ICE fears sweep Washington’s Yakima Valley after Trump takes office

Erik Molina and Elena Verduzco were headed to McDonald’s in their Dodge Ram with their toddler son when they realized they were being followed by a pair of unmarked trucks with tinted windows.

“I think that’s ICE,” Verduzco told Molina, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for deporting immigrants.

Here were U.S.-born citizens driving an American pickup to America’s most popular restaurant. Yet on a chilly Sunday less than one week into President Donald Trump’s second term, Verduzco had a weird feeling about the trucks.

She was right. They cornered Molina’s pickup after he pulled into a gas station parking lot, and a couple agents jumped out. Verduzco started recording the encounter on her cellphone.

“Do you have your ID?” one agent asked Molina, whose hands were shaking.

The agents let Molina and Verduzco go a minute later, attributing the stop to a case of mistaken identity. But Verduzco’s Jan. 26 video of the stop spread quickly after she posted it on social media and, along with other ICE sightings, raised fears in the Yakima Valley’s Latino communities.

In Granger, the small town where Molina and Verduzco live. In Sunnyside, where agents arrested a farmworker couple outside a Latino supermarket. In Yakima, where hundreds of protesters rallied against ICE a week later.

While large raids have not yet been reported and while some voters say ICE can make the area safer by removing dangerous criminals, recent events are reminding residents of Trump’s promises to carry out mass deportations, putting people on edge and changing the complexion of their daily lives.

Some are getting groceries delivered, rather than venturing out to stores. They’re arranging guardians for their kids, in case their families get separated. They’re working to educate neighbors about their rights, like which documents you can demand to see before ICE agents can enter your home.

These stories are playing out across the U.S., but especially in places like the Yakima Valley, with major concentrations of Latino and undocumented residents. Places with traumatic histories of deportations and separations.

The area’s orchards, hop fields and vineyards have attracted immigrants for decades. Molina’s grandparents came from Michoacan in Mexico. More than 85% of Granger and Sunnyside residents are Hispanic or Latino, about 30% are foreign-born and 70%-plus speak Spanish at home, per census data.

An ICE spokesperson declined to comment on the Sunnyside incidents.

“Some kids don’t want to go to school,” said Molina, 27, a lifelong resident of the valley who drives a fuel truck for work. “People are just scared.”

ICE sightings

The day Molina and Verduzco went semiviral began like any other with their 3-year-old, Erik Jr. They knew ICE activity might increase under Trump but neither voted in the November election, said Verduzco, a certified nursing assistant.

Her mood changed as they were getting into Molina’s pickup and she saw a strange truck pass by their house twice. When that truck followed the family onto Interstate 82 and a second truck joined, Verduzco, 25, started to freak out.

She didn’t know what might happen when they stopped for the agents. One wore a vest with the acronym ERO, which stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations, a division of ICE. He asked Molina’s name.

Molina hesitated before grabbing his ID, telling the agents he would have to reach into the sling bag where he was also storing his concealed-carry gun. He told Verduzco, who was crying, that it would be OK. Then suddenly, the agents backed off.

“We’re looking for someone, you just matched his description, but you’re not the right guy,” the agent at Molina’s window said. “You’re good to go.”

The agents drove away, but the couple felt shaken and profiled.

“Like, yeah he matches the description of a lot of people,” Verduzco said about Molina. “A lot of Hispanic people.”

There was a different outcome that same day in a parking lot outside Sunnyside’s Fiesta Foods supermarket, where a video posted on social media captured agents taking another couple from a car and arresting them.

The Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, which operates a deportation defense hotline and rapid response teams to discern between rumored and actual incidents, subsequently verified the ICE arrests.

Lorena Avalos, a community organizer in the area who said she knows the couple who were arrested, described them as farmworkers from Peru. The incident alarmed many residents because it happened outside a well-known Latino store and because the detainees looked like regular shoppers.

“When I see that, I see my mom, I see a tia (aunt), I see a prima (cousin),” Sunnyside City Councilmember Vicky Frausto said the next day.

The Jan. 26 videos spread quickly partly because they were posted on a Facebook page called “ICE Border Patrol sightings Yakima Valley” that resident Jamie Ortiz started Jan. 22 to help her neighbors stay informed.

“Sunday morning we had 300 members. By that night, we had 11,000,” said Ortiz, who lives just east of Yakima in the town of Moxee.

With ICE-related sightings and rumors still swirling across social media the next day, Sunnyside city leaders called a news conference. They hoped to reassure residents by drawing a distinction between ICE and local police, who are mostly barred by state law from assisting with immigration enforcement.

That plan went sideways during a question-and-answer session, when a man in the audience introduced himself as a potential ICE bounty hunter and asked officials how they would stop him. Although City Manager Mike Gonzalez cut the man off and later called the bounty hunter claims bogus, a video of the exchange made its way to social media, stoking concerns even more.

City’s response

Sunnyside police Chief Rob Layman was at home watching football when someone sent him the videos of the arrests outside Fiesta Foods, carried out by agents wearing vests that said “POLICE” in large, block letters. ICE didn’t let him know ahead of time, so he was blindsided, he said.

