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.

PREVIOUSLY: Maria: The Deportation Trials of the Sun Valley Seven, Part One

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When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided the Sun Valley Group’s Arcata headquarters on the morning of Sept. 3, 2008, they wound up arresting 23 employees suspected of being in the country illegally.

Isabel was not among them. A 25-year-old mother of two at the time, she was at home in Eureka with her kids and her sister-in-law, Andrea. Neither Isabel nor Andrea was employed by the company, but hours after the raid at Sun Valley, ICE agents swarmed their house, rifles drawn, demanding entry. Isabel’s children were terrified.

The agents were searching for Isabel’s husband/Andrea’s brother, Javier, a Mexican immigrant and Sun Valley employee who had avoided arrest during the raid by hiding, along with four coworkers, in the small, frigid space between a cooler and the ceiling. 

Isabel had formerly worked at Sun Valley — it’s where she met Javier — and she knew that ICE had been investigating the company. Earlier in the year Sun Valley laid off nearly 300 workers suspected of being in the country illegally. On the day of the raid she got a call from a friend telling her that ICE agents had actually shown up at the flower farm to arrest people. Knowing her husband was undocumented, Isabel was scared.

“The first hours I didn’t know what to do, who to call,” she said in a recent interview. “I was nervous and sad, thinking [about] what happens if they get him.”

Around 3 p.m. she saw Javier’s car pulling up outside. He came in, told Isabel and Andrea about his frightening experience and then went to lie down. A few minutes later, as Isabel was on the phone with a cousin, she looked out the window and saw people in black shirts, the word “Police” written across the back, surrounding her house. 

Andrea saw them, too — 15 or 20 officers holding weapons. Javier had emerged from the bedroom. Everyone was scared.

“We hid in the bathtub with the kids,” Andrea said. The ICE agents pounded on the door.

Isabel had learned from TV shows that if police don’t have a warrant they can’t enter a home.

“When they started knocking they didn’t say, ‘This is ICE; we have a warrant for this person,’” Isabel recalled. “They just said ‘This is the police.’ We just thought they would leave.”

They didn’t. 

“We started hearing they were hitting the door,” Isabel said. “Seconds later they opened the bathroom [door]. They had guns in their hands. They said we had to get out.” The agents sat each family member down on the sofa. Javier asked to see a warrant, but the agents just mocked him, saying, “‘Oh, now you want to see a warrant,’” Isabel said.

Javier and Isabel’s daughter was 5 at the time; their son was 2. Their daughter was so traumatized by the incident that for as long as the family lived in that house she never wanted to go into the bathroom by herself. 

“We asked them to put their guns down for the children’s safety,” Andrea said. “They did.”

The agents separated the family members and searched the house thoroughly, she added. At one point they told Javier that if he could produce a valid social security number and a work permit, they would leave. Since he could not, they put him in handcuffs and took him to the Coast Guard station in McKinleyville, where ICE agents had brought the rest of the Sun Valley employees they’d arrested that day.

“I thought he wasn’t coming back; that was the first thing I was thinking,” Isabel said. But Javier was released a couple hours later. 

It’s been nearly eight years since that day. In the interim, Javier managed to get a work permit and return to Sun Valley, where he continues to work to this day. Andrea and Isabel haven’t been so lucky. During the arrest of Javier, ICE agents learned that his wife and sister were also undocumented, and the two women have been fighting a legal battle ever since then to keep from being deported. (Because of their legal battles, the women asked to remain anonymous. Andrea and Isabel are pseudonyms.)

Fernando Paz, a community organizer with the nonprofit True North Organizing Network, has been helping them and five others, known as the Sun Valley Seven, navigate the legal process. At the time of the Sun Valley raid Paz was part of a group called La Afi (short for “afinidad,” meaning affinity), which offered advice and legal triage to the arrestees. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center helped line up pro bono legal representation through the Latham & Watkins firm for several years, but eventually the arrestees had to start paying their own legal fees.

Paz said there’s a frustrating lack of clarity and consistency from ICE regarding the deportation process. It’s unclear why some people, including Javier, have been allowed to stay while others, such as Andrea and Isabel, have received deportation orders.

“We still don’t know if they had a warrant,” Paz said of the officers who stormed the house. And besides, he said, the agents weren’t even looking for Andrea and Isabel.

This past May, Jeremiah Johnson, a San Francisco attorney who worked for Andrea and Isabel until leaving private practice last month, filed petitions for review on their behalf in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He argued that the evidence against them was obtained illegally and should therefore be suppressed. He also filed a motion to stay their deportation orders, pending the outcome of the Ninth Circuit appeal. That motion was recently granted.

Johnson tells clients it can take two to three years for the overburdened immigration courts to reach a decision on such cases. 

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Born in the central Mexican city of Guanajuato, Isabel first came to the United States at age 5 (coincidentally the same age as her daughter on the day of the Sun Valley raid). Her parents brought her to northern California, where they split their time between family in Willits and along the Smith River in Del Norte County. Her dad was a violent alcoholic and her mom was chronically depressed. 

Eventually they split up, and Isabel returned to Mexico with her mom and sisters. Her mom worked for several years, trying to support the family, and eventually remarried. Isabel didn’t care for her new stepdad.

“I was a rebel teenager,” she said. She spent a lot of time arguing with her mom and stepfather. “It was very, very hard.”

Isabel came to the Outpost office in sweats and tennis shoes, her three children in tow, and spoke in fluent, lightly accented English for nearly an hour. 

With her family suffering from dysfunction and oppressive poverty, headstrong Isabel was ready to leave Mexico for good by the time she was 16. Her dad had been working as a migrant laborer, alternately picking strawberries in Bakersfield and apples in Washington. But he’d recently moved to Eureka, and according to grandparents and uncles he’d changed. So Isabel decided to come back to the United States. This time a human trafficker, or “coyote,” drove her and about 20 others across the border in the back of a truck.

