Community members march through Eureka in support of migrant workers and the Sun Valley Seven. Screenshot from a Whitehorse Productions YouTube video.

Note: This is the fourth in a series of stories about seven people fighting to remain in this country, and this county, eight years after a federal immigration raid at Sun Valley Group’s Arcata floral farm.

PREVIOUSLY:

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Ellie was sexually assaulted in a car shortly after arriving in California from Mexico. She’ll never forget the specific shade of that car’s red paint. 

The daughter of a construction worker and a housewife, Ellie had fled a life of poverty in Oaxaca. Growing up she got one new pair of shoes per year and she’d wear them until they fell apart. When they tore along the zipper, Ellie had to figure out ways to keep them strapped together, hoping they’d hold out until it was time for a new pair. 

She was 19 when she came north, passing through San Luis Rio Colorado and walking across the border near the twin towns of Mexicali and Calexico. Hoping for a better future and a chance to send money to her struggling parents, Ellie was on her way to meet her siblings and their spouses here in Humboldt County.

In a town near the border she met the man who would assault her. He made money by transporting immigrants, and he had agreed to drive Ellie to Los Angeles. In the home where she met him there was a 12-year-old boy who also needed a ride to L.A., where his parents were waiting for him.

“But when he saw that I was coming by myself he didn’t want to bring the boy,” Ellie told the Outpost in a recent interview. This was the first red flag, but Ellie didn’t have any other options. “The man’s wife forced him to bring the child,” she said.

The man sat Ellie in the front seat, the boy in the back. At a rest stop the man watched them closely, making sure they didn’t try to run away. 

“When we got back to the car the man started speeding, saying we were being followed by police, but I didn’t see anybody,” Ellie said. “It was a lie.”

Speeding down the road, the man started touching Ellie’s leg. Eventually they got to the motel where they’d planned to spend the night, but instead of going inside the man told Ellie and the boy they had to lay down to avoid being seen by the police. 

“And the man lay on top of me, and he started touching me,” Ellie said. After a while she faked nausea and said she wanted to throw up. The man let her go. “I was crying,” she said. “I was very scared.”

When they got into the motel room Ellie saw two beds. She quickly got into one with the boy, forcing the man to take the other one alone. Early the next morning she was turned over to her brother in L.A. 

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Ellie, who is now the mother of a three-year-old boy, had been working as a flower cutter at Sun Valley Group’s Arcata floral farm for about six months when the place was raided by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Though she wasn’t one of the workers ICE was looking for, she, like a number of other employees, was in the country illegally. So with the place swarming with armed agents she chose to hide with some coworkers in an outdoor area where they washed out flower buckets.

A helicopter circled over the sprawling complex in the Arcata Bottoms, and inevitably the agents found them.

“They told us to come out slowly with our hands up, and that if we didn’t come out they were going to release the dogs,” Ellie said. When she and her coworkers emerged from their hiding place, she said, they were staring down the rifle barrels of a group of ICE agents.

The agents bound the workers’ hands behind their backs with plastic zip-ties. One confiscated an official identification card Ellie had obtained from a Mexican consulate. She remembers the officers mocking her. “They were laughing at us,” Ellie recalled. “They said that they weren’t coming for me but I was there at the wrong time.”

Like the other members of the Sun Valley Seven, Ellie received deportation orders as a result of her arrest that day. Her case is currently under review in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Ellie’s attorneys have argued, in part, that the evidence against her should be suppressed because it was obtained in violation of her civil rights. In short they say she was targeted because of racial profiling.

Another former Sun Valley employee told the Outpost on condition of anonymity about what she saw as a double standard on the day of the raid, Sept. 3, 2008. According to her account, two Dutch employees of the company — tall, blond, blue eyes — were allowed to walk straight out the exits, though they were in the country illegally, having overstayed their visas. Meanwhile, she said, employees with brown skin were stopped by ICE agents and asked for IDs, regardless of whether or not they were on the agency’s list of suspected illegal workers. “They said they don’t use racial profiling, but I think they did,” the woman said.

Attorneys also argue that ICE agents violated their clients’ civil rights after taking them for processing at the McKinleyville Coast Guard station. Like others, Ellie remembers being asked to sign paperwork that was only available in English, which she couldn’t read. 

“I didn’t understand anything about them because I’d only been here a little while, and they made us sign them,” she said.

The arrestees were fingerprinted and photographed. Ellie remembers seeing a coworkers hands swollen and discolored because the zip-ties around his wrists were so tight. At one point Ellie asked for her consular ID back but was denied. The agents told her it was fake, though it wasn’t, she said.

In our interview, held at a Eureka Starbucks, Ellie pulled out her new consular ID card. Nearly eight years after the raid Ellie is now 27. She wore a pensive expression and a silver hoop through her pierced lower lip. While her economic situation is better here than it would be in Mexico, she said it’s still hard to support her son.

“In Mexico,” she said, “I worked from 8 in the morning until 6 in the [evening], and in a week I would earn less than $100. Now I’m earning more and I can help my family. And for my son I can offer him a better life here. … I have more time to be with him. In Mexico I’d be working all day [and] wouldn’t be able to buy him a toy.”

Nevertheless, she still struggles financially. Fernando Paz, a community organizer with the nonprofit True North Organizing Network, noted that numerous studies have shown that it’s difficult if not impossible to survive on minimum wage. And unlike other low-income workers, undocumented immigrants don’t have access to food stamps or other government subsidies. 

Asked what she wants people in this community to understand Ellie responded, “That we’re not here to take away anything; that we’re just here to work, just like everyone else — white folks, black folks, people from all the races. We pay our taxes; we contribute to this country. We want to have a better life, which is something that in Mexico we cannot have.”

From the sexual assault upon her arrival to facing down the loaded rifles of immigration agents, Ellie has had some traumatic experiences in the United States, and she worries about the effects on her son. The letter with her deportation order didn’t arrive until after he was born, and she remembers coming home and crying after work. 

“And he would ask, ‘What’s wrong mom?’ And I would say, ‘I’m scared.’ I don’t know if that affected my son. He would tell everyone, ‘My mom is crying because she’s afraid that they’re going to take her.’”

Back in May, True North organized a community march through Eureka to show solidarity with migrant workers worldwide and to support the repeal of the Sun Valley Seven’s deportation orders. At the event Ellie heard her son tell others that he too was afraid his mom would be taken away, and he cried after saying it. 

Marchers that day chanted, “We are all united,” and that made her son feel better. But Ellie still worries about him. And she worries about her own future. 

“It makes me sad when he tells me that he’s afraid they’ll take me out of here, and it makes him cry very hard, [the idea] that he’s not going to have his mom.”