Federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, swarmed Sun Valley Group’s Arcata floral farms in 2008. | Photo by Bob Doran, courtesy the North Coast Journal.

Maria had been working at Sun Valley Group for nearly 15 years when, on the morning of September 3, 2008, special agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the company’s Arcata headquarters and arrested 23 suspected “illegal aliens.” She was one of them.

The commotion started around 10:30 a.m., Maria recalled. Agents had surrounded the property in the Arcata Bottoms, blocking the only exits in the building where Maria worked as a flower cutter. As a helicopter thumped overhead, Maria saw a friend of hers sitting handcuffed on the floor, getting yelled at by ICE agents. A manager approached Maria and told her she needed to leave because her name was on the list of people ICE was looking for, she said, but she stayed where she was.

“I told people to find a place to hide, to try to get away, but I didn’t hide,” Maria said. She was arrested and taken to the Coast Guard base at the Humboldt County Airport, where agents had set up a temporary processing center with tables, computers and paperwork. 

“After an hour, other coworkers came in,” Maria said. “They were all handcuffed, some with dirt on them because they had hidden. Others were shaking because they had been [hiding] in coolers.”

She was held for more than four hours, and at one point she signed a piece of paper that ICE agents presented to her. To this day she’s not sure what exactly she signed. The paperwork was in English, and no one offered to translate it for her. She believed that signing the paper entitled her to appear before a judge rather than being deported immediately.

“I signed, but only because I wanted to see a judge — because they never told us what our rights were, that we had the right to be silent or any of our rights,” Maria said.

Nearly eight years later, Maria still lives here in Humboldt County, as do six of the other Sun Valley employees arrested that day. With their deportation orders languishing in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the “Sun Valley Seven,” as they’ve come to be called, exist in a sort of legal purgatory — unsure whether they’ll be allowed to stay in the United States or, like the husband of one of the seven, suddenly handcuffed, whisked away and shipped back to a country they no longer consider home.

Over the next several weeks the Outpost will look at the lives of these seven people, from their poverty-stricken roots in Mexico through their perilous journeys north to Humboldt County, where they’ve been living, working and raising families.

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When Maria came in to the Outpost office she was carrying a folder with her own paperwork, including her Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) form and a W-2 tax statement to prove that even though she’s not a legal resident she does pay taxes. (Because of her legal status, however, she asked not to be identified by her real name. She spoke to the Outpost via a translator.)

Maria came to the United States in January 1994, at the age of 24. The second of eight children, she’d grown up poor, with her father struggling to support his large family on the equivalent of $15 a week. Ten years before immigrating, her mother had died due to complications from a miscarriage. 

“I decided to come here to try to help,” Maria said, “because sometimes we didn’t even have enough to eat.”

She came to Humboldt County because two of her brothers were already living and working here. They wanted her to go to school, but she felt compelled to start earning money to send back home. After two weeks here she was hired, using a false social security number, to cut tulips at Sun Valley floral farm.

After more than a decade on the job, Maria was promoted to a salaried supervisor position. During busy seasons such as the lead-up to Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, she said, she’d work as much as 15 hours a day for 15 days in a row.

Sun Valley had already been dealing with ICE in the years and months before the 2008 raid. In 2006 about 300 employees were told to stay home to avoid an immigration visit, according to the North Coast Journal. In June 2008 Sun Valley received a letter from ICE identifying 283 employees suspected of using false identification and being in the country illegally. All 283 workers were let go the next day.

In an interview this week, Sun Valley CEO Lane DeVries said the company received no advance notice of the September 3 raid. Forty cars pulled onto the facility that morning, he said, and officers delivered a warrant for the arrest of about two dozen employees. In the process of the raid officers also scooped up any other employees they suspected of being undocumented.

Asked whether managers at the company may have advised some employees to hide from ICE, as Maria and others contend, DeVries said the very suggestion was “complete nonsense.” He was surprised to learn that former employees arrested that day are still dealing with the legal fallout. And he said the Sun Valley is now an e-verified employer through U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services.

“We have gone through hell getting here,” DeVries said. He insisted the company has never knowingly hired an ineligible worker.

In the aftermath of the raid, many of those who were arrested, including Maria, were allowed to return home. Fernando Paz, a community organizer with the nonprofit True North Organizing Network, has been helping the Sun Valley Seven (and others) since shortly after their arrests, and he said that since the day of the raid the government’s actions have been inconsistent and its reasoning opaque. Some of the arrestees have since been granted work permits while others have been deported, with no apparent rhyme or reason.

The Sun Valley Seven, meanwhile, have been granted stays on their deportation orders pending appeal. The legal grounds for appeal center on alleged violations of their constitutional rights. As with Maria, many workers weren’t advised of their rights; they were intimidated into signing documents they didn’t understand (including their own deportation orders, in some cases); and some were stopped and questioned only because of their appearance, Paz said. Their lawyers argue this is a clear example of racial profiling.

Maria and the rest of the Sun Valley Seven now have to check in regularly with immigration officials at the ICE field office in San Francisco. Maria has to travel to the city every three months to check in. Sometimes her brothers drive her down. Other times it’s a coworker. 

For a while she was traveling to San Francisco with her former Sun Valley coworker Omar, who lived with his wife in Eureka. Omar was the friend Maria had seen handcuffed on the floor on the day of the raid. But Omar has since been deported to Mexico, and Maria was with him when he was unexpectedly detained.

