Senate Republicans and Democrats are inching closer to a deal on an immigration bill that farmers say if passed could help reduce food prices in part by helping them hire more workers. This measure, known as the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, is focused mainly on updating the food production workforce, a system some call outdated and that has led to higher food prices especially for dairy, meat and vegetables. It would do this by allowing more farmers — like dairy and pork producers — to hire temporary workers year-round. Currently, year-round employers cannot use that worker visa program, known as the H-2A temporary agricultural program used by seasonal employers. It would also satisfy some goals for labor rights advocates by providing a pathway to legalization for workers who show a dedicated history of farm work. But Senate negotiators writing the bill are stuck on a little-known provision centered on those H-2A workers: whether they should be allowed to sue their employers if they believe labor laws have been broken. That provision's biggest foe is the American Farm Bureau Federation. The Farm Bureau, often known for its more conservative stances, has long been the agriculture lobbying giant in Washington. The bill received large GOP support in the House, where it passed twice. And members are anxious for their Senate counterparts to finally finish writing and introduce a bill. The split within the GOP over agriculture labor reform, led by Farm Bureau influence, threatens the prospects of a final deal as time runs out. Republicans on the Hill are accusing each other of not understanding the urgency of the bill, or even what it could do. "It's sitting over on the Senate side waiting to move over there because there are people creating misperceptions about what the bill does," said California's Doug LaMalfa at a GOP-led press conference hosted by the American Business Immigration Coalition on the bill last week. "Do people want to eat in this country or not?" What is MSPA?For over a year now, the top Senate negotiators on the bill – Democrat Michael Bennet of Colorado and Republican Mike Crapo of Idaho – have struggled to nail down a compromise for a handful of provisions. They've made progress, but the biggest hurdle is the lawsuit provision. It proposes to expand employee protections known as the Migrant and Seasonal Agriculture Workers Protections Act. That's one of the many laws establishing labor protections for farmworkers under the Labor Department, and it regulates the contracting, payment, record keeping, housing, transportation and other working conditions of farmworkers in the U.S. Proponents of the immigration bill argue many of these laws are already broader and wider reaching than MSPA requirements, or in many cases even the same. The biggest difference: the possibility of workers filing lawsuits against their employers. Unlike other farm labor laws, MSPA allows workers who believe an employer has violated a portion of the law to file a lawsuit in a federal district court. And unlike other laws, MSPA has specifically excluded H-2A visa workers — something the bill is looking to change. And there are more H-2A workers than ever before. Where is the Divide?The lawsuit provision isn't new – it was included in the House version of the bill years ago by Democrats who wanted to increase labor protections for farmworkers. Labor advocates say the law helps protect workers from being shorted on wages and placed in unsafe housing and transportation by requiring record keeping. This and the ability to file a lawsuit, said Reyna Lopez, executive director of the Oregon-based Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, does not differ from how employee rights work in other sectors. "[We] really need these very basic documentations, very basic standards, very basic housing standards and licenses when people are driving and proof of their transportation when they're driving," Lopez said. "This is the bare minimum we're asking from our employers when we're doing a lot to make sure that this economy continues." Advocates say that with the increased number of visa workers, it is even more important to ensure all workers that do the same job have the same protections. But the Farm Bureau and other employer groups argue the bill could potentially result in frivolous lawsuits costing producers, who are already operating on slim margins, thousands of dollars. Getting to 60 VotesAs of last week, Senate negotiators have reached tentative deals on a few provisions that had been holding them up – proposals that they say would help save employers money amid rising costs. For example, they agreed to freeze H-2A wages at current levels for the next year, and they are nearing a deal that would allow year-around employers to hire more workers than what the House proposed.
