Union farmworker organizer 'Lelo' denied bond to leave Tacoma ICE lockup

A prominent Washington farmworker union organizer arrested by ICE earlier this year, will remain detained in the Tacoma ICE facility after being denied release Thursday. The attorney for Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino said he plans to keep pushing to get him out.

An immigration judge said she would have approved the $5,000 bond to release Zeferino from the Northwest ICE Processing Center — getting a bond out of the Northwest ICE Processing Center can often range between $15,000 and $30,000 — but the judge said she didn’t have the legal precedent to do so.

“We think she's wrong,” said Larkin VanDerhoef, an attorney representing Zeferino. He’s appealed the decision and is in talks with attorneys at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project who have an ongoing class action lawsuit alleging judges at the Tacoma immigration lockup unfairly inhibit meaningful appeals to bond out of the facility.

“The judge is wrong on the jurisdiction point, and if we can get somebody to agree with that, she's already otherwise agreed to a bond,” VanDerhoef said.

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Aside from the argument over jurisdiction, two significant factors immigration judges must consider is whether Zeferino can pay the bond and if he’s a flight risk.

After exiting the facility from Zeferino’s hearing earlier this week, VanDerhoef met a crowd of 50 people waiting outside the Northwest ICE Processing Center, including family and friends of the detained union organizer.

"To show that he's this well known… and this well supported goes a long way,” he said into a megaphone. “It’s just showing he's not going to get out and go hide somewhere he never has, and he would never do that.”

In previous statements, ICE and GEO Group, a private company contracted to manage the center, have said the Tacoma facility isn’t a prison. But conditions at the facility have often been described as just like one, by a U.S. representative and by former and current detainees.

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About one third of those detained in the Tacoma ICE lockup are people classified as likely to engage in criminal behavior, limiting their ability to bond out. Unlike that group, Zeferino has no criminal record in the U.S.

“We think that they stopped him because of his leadership, because of his activism,” Rosalinda Guillén previously told KUOW. Guillen is a longtime farmworker organizer in Skagit County.

U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement have previously told KUOW in response to Zeferino’s arrest that arrests like these are “based on intelligence driven leads focused on people identified for… …removal from the country.”

Juarez had a standing deportation order from 2018 related to an immigration case, about which the family contends they were not notified.

The Bellingham Herald reported in 2015 that Zeferino was first sent to the Tacoma detention center when he was pulled over by police for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. The police then called immigration enforcement.

Zeferino sued the City of Bellingham and the police for racist profiling. The city settled for $100,000.

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