UFW

“I’ll join the advocacy groups. I’ll even join the UFW.”

“In our perspective, it was definitely meant to terrorize the community, and especially the Latino and farmworker community,” Sofia Corona, a directing attorney with the UFW Foundation in Bakersfield, said of the operation.

Rather than “targeted” enforcement, the Border Patrol conducted “random stops of vehicles exclusively founded on racial profiling of individuals,” Ambar Tovar, director of legal services for the UFW Foundation, told me.

“It’s had a very chilling effect on the whole community,” said Antonio De Loera-Brust, a spokesman for the UFW.

Two UFW members were pressured into signing a form attesting to their voluntary departure from the U.S., then shipped over the border from El Centro to Mexicali, De Loera-Brust says.