the area.
They soon learned that one of their co-workers had been arrested, and most people decided to remain in the field until after dark, she said. The couple returned to Bakersfield before sundown to pick up their 5-year-old son at day care.
“Our biggest fear as parents is, what will be of our children if we are deported?” said Alejandra, 38, who did not share her or her partner’s surname out of concern for their safety. With workers feeling anxious during the week of the sweeps, she said, “the fields were almost empty.”
To feel more empowered, Alejandra said, she attended three information sessions held by community advocates to learn about her rights.
“I am nervous, I am afraid,” she said. “We don’t know what Trump has in store for us.”
