Immigration agents detained four farmworkers Thursday morning in Woodburn, legal group says

By TROY BRYNELSON/OregonPublic Broadcasting

Immigration agents pulled over a van in Marion County on Thursday morning, broke through the driver’s window and detained four farmworkers on the way to their jobs at a blueberry farm, according a legal group representing one of the workers.

All four people — three men and a woman — originally hail from Guatemala and now live in Woodburn, said Isa Peña, a spokeswoman for Innovation Law Lab. The arrest happened around 6 a.m. Thursday, as they traveled from Woodburn to Canby.

Word of their sudden capture has shot across the migrant community and risks scaring scores of farmworkers in the Willamette Valley as harvest season is underway.

One of the farmworkers is an asylum seeker from Guatemala, identified as “L-J-P-L” in court filings. Their attorneys say they haven’t been able to speak with L-J-P-L at the Portland ICE office.

Court filings show L-J-P-L fled his home country after he was targeted by people who, he said, had murdered his brother. He has been in the U.S. since 2024. He is 25 years old and, like the three other people arrested, mostly speaks the Mam language, an Indigenous language of Guatemala’s northern regions.

Innovation Law Lab believes all four farm workers have already been transported to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. Peña said the firm hopes to be able to meet and talk with them in the coming days.

“This is part of really just a terrible pattern from ICE to terrorize our communities, but also refuse to grant individuals attorney access — which they have a legal right to,” Peña said.

Three other people in the van — two women and a young girl — were not detained. It wasn’t immediately clear why ICE officers targeted the others. A representative from ICE did not immediately respond to questions.

The incident appears to be the largest single arrest action by immigration officials this summer in Oregon’s mid-valley farmlands. The farmworker advocacy group Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, or PCUN, said they’ve been inundated with frantic messages since the arrest.

“This is really the largest ICE arrest I’ve seen since January in Woodburn and in the surrounding areas,” said Reyna Lopez, PCUN’s executive director. “These tactics are really scaring people, especially right now we’re in the peak of harvest and people from all over the state are trying to help meet those deliverables.”

Farms have been on edge during the second Trump administration’s sweeping deportation efforts. In June, ICE officers arrested Newberg vineyard owner Moises Sotelo and deported him to Mexico a month later. Sotelo had just two speeding tickets on his record.

Sotelo’s arrest led the Oregon Farm Bureau — the state’s largest agricultural group — to worry about staffing as farmworkers began to stay home. The agricultural organization subsequently started to help farmers and workers connect with legal resources.

“Labor is always a concern for farmers because unlike other industries, it requires a labor force that is willing to work,” said Austin McClister, a farm bureau spokesperson, in June. “Most domestic workers don’t apply for jobs. And if we don’t have workers, we don’t get people fed.”

The latest arrests threaten to scare away workers at a time when berries and other crops are coming to harvest, Lopez said. If workers stay home, there could be downstream consequences for the broader economy, like retailers and restaurants in the area.

Community members have braced themselves, proliferating “Know Your Rights” cards and setting up hotlines, but the fear of more arrests could grip the town again, Lopez said.

“People were already holding back from doing anything beyond the basic needs. People are just going to work, people are getting their groceries, but that’s it,” she said. “But, from where we’re standing, farmworkers want to be back at work. They want to go to work — as long as they can.”