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Emboldened by President Trump’s unyielding anti-immigrant invective, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has carried on tradition in 2018, sabotaging immigrant communities across the country at a breakneck pace. In a coordinated campaign to suppress the constitutionally protected speech of immigrants, ICE has been targeting and arresting immigrant activists across the country, continuing decades of hostility toward progressive activists of color. Those targeted in 2018 alone include Ravi Ragbir, director of the New Sanctuary Coalition and an outspoken leader for immigrants in New York and nationwide; Daniela Vargas, arrested in Mississippi moments after she spoke at a press conference to denounce the arrests of her brother and father; Claudia Rueda, whom ICE detained after she publicly advocated for the release of her mother, whom ICE had previously arrested; and Maru Mora-Villalpando, a nationwide immigrant rights leader and a Washington-based community stalwart. ICE’s anti-speech program is not limited to individual, nationally known activists. In one of its more insidious attacks, the subject of a Center for Constitutional Rights’ (CCR) First Amendment lawsuit, ICE has set its sights on Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based collective of predominantly migrant dairy workers. Migrant Justice has suffered the retaliatory immigration arrests of dozens of leaders and members over the last four years, often in the aftermath of successful organizing campaigns and events. In targeting Vermont migrant laborers, ICE is targeting among the most vulnerable. Isolated on remote farms scattered across the state, dairy workers operate in dangerous, sometimes life-threatening conditions, and historically have relied on their employers for their basic needs. It is not unlike feudal-era serfdom or the company towns of old. Migrant Justice sprung up to meet this dire need for labor organizing, and follows the path laid down by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, the two titans of the Chicano movement and co-founders of the National Farm Workers Association (now the United Farm Workers). Migrant Justice is both the lifeline for the Vermont Latino community and is heralded as the gold standard for organized labor in the state. So far, it’s won state-issued driver’s licenses and state-provided universal health care for its immigrant community. Its Milk with Dignity program, which seeks to ensure a more humane dairy industry, has spread to over seventy farms and has attracted commitment from Ben and Jerry’s. Along with the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based human rights organization internationally recognized for its widely lauded Fair Food Program, Migrant Justice’s success has helped cultivate a nationwide migrant farmworker movement, introducing migrant labor issues into the greater national civil rights chorus.

Divide and Conquer Because the Vermont dairy industry — like many others — relies so heavily on migrant labor, Migrant Justice has also served as an advocate against the federal government’s increasingly abusive immigration practices. This advocacy has become a matter of survival for its targeted membership. ICE has arrested over a dozen Migrant Justice members; none had serious criminal records and few, if any, were priorities under ICE’s guidelines for enforcement, a fact not lost upon Senator Bernie Sanders, who was quick to point this out to ICE when it arrested two Migrant Justice leaders in 2017. Instead, ICE agents in Vermont made clear that leaders and members were targeted for their association with Migrant Justice. ICE mined Migrant Justice members’ social media pages and referred to them by their nicknames found only on Facebook. ICE followed them from the Migrant Justice office. ICE told Migrant Justice which members were next to be arrested and, when they arrested Migrant Justice’s spokesperson, gloated to jailers that they had brought them a “famous” person. When they detained them, they forbade them from contacting anyone at Migrant Justice. ICE even conscripted a confidential informant, a known figure in the local community, to infiltrate the organization and to funnel personal and sensitive information to ICE. ICE thus knew about organizers’ private meetings before they even happened. According to text messages obtained, the informant stated that “anytime [a local ICE agent] makes an arrest he asks me.” When rumors began swirling about the identity of the informant, ICE made Migrant Justice members believe it was their leadership who were funneling information. ICE intentionally spread disinformation within Migrant Justice, pitting leaders against one another to sow discord and disruption and to weaken its efficacy. And these tactics continue. This isn’t legitimate law enforcement — it’s vendetta.