United Farm Workers say unanswered questions on why ICE detained farmworkers in Orleans

Armando Elenes, Secretary Treasurer of the United Farm Workers, has issued a statement in response to the statement on Monday from Lynn-Ette & Sons after 14 of the farm’s workers were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Friday. They were on a bus headed to work when they were stopped on Route 98 in Albion at about 7:30 a.m. near Crosby’s, north of the Erie Canal.

Statement from the United Farm Workers:

“There is in fact a bargaining unit at Lynn-Ette farm which covers seasonal workers — as Lynn-Ette is aware, an arbitrator has already been appointed by the State of New York following Lynn-Ette’s failure to negotiate a union contract for them in good faith and we are waiting for the arbitrator to issue their decision.

It is true that the workers who were detained last Friday are not part of the current bargaining unit. This is because Lynn-Ette itself successfully argued that its year-round workers should be excluded from the unit. At the time, we argued strongly that year-round workers should be included in the same bargaining unit as their seasonal coworkers.

Given that exclusion, several year-round workers were continuing to organize to file a petition for a separate bargaining unit that would negotiate a contract for the year-round workers. Several of the workers who were leading that effort have now been detained by ICE.

We do now know that ICE came to target the bus as a result of a tip. We demand that ICE be fully transparent about how and why and based on what information these arrests were made, including to the members of Congress who are inquiring about this very issue.

If workers at any company were to be targeted for immigration enforcement for union organizing, that would be a violation of our Constitution’s First Amendment; the right to freedom of association including with your union. Everyone should be concerned about that.”