Layman was frustrated with that “lack of communication,” which forced him and Gonzalez to play catch-up as they scrambled to tell the public what was going on, said the chief, who’s spent 19 years trying to build trust in police.

Layman said a federal contact later confirmed the Jan. 26 arrests had been conducted by ICE. But some damage had already been done.

“If somebody’s concerned that we’re going to enforce immigration, they might not report something or might not come forward as a witness,” he said.

At Sunnyside’s Jan. 27 news conference, Gonzalez intentionally struck a calm, apolitical tone, hoping to lower the temperature in the community of 16,000. Then the masked so-called bounty hunter started ranting.

“We’re going to have to ask you to stop, and around here we don’t refer to people as illegals. They’re human beings,” Gonzalez said, telling the man to “be quiet … because you don’t even have the cojones to take off the mask.”

Reactions to the incident have been revealing, said Gonzalez, a moderate Republican now questioning “what in the world is going on.”

The city manager, hired last year after a record number of Latinas won City Council seats, has received several threatening messages and many appreciative ones, he said in an interview at a coffee shop. It feels like ICE sees “easy pickings” in Sunnyside for Trump’s deportations, Gonzalez said.

“We’re always going to stand with our residents because we know who we are,” he said. “Our economy is really dependent on undocumented residents, and we know that 99.99% are wonderful people who come here to work.”

Debate, consequences

Trump’s campaign promises and last month’s ICE sightings shook many in the Yakima Valley partly because of past experiences with raids, said Toppenish City Councilmember Ezequiel Morfin, Jr., who as a kid saw farmworkers running through a hop field by his house and climbing trellis poles to get away from the immigration agents they called La Migra.

“My mom said, ‘Come inside, hide, lock the doors,’ and we had to hide for a while,” he recalled at ELLA, a Sunnyside-based social justice organization.

There are debates in the valley about how upset community members should be. Matt Brown, a Trump supporter who chairs the Yakima County Republican Party, said he believes concerns are overblown. Trump has vowed to send ICE after the “worst of the worst,” like those in drug cartels, Brown said. A lot of people in the area support that, he said.

“There’s been a lot of hyperbole,” supercharged by social media, he said.

Fiesta Foods’ Luis Moreno agrees with that assessment, to some extent. But the consequences of the ICE anxiety rolling through the area are real, said Moreno, business administrator for the Latino supermarket chain. When residents are afraid, they stop going to stores. He’s seen it before.

“Everything goes to hell. Volume goes down” at stores like Fiesta Foods, said Moreno, who was born in Mexico and feels for undocumented residents who have worked, paid taxes and stayed out of trouble for many years. “Who doesn’t have friends and relatives who are in that situation?”

In the days after ICE enforcers were spotted in Sunnyside, some residents posted offers of help on Ortiz’s Facebook site, saying they could pick up groceries for people staying home. Meanwhile, some parents have kept their kids home from school, multiple community members reported.

At the same time that Trump talks about targeting dangerous criminals, he’s also seeking to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented parents.

“My partner is a second grade teacher and he had a very difficult conversation with 7- and 8-year-olds yesterday because they were scared they were going to get deported,” said Chelsea Dimas, a local organizer.

Day cares are asking parents for notarized letters specifying who will take in their kids if they get detained by ICE, said Sunnyside Councilmember Keren Vazquez, a notary public helping some families with the letters.

Educating, protesting

Even before Trump’s inauguration, some Yakima Valley organizers were preparing for a potential crackdown. For example, ELLA was working with the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington. The organizations have scheduled a “know your rights” training in Sunnyside this weekend.

“The reason why our people are so scared is because you just have to look at a good history book,” Frausto said, hugging Avalos and blinking back tears as she compared the current era to deportation and incarceration campaigns past.

“We knew what was coming,” Executive Director Maria Fernandez added.

Besides ELLA in Sunnyside, the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network is coordinating volunteers across the state to share information.

The network “has taken on the role of doing rumor control … and at the same time holding the administration accountable” for scapegoating immigrants, despite research showing they are less likely to commit crimes than nonimmigrants, Executive Director Catalina Velasquez said. “The specter of mass deportations is destabilizing our communities.”

There are various other efforts underway, like at KDNA, a Granger-based radio station that caters to Spanish-speaking farmworkers. Established in 1979 and owned since 2011 by Sea Mar Community Health Centers, KDNA is currently broadcasting public service announcements about immigrant rights, said Gilbert Alaniz, Sea Mar’s eastern region vice president.

After the Jan. 26 encounters with ICE in Sunnyside, it wasn’t clear whether people would take to the streets. Although a digital poster for a rally in downtown Yakima gained traction online, some local leaders were wary because the poster was anonymous. They worried it could go wrong.

But on Feb. 1, several hundred people showed up for the afternoon rally at the intersection of First Street and Yakima Avenue.

They held signs with messages such as “Protect People, Not Borders” and “Immigrants Make America Great.” They waved Mexican flags, American flags and Mexican American combination flags. They hugged each other, revved their truck engines, honked their horns and chanted “No more ICE.”

The rally lasted hours, thinning only as the sun dipped near the horizon.

“I came out to support the community, especially the immigrants who work hard every day,” said Anay Bautista from Granger, whose parents came from Mexico. “I’m not scared. I just don’t want families being separated.”