But skepticism over the American Farm Bureau Federation's refusal to support expansion is the biggest hurdle. Crapo is not willing to put his name on a bill unless there is buy-in from a significant number of Republicans and unlocking support, or at least neutrality, from the Southeast is crucial, according to sources familiar with negotiations. But the Farm Bureau still maintains a stronghold and time is running out: production costs are only increasing and the November midterms are getting closer. Jose Martin Hercules Aleman had to show up to immigration court alone, twice. He remembers feeling fearful, appearing in front of a judge without any legal representation by his side for two removal hearings, once in mid-March and again in April. “It’s really scary because you don’t know what you should respond,” Hercules Aleman, 36, said in a phone interview from detention. “You don’t know anything.” Hercules Aleman, who is from El Salvador, has been in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania for about four months. What Hercules Aleman didn’t know when he arrived was that there was a network of state-funded New Jersey immigration legal providers searching through every avenue they could to find people like him to represent.
He lived in New Jersey before being picked up by ICE and taken out of state, so he qualifies for a state-funded program that represents immigrants in detention or deportation proceedings. ICE is moving New Jersey immigrants like Hercules Aleman – who face charges in criminal or family court – to out-of-state immigration detention facilities. But the agency is usually not notifying the group of immigration legal providers funded by the state to represent these detained immigrants. The situation also makes it challenging for immigrants to resolve their charges in criminal or family court from outside of New Jersey, advocates say, and even to access public defenders. Without resolving other charges, immigrants are more likely to be denied immigration relief and released on bond, limiting the possibility for them to travel to New Jersey to deal with their other cases. In immigration court, the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply. Priscila Abraham, a Detention Fellow with the Rutgers Immigrant Rights Clinic, said that ICE and immigration courts do not look “favorably” on an individual who has pending criminal cases. “So we’re kind of caught in this [catch] 22 where we’re trying to resolve these cases without ICE cooperating with us,” Abraham said. So if an immigrant goes into ICE custody with criminal charges pending, said Susannah Volpe, an assistant deputy public defender at the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, “you have a really hard time proving that you’re not a danger to other people in the community, because those charges can be assessed in sort of the totality of the evidence–even though in the criminal case, you’re innocent until proven guilty.” Immigrant advocates and elected officials have asked ICE to provide more information about individuals the agency is moving to out-of-state facilities. But ICE has repeatedly denied these requests, according to emails from immigration legal providers and an ICE official, and people familiar with these communications. In its policy on transfers, ICE says it is not required to notify family members “or other third parties” of a transfer. If a detained immigrant has an attorney registered with the court, ICE will notify the attorney, the policy says. But many of the individuals taken out of New Jersey do not yet have an immigration attorney on record, advocates said, so it becomes difficult to locate those who need representation. “These are our New Jersey community members and residents, and they might not know about us until it’s too late,” said Raquiba Huq, the Chief Attorney for the Immigration Representation Project at the Legal Services of New Jersey (LSNJ). Emilio Dabul, a spokesperson for ICE, said that the agency adheres to its transfer policy, and takes into consideration “immediate family, attorney of record, and status of removal proceedings.” “Due to operational security, ICE does not announce and/or discuss projected transportation operations,” Dabul said. Hercules Aleman had been living in New Jersey since 2008, he said, and was detained by ICE in early March after he faced criminal charges of simple assault and violation of a domestic violence restraining order, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents and New Jersey court documents his immigration attorney shared with Documented. The attorney said the charges were related to a fight with his landlord. The charges were downgraded and transferred to family court. Hercules Aleman was convicted of a separate simple assault charge in 2019, and sentenced to a year of probation, including an anger management program, according to court documents. He has also faced a list of other criminal charges in the past — involving simple assault, criminal mischief, and theft — which were dismissed, according to the DHS documents. In 2016, he was also