"ICE arrests WA farmworker activist in Sedro-Woolley,"

Immigration officials on Tuesday morning arrested 25-year-old union farmworker activist Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez in Sedro-Woolley, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement records and Juarez’s fellow organizers.

Juarez, who is a member of the Indigenous Mexican Mixteco community, has organized on behalf of farmworker rights in Washington state since he was 14 years old and worked as a berry picker, according to Rosalinda Guillen, a longtime activist leader and founder of social justice group Community to Community Development...

Juarez was driving his partner to her job at a tulip bulb company in Mount Vernon, said Edgar Franks, political director for Indigenous farmworkers union Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Franks said Juarez later called from an ICE facility in Ferndale, Whatcom County, and said he had been detained...

Guillen and Franks said they feared Juarez was targeted because of his activism.

“We feel that there are no First Amendment protections for people that are doing activism in the immigrant community,” Franks said. “This is a basic constitutional right for everyone.”

Juarez was in the news as recently as last month, when he led a cohort of farmworker activists to Olympia to meet with lawmakers over farmworker rights. He has also been quoted in The Seattle Times on the conditions faced by striking tulip workers in the Skagit Valley...