Yuma Farm Workers Detained by ICE, Families Turn to GoFundMe

A daughter's GoFundMe page titled "Help keep our father home with us" appeared in February with a detail that few in Yuma's agricultural fields were willing to say out loud: her father had been stopped and arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while driving produce for a local farming company.

The family wrote that he had lived in the U.S. for decades and was the primary provider for his children and grandchildren, and that they are now scrambling to pay legal fees and basic bills. No charges have been publicly disclosed, and ICE has not issued a statement specific to his case.

A second campaign, "Ayúdame a traer a Jaime a casa," tells a nearly identical story in Spanish. The organizer writes that Jaime, a longtime resident and family breadwinner, was detained recently and is now in immigration custody. His family is raising money to cover legal representation, travel, and the cost of keeping things afloat while he is gone. No last name, detention facility, or arrest date has been made public.

Together, the two fundraisers have become something rare in Yuma County's agricultural sector: a public record. "When a farmworker is detained somewhere in Yuma County's sprawling agricultural fields, almost no one talks. Not the farm owners. Not the co-workers. Not the families," as the situation has been described. GoFundMe pages, it turns out, are often where the silence breaks first.

There have been no reports of large-scale immigration raids on Yuma farms, the kind of sweeping operations that have drawn headlines and protests in other parts of the country. What is happening instead is a steady, quieter pattern of individual arrests continuing across the county's fields.

Yuma Fresh, one of the region's agricultural operations, said in a statement that "we are particularly focused on the impact to our farms," without elaborating further.

Guidance circulating among Yuma-area farmers urges agricultural employers to have a plan in place, train employees about their rights, update I-9 employment records, and ensure ICE only has access to areas authorized by a judicial warrant. The source of that guidance has not been publicly identified.

The full scope of the enforcement activity remains unclear. No total count of arrests has been confirmed, no detention facilities have been named in connection with either GoFundMe case, and neither ICE nor local law enforcement has released incident reports matching the accounts described in the fundraisers.