arrested by the Woodbrige, New Jersey police department for assault by auto, though there is no disposition for the charge, according to DHS documents. Once ICE moved Hercules Aleman to detention in Pennsylvania, it created additional barriers for him to resolve these separate cases. He likely spent extra time in detention than necessary because he could not find the New Jersey pro-bono representation program until a month and a half in, his attorney said, and showed up to immigration court removal dates alone. He still has not been able to access a lawyer for his case in family court, and was denied immigration bond at a May 25th bond hearing while his other charges were still pending, according to his attorney. Hercules Aleman said when he was taken into immigration detention in early March, he was given a sheet of paper that listed attorneys, but none of them answered his calls. Eventually, a friend inside the detention center who lived in New Jersey shared the number for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a group that provides pro-bono legal representation for New Jersey immigrants, he said. Now, Hercules Aleman is giving the AFSC hotline number to others in detention, where he said many people are struggling to find attorneys. “For all the new people who are arriving here, the situation is frustrating,” he said. “The days and the weeks pass, and the lawyers that [ICE] give you don’t answer. And then from there you start asking friends if they know any lawyers.” Last year, after a lengthy push by advocates and elected leaders in New Jersey, county jails stopped holding detained immigrants for ICE. Since then, ICE has been transporting New Jersey residents to detention facilities out of state. In August of 2021, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill that would prevent new or renewed contracts for immigration detention in the state. The Elizabeth Detention Center is the only immigration detention center that remains in New Jersey. It is a privately-owned facility which mostly holds migrants who have recently crossed through the southern border. New Jersey residents are usually only processed there briefly before being moved out of state, immigration legal providers said. Many immigrants, like Hercules Aleman, are now being detained at the Moshannon facility, hundreds of miles away from their New Jersey homes, according to various legal providers, cutting off their access to resolve charges in criminal or family court in-person, and making it challenging to connect with immigration groups that are state-funded to represent them. “ICE understands that detainees may have ties to the community and a support network near the location that they are detained,” said Dabul, the ICE spokesperson. “ICE takes that into account when moving to a new facility to keep them as close as possible to their support network.” Before three county jails shut their doors to ICE last year, the agency shared information with specific legal providers about the immigrants who were arriving in detention at the Hudson County jail, and the Essex County jail more recently, allowing these attorneys to locate people they were funded to represent, said Huq, of LSNJ. This information included lists of names and A-numbers, or partial A-numbers, which the government assigns to every person in immigration proceedings, and providers can use to locate immigrants in detention. LSNJ is part of a coalition of four groups that have been allocated money in the New Jersey Governor’s budget since 2018 to provide immigration legal services for state residents facing detention, deportation, or both. The coalition is called the Detention and Deportation Defense Initiative (DDDI), and includes LSNJ, AFSC, the Rutgers Immigrant Justice Clinic and the Seton Hall Law School Immigrants’ Rights/International Human Rights Clinic. But now, providers say that ICE has largely stopped providing the information that they used to locate potential clients, ever since the county jails stopped holding detained immigrants. The agency still gives attorneys information about immigrants who are staying long-term at Elizabeth Detention Center, but that group does not usually include New Jersey residents, Huq said. Funds have been specifically allocated in the state budget for DDDI providers to represent immigrants in deportation proceedings. But providers are still receiving this money to represent detained immigrants who they now may not be able to find. “We don’t know how big the scope of the problem is, because we have no official way of knowing how many people they’re detaining out of state,” said Jordan Weiner, Hercules Aleman’s attorney at AFSC. Last year, shortly after Essex and Bergen stopped holding people in ICE detention, LSNJ had heard “informally” that about ten people a week were being apprehended by ICE in New Jersey, Huq said, and sent to detention out of state. But the group has not received any updated information since then. Just days after crossing the border from Guatemala, the meagre supplies in Noé's small rucksack had dwindled, and he had gone with