“I was 16 [so] I didn’t really measure the danger,” she said. “I didn’t think that something could happen to me.” It wasn’t until she was older that she really considered the risks. She’d heard the stories about women and girls being coerced into having sex, or about immigrants dying on the border-crossing journey.

But she arrived safely, moved in with a friend and enrolled at Eureka High School. A year later she dropped out and got a job at Sun Valley.  She’d been on the job  for about a year when she met a handsome coworker, Javier. They quickly became a couple, and soon thereafter Javier told Isabel that he wanted to visit family in Mexico. Isabel agreed, reluctantly. Now older and wiser, she was nervous about crossing the border yet again.

“The third time I felt, really, more danger,” Isabel said. “It was a lot harder, a lot scarier. We found bones on the desert. … But nothing happened to us, thank God.”

They returned to Eureka in February of 2003, and 10 months later their daughter was born. Isabel worked in housekeeping for a while but soon stopped to raise the children. When Javier got arrested, Isabel thought she might have to raise them alone, so in 2008 she finished her high school education, improved her English-speaking skills and became certified as a receptionist.

Like Isabel, Andrea came to the U.S. in search of a better future. Born and raised in Santiago de Querétaro, north of Mexico City, Andrea felt that her prospects were bleak. “In general it was a very beautiful place, growing up, but no longer,” she said. “There’s a lot of violence, a lot of drugs.” While there she worked as a store clerk in a pharmacy, but she was never able to get ahead.

“In Mexico you had to work six days, from very early sometimes until 10, 11, 12 at night,” she said. “And you work a lot and you never have enough money. When you buy medicine you don’t have enough for food; when you buy food you don’t have enough for medicine.” Andrea suffers from lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease, and she couldn’t keep up with the costs of medication and doctor visits.

“Here, I work like a half day and I can pay for my medicine. I can buy my clothes and I have enough for food. I can own a car. In Mexico I never had enough to buy a car.”

Now 37, with long hair and a round face, Andrea spoke to the Outpost through an interpreter at a Eureka Starbucks. She and Javier came to the United States more than a decade ago. They’d been in Humboldt County for two or three years when the 2008 ICE raid happened.

Since getting busted by ICE agents, both Andrea and Isabel have been under the watchful eye of the Department of Homeland Security. Isabel has to be home every Monday, because one Monday per month (she never knows which one), ICE agents will call on a landline to make sure she’s home. For Andrea the calls come on Fridays, typically in the evenings.

“Recently,” Andrea said, “they’ll call and say I have to call [back] and report in in two minutes.” When she does, she said, “They ask me to say a series of numbers. They say ‘Thank you’ and hang up.” Andrea said she’s not sure if the numbers have any significance; she assumes there’s some technology analyzing her voice to make sure it’s her.

Also, every six months Andrea and Isabel have to report to the ICE field office in San Francisco. And ever since a former Sun Valley employee named Omar was suddenly seized and deported during such a visit, these check-ins are profoundly scary. Isabel said she always takes her children with her. They’re legal citizens, and she assumes the immigration agents won’t separate a mother from her kids. So far she’s been right.

Andrea said each trip to the city costs her $200 to $300, and she recently paid $1,000 to start the appeal process for her deportation orders, merely the latest in a long list of legal bills. She doesn’t understand why her brother has been cleared to work while she and Isabel are still facing the threat of deportation. 

“I’ve been made to feel like a criminal, because I have to stay in my home, I have to wait for a call,” Andrea said. “That makes me feel stuck, imprisoned. I sometimes want to do things but I can’t because I have to stay home and wait for that call.” She currently works as a store clerk (she didn’t want to say where), and she was invited to go to Baltimore to attend a leadership conference. But she couldn’t go because she might miss one of the phone calls.

Despite these troubles, Andrea is happy to live in this community. “For me, I still feel [Humboldt County] is a safe place,” she said. “It’s very calm, especially compared to places like San Francisco and Sacramento. And it’s much more connected to nature. I can see more green here than in other places.”

Isabel agreed; life here is much better than back in Mexico. “My kids here can go to school and have lunch and breakfast [provided] in case you don’t have them at home,” she said. “In my country they don’t have that. … You pay for uniforms, notebooks, paper, pen, and you pay the school membership.” At Mexican doctors’ offices, she said, you can’t use insurance or set up a payment schedule; you have to have cash in hand.

Here, she said, her kids have the basics they need — food, an education, access to health care. Even something as simple as crossing the street is safer here.

Paz, the community organizer, said that regardless of their citizenship status, Andrea, Isabel and other immigrants have enriched our local culture. “A lot of the things we started doing together have become parts of this community, like the Day of the Dead event,” he said. After the Sun Valley raid, supporters of the arrestees organized a Día de los Muertos procession through Old Town Eureka. “It was a way to fundraise and make ourselves known, and now it’s become part of our cultural community matrix,” Paz said. The procession is now part of a popular annual festival held on Second Street. (Here’s some video of the 2013 event.)

“That’s just one example of how we’ve contributed to this community,” Paz said.

Isabel knows there are plenty of people who think she never should have come here. Asked what she wants them to understand she said, “I just want to tell them that if they just live a little bit what I already lived maybe they will think differently. I’m not asking for anything free. I can work; my husband is a hard worker. … I just want to have the opportunity to work and give a better life for my kids.”

Andrea is nervous about the outcome of her legal appeal. She doesn’t want to be deported, and she hopes the judge will show compassion. “Our only crime,” she said, “was to live the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”