They’d gone into the ICE office just as they had many times before. Usually it was simply a matter of delivering some paperwork to an agent and waiting while the agent checked a computer to make sure everything’s squared away. On this particular day, however, agents told Omar they needed to speak with him. Maria stood up and tried to go with him to keep him company. “But an agent told me, ‘No, you stay.’ And they took him away,” she recalled.

After about half an hour of waiting an agent told Maria that Omar had been seized and would be deported the next day. His wife, another member of the Sun Valley Seven, had just given birth to their first child two months earlier. She still lives in Eureka with her now two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen. Omar’s deportation order remains under appeal in the Ninth Circuit Court, but he awaits a decision back in Mexico.

Maria doesn’t know why Omar was deported while she’s been allowed to stay, but the experience proved traumatic. She cried while recounting it, and she’s now scared every time she goes to the city to check in. She’s even scared in her own home. One day not long ago she looked out her living room window and saw that police officers had surrounded the house. As it turned out, they were targeting some drug-dealing neighbors, but Maria was terrified for the rest of the day. In fact, anxiety has become part of her daily life.

“I’ve been struggling a lot,” she said. “I didn’t believe that it would affect me so much psychologically.” She frequently relives both the raid at Sun Valley and Omar’s unexpected arrest. And with the toll on her mental health, she’s had trouble finding steady work. “It makes me sad,” she said. But she still works “odd jobs.”

Paz, the community organizer, said that the people who have been here for as long as Maria have weaved themselves into the fabric of our community. “And their lives have been altered in really significant ways because of the impositions of the immigration system,” he said. 

But aren’t we a nation of laws? Shouldn’t they have come here legally? Paz said it’s not that simple. “It was legal [in this country] to have slaves,” he said. “It was legal to beat your wife. Laws don’t reflect justice. And if you look at the fundamental beliefs that built this nation — that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — their crime is in pursuit of that. Right?”

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After her arrest Maria was hooked up with the services of a pro bono lawyer thanks to the work of the True North Organizing Network. But she figured that as an unmarried woman with no kids her chances of getting to stay in the U.S. were slim. She quickly enrolled in adult school, hoping to improve her English and maybe get her GED before getting deported.

But she wasn’t deported. Eventually she had to drop out of school to go back to work, in part to pay for a new lawyer. To date she’s spent about $11,000 on legal fees, “just to be left in peace,” she said. “In relative peace, because still we haven’t seen results.”

Maria has now lived in Humboldt County for 22 years, roughly half her life and almost the entirety of her adult life. And she loves it here. “I’m enchanted because of the nature, the environment,” she said. Sometimes, though, people here judge her and her family based on stereotypes. Mexican families tend to gather together and celebrate frequently, she said, whether it’s to drink coffee, watch a fight on TV or eat dinner together. An angry neighbor once assumed that with all the people coming and going, Maria’s house must be a drug den, and so the neighbor started a petition to have Maria’s family evicted.

Again she started crying. Some people, she said, “they constantly judge us for what other people do, but we’re not all the same. We work very hard to have what we have. Like I was showing you, we pay our taxes like any citizen from here. And in my personal case, I don’t receive any help; I don’t get MediCal, nothing. I’ve always paid my accounts, [including] my medical bills because I don’t have any insurance.”

Asked what she wants people in the community to know about her, Maria said it’s “that we have family, and the reason to stay here is to work for them, to have a better life. And that we don’t come here to take away anybody else’s job. Sometimes we do work that people here don’t want to do, and we accept whatever job we can get because we have the necessity.”

Congressman Jared Huffman has expressed support for Maria and the rest of the Sun Valley Seven.

“Our country is long overdue for immigration reform, and I hope that someday soon I will have the opportunity to vote on legislation for comprehensive immigration reform,” Huffman said in a statement to the Outpost. Our local congressman supported President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, DAPA and DACA, which were undermined by a recent 4-4 deadlock by the short-staffed Supreme Court. The legislation would have allowed up to 5 million immigrants to remain in the country. (On Monday, the Obama administration asked the court to rehear the case due to the deadlock.)

Regardless of the shifting legal ground, Huffman called for change and compassion in the country’s immigration policies. “I can only imagine the difficulties facing undocumented families living here, especially those facing separation from loved ones,” he said. “America can do better.”

“Finally,” he added, “I want to express my support for the individuals who are being deported as a result of the raid on Sun Valley Farms. Individuals who are law-abiding, hardworking members of the community for over ten years should not be deported.”

Maria has mixed emotions thinking back on the border crossings she and her brothers made more than two decades ago.

“I know that maybe we made an error in coming here without documents to work, but the necessity was so great,” she said. “Our families need to eat. And we left family behind.” Again, her tears started flowing down her cheeks and her voice caught in her throat. “I haven’t seen my father in years.” 

She regularly sends money to her dad and siblings who still live in Mexico. And she often thinks about the nieces and nephews she left behind, now married with kids of their own. “And that’s something I want the community to understand,” Maria said, “that we have fathers, brothers, sons and daughters, I think they would do the same if they didn’t have the ability to feed their family. I think they would go out and work, to risk their own life.”

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Note: This Friday starting at 7 p.m., Richard’s Goat Tavern and Tea Room in Arcata will be hosting a film screening event called “Stop the Deportation of the Sun Valley Seven!” The event is being organized by True North.

Note: This post has been corrected from a pervious version to reflect the proper timeline of events in Omar’s case.