U.S. Representative Rick Larsen met with detained farmworker activist and union organizer Alfredo Juarez Zeferino at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Tacoma on June 20.
Zeferino, 25, was detained by ICE on March 25 based on a 2018 detention order along with a group of farmworkers in Sedro-Woolley. He has been held in the detention facility – privately run by the for-profit GEO Group – ever since, and told Larsen he has been unable to speak with his family in the same room while incarcerated.
In a video taken outside the detention facility, Larsen criticized the Trump administration’s stated goal of 3,000 deportations per day, leading to overcrowding and understaffing at the detention center.
Larsen toured the facility and was shown the kitchen, law library, medical facility and housing pods. He said Zeferino “still feels resilient, still feels hopeful, but it’s taken a toll on him, being in the detention facility.”
Zeferino, known to the migrant and farmworker community in northwest Washington as “Lelo,” immigrated to Washington from Mexico with his family as a child, and later became a prominent farmwork and immigrant rights advocate. He co-founded farmworker union Families Unidas por la Justicia,and was on the now-dissolved Bellingham Immigration Advisory Board. Protests erupted across Skagit and Whatcom Counties after his March detention was made public.
“I shared with him how the Skagit County and broader Northwest Washington community has rallied around him to fight for his future,” Larsen said. “He asked for my help to be able to visit with his family in the same room, and I am working to make that possible.”
Larsen said only 10 percent of detainees in the Tacoma facility have legal representation.
“More than 1,500 people are currently detained in the Tacoma facility – that’s more than twice as many as the start of the year,” Larsen said. “The facility has not staffed up sufficiently to provide basic services to the people being held there.”
