Immigrants’ deaths rattle farmworker town
DELANO — Celestino Hilario Garcia, his eyes bloodshot and his voice raw, struggled to explain that his brother’s and sister-in-law’s deaths were not his fault.
A month ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had trained their sights on Santos Hilario Garcia. In the early-morning darkness, they followed in two black Jeeps as he and his wife, Marcelina Garcia Profecto, dropped their teenage daughter off at Robert F. Kennedy High School.
Minutes later, the couple were dead, having crashed their truck as they tried to escape the agents. ICE officials later said that the couple had not been their target — Garcia happened to have matched the description of the person they were after.
That person was Celestino, a Mexican immigrant who, like his brother, was in the country illegally.
“It was his car, it was in his name. If I lent him my car, then it’s my fault,” Celestino said. “It was his car. His car . ... They had time to check the plates.”
Blame has been a recurrent theme since the fatal crash in this Central Valley town of vast farmlands.
There have been protests, with some Delano officials and residents blaming ICE and the Trump administration for being too aggressive in their crusade against illegal immigration. ICE has blamed the deaths on California’s “sanctuary” policies, which the agency says put it in a position to target, and sometimes arrest, immigrants without legal status who were not initially sought for removal.
Aggressive immigration enforcement by the Trump administration has become an issue across the nation. Last month, top federal officials and the president condemned Oakland’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, after she warned the community of upcoming ICE sweeps.
The Delano case took on a new dimension when the local police department asked prosecutors to look into whether two ICE agents had given false information to police after the crash. On Wednesday, Kern County prosecutors said they would not file charges.
“There is no credible evidence that either agent lied,” Kern County District Attorney Lisa Green said. “I approached this case, and every other case, by trying to do the right thing, for the right reason. Politics had nothing to do with it.”
The decision is unlikely to settle matters, particularly since ICE will not say why deportation officers were after Celestino. And it still is unclear why the couple initially stopped for the agents before speeding off.
“Santos Hilario and Marcelina did not get justice today from the Kern County district attorney, and they deserved it,” said Diana Tellefson Torres, the executive director of the United Farm Workers Foundation. “They and their six orphaned children are just the latest casualties of the federal government’s recent targeting of hardworking immigrant farmworkers who feed all of us.”
Delano, with a population of about 52,000, is a town of farmworkers.
About 76 percent of the city’s residents are Latino, and nearly 40 percent are foreign born — many of them now deep in the labor of filling buckets with plucked blueberries and tying grapevines to metal wires to help them grow properly.
The town’s median household income is $36,265.
Interim Police Chief Raul Alvizo’s parents labored in the fields, as did he as a teenager. Mayor Grace Vallejo was a migrant farmworker, bouncing from town to town across the state with her parents and siblings.
About 30 miles north of Bakersfield in Kern County, Delano is a center for growing table grapes. The sign welcoming people to the city features a cluster of grapes. A mural along Main Street, celebrating the city’s 100th anniversary, shows farmworkers working under bunches of the fruit.
The city’s vineyards were the scene of a September 1965 grape strike, led by Filipino workers who were soon joined by civil rights icon Cesar Chavez to fight back against unfair treatment. The movement led to the formation of the United Farm Workers of America.
On a recent afternoon, under a clear sky, six women with bandannas covering their faces fanned out among rows of grapevines.
“We leave our homes not knowing if we’re going to come back,” said one, who is originally from the Mexican state of Sinaloa.
“Imagine the necessity to work but with the fear that when we leave, that immigration is going to stop and take us,” another said. “And our children? What is going to happen to them?”
The workers refused to give their names, fearing being targeted for arrest and deportation.
After the crash that killed Garcia and Profecto, many immigrants were afraid to leave their homes. Business owners and residents in Delano, many of whom could see their own story in Garcia’s and Profecto’s, set about raising money for the couple’s children.
At Tony’s Barbershop, Osbaldo Prieto, whose mother is a farmworker, gave the couple’s two sons free haircuts in preparation for the memorial service this month. The mayor’s niece donated haircuts to the four daughters.
Emmanuel Perez, who left for the U.S. from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in 1978, was a farmworker for more than a decade.
The week of the crash, Perez, who owns a furniture store on Main Street, donated beds, a dining set and sofas to the family.
“We felt bad, because that’s how we came,” Perez said, taking a shaky breath as tears filled his eyes. “We came here to progress . ... These people came probably the same way. Now their kids are going to be the ones suffering without their parents.”