barely any food for several days as he bussed and trudged across the humid, forested landscape of Mexico's Chiapas state, where temperatures rose to a sweltering 34 C during the day. Already reeling from exhaustion and an empty stomach, Noé then faced another hazard: corrupt and abusive members of Mexico's security forces, who he said repeatedly strong-armed migrants for "mordidas" - a Mexican term for "little bites", or bribes - at roadblocks. "Mexico was very hard," he said. "The police were bad. They looked for people to take their things and chased us. They charged us bribes when we were already all hungry and tired". This, despite having paid a group of smugglers several thousand dollars for the 2,000-mile (3,332km) trip from his home on the banks of the San Juan River in southern Nicaragua through Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico - a small fortune for a man from a country where the average income per person stands at around $1,850 (£1,533) per year. Several weeks after his journey began, Noé - a stocky and muscular figure whose sun-beaten face and reserved demeanour makes him seem older than his 38 years - was crossing the murky green waters of the Rio Grande into Texas aboard a small rubber raft alongside migrants from as far afield as Ecuador and Colombia, including young children and their mothers. "It was very scary," he said. "I can swim, but the river is stronger than it looks. And it was dark." Safely on the US side, Noé voluntarily surrendered to Border Patrol agents. Detention came as a relief. After a few weeks, he was released into the country to wait for a court date to decide his future in the US. "Here one feels protected. They [US authorities] even fed us well," he told the BBC at a migrant shelter in Texas. "It was hard, but I couldn't have stayed in Nicaragua". Noé is not alone in feeling this way. Privation and poverty have been known to many Nicaraguans like Noé for a long time. But a recent crackdown on civil society, a faltering economy and an atmosphere of terror instituted by the country's long-serving president, Daniel Ortega, is now driving many to leave. US Border Patrol figures highlight the growing flood: a record number of nearly 19,000 were taken into custody in May, up from 12,600 in April and 16,000 in March. All told, a record high number of about 111,000 Nicaraguans have been detained entering the US so far in the 2022 fiscal year, compared with 50,722 in all of 2021 and just 3,164 in 2020. Soon after being released from custody, Noé joined dozens of other migrants in temporary housing at a non-profit humanitarian shelter in Laredo, nestled in a quiet residential neighbourhood just 1.5 miles (2.4km) from the Mexican border. On a sweltering hot Monday morning in late May, he was among dozens of people - mostly men in their 20s and 30s - milling around a courtyard. Some were stretching in the Texas sun, while others used mobile phones to call friends and family back home or in the US. While a smattering of Colombians and Venezuelans were there, the vast majority were Nicaraguan. A Climate of FearThe stories shared by Nicaraguans at the shelter have two common themes: a struggling economy and fear of the government of Daniel Ortega, the leader of Nicaragua's 1979 Sandinista revolution who earlier this year was sworn into a fourth consecutive term as President. Affectionately known as Comandante Daniel to his supporters, Mr Ortega has long been accused of abandoning the revolution's ideals by turning into a dictator, harshly suppressing any opposition. These crackdowns have become more pronounced since Mr Ortega was returned to office in November, in an election that saw opposition candidates arrested or exiled alongside prominent regime critics, journalists, business leaders, human rights advocates and students. Since then, the clampdowns have continued and escalated, with the UN's human rights chief warning that new criminal legislations are being used to persecute perceived opponents of the Ortega government. A Dangerous JourneyFaced with these conditions, an increasing number of Nicaraguan citizens are choosing to leave. Comments on Nicaraguan news outlets - mostly those now operating from outside the country - are peppered with questions from those seeking to go.
Some are taking practical steps to prepare. According to Reuters, dozens of would-be migrants in the Nicaraguan town of Esteli have been signing up for swimming classes offered on social media in anticipation of crossing the fast-moving waters of the Rio Grande at the end of a long trek to the United States. But many migrants have little idea of the dangers that they may face. The risks were starkly highlighted on 1 May by the death of Calixto Nelson Rojas, a Nicaraguan radio host, whose death by drowning in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass was caught on video by a Fox News cameraman. About two weeks later, a three-year-old Nicaraguan girl went missing after her 25-year-old mother drowned crossing the river. While the mother's body was recovered, the little girl has still not been found. |