The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained 25-year-old activist farmworker Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino Tuesday morning while he was driving his partner to work at a tulip bulb farm in Mount Vernon.
At 7:23 am, Zeferino called Rosalinda Guillen, a long-time organizer and founder of Community to Community (C2C). In the background, she could hear Zeferino’s partner crying as Zeferino told ICE officers to leave her alone, and that she had nothing to do with this, before the chaotic phone call abruptly ended.
Guillen didn’t hear from Zeferino again until 8:57 am, when he called from an unmarked ICE facility in Ferndale, the same nondescript warehouse he and other activists uncovered years ago, and where more than 100 people would demand his freedom that afternoon.
Zeferino spoke quickly, she says: ICE had also detained his uncle and another man from Mount Vernon. He protested when guards told him he’d be transferred to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma and then deported. According to the ICE Detainee Locator System, he’s now in Tacoma. ICE did not return a request for comment.
Guillen and others suspect the berry picker and union organizer, beloved by Indigenous farmworkers across the state, was targeted for his political activism. Not unlike Jeanette Vizguerra, the immigrant rights activist ICE picked up during her break at a Target outside Denver, or Mahmoud Khalil, a student, green card holder and Palestinian activist at Columbia University, shipped to Louisiana after ICE arrested him in his university-owned apartment in New York City.
“We’re worried they’re going to deport him to El Salvador, Gitmo, or these other places that are horrific,” not to Mexico, Guillen says. “This administration is just punitive and mean. They’re cruel.”
An Indigenous Mixteco immigrant from Mexico, Zeferino started organizing at 14, just a kid picking berries at Sakuma Brothers Farms in Burlington, which is how he met Edgar Franks, political director of the Indigenous farmworkers union Families Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ). In 2016, after years of organizing, the union reached a historic collective bargaining agreement for more than 500 workers.
When asked what Zeferino had done for farmworkers in Washington, Franks exhaled and clicked his tongue, as if not sure where to start. He says Zeferino helped establish new state standards to protect farmworkers from grueling heat in the fields and had a hand in a 2021 state law guaranteeing overtime pay for them. Zeferino has fought for basic improvements like added restrooms. He’s coached workers on how to talk to legislators, and it’s quick to jump on the picket line with first time strikers to show them how it’s done.
On January 21, the day after President Donald Trump took office, Zeferino was in Olympia, marching farmworkers across the capitol grounds on a mission to bring District 40 ruled to a farmer’s “court” where workers would share the injustices they face.
Even Mixteco workers who aren’t in their union and don’t want to join one trust Zeferino, who is fluent in Mixteco, Spanish, and English. They call for their advice when they want better wages, when the boss yells at them, when they need someone to sit with them in court, or to translate at the DMV. If the community calls Zeferino, Zeferino picks up the phone, Guillen and Franks say. But for all his soft-spoken and humble studiousness, he’s still a young man, Franks says.
“For me, he’s still always a little kid,” he says. “He likes Baby Yoda, he likes to watch animated films. We went to New York for this conference on worker rights; in his free time, he went to go watch Kung Fu Panda.”
In 2023, the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center gave Zeferino the Dotty Dale Youth Peacemaker award for his work. Board member Josh Cerretti met Zeferino in 2015, shortly after he was arrested by Bellingham Police and turned over to ICE. (Zeferino’s family alleged racial profiling and sued the city, later settling for $100,000). Zeferino’s arrest was an attack on all farmworkers in Washington, he says.
Cerretti noted that Zeferino was on the city of Bellingham’s Immigration Advisory Board until October, when the council dissolved it (after suspending its monthly meetings that January). The advisory board had recommended the city build a resource center for immigrants in Whatcom County, which Cerretti, Franks and Guillen agreed would’ve been good to have right now.
Michael Lilliquist, one of the two dissenting votes against axing the advisory board, wrote in an email that Zeferino’s arrest had upset him. Trump was targeting practically every immigrant, regardless of immigration status or criminal record. The possibility that enforcement is being used to stifle political dissent “adds a frightening additional layer,” he wrote. “I’m worried about Lelo’s future.”
