Federal immigration agents raided two cannabis farms in California last week, arresting more than 300 workers suspected of being in the United States without documentation. One farmworker, Jaime Alanís, fell 30 feet from a building to his death while attempting to flee the aggressive, chaotic raid at Glass House Farms in Ventura County. Alanís is the first known person to have died during an immigration enforcement operation in President Donald Trump’s second term.
The majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s mass deportation regime, polling shows, and the administration’s immigration operations are only growing more and more unpopular. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in California have received widespread condemnation, not only for contributing to Alanís’s tragic death, but also for indiscriminately sweeping up U.S. citizens, including a professor at California State University Channel Islands. The professor, Jonathan Caravello, was arrested while protesting alongside roughly 500 people against the immigration raid at Glass House Farms. In a stunning display of force, masked federal agents were captured on video tear gassing protesters, including children, and pinning people to the ground.
In response to the public backlash, the Trump administration has attempted to divert public attention to a child labor investigation at Glass House farms.
“As of July 13, at least 14 migrant children have been rescued from potential exploitation, forced labor, and human trafficking,” states a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press release touting the operation.
Conservative media have seized on this detail in their coverage of the abhorrent raids. But, as the United Farm Workers (UFW) noted in a statement, “detaining and deporting children is not a solution for child labor.” The trauma of these raids — and the Trump administration’s cruel practice of separating families through detention and deportation — will not bring justice to those impacted. “The UFW demands the immediate facilitation of independent legal representation for the minor workers, to protect them from further harm,” the UFW wrote.
The Trump administration’s focus on child labor is a cynical bait-and-switch. After all, it is Trump’s own party that has pushed to weaken and repeal child labor laws in recent years. The U.S. Department of Labor reported an 88 percent increase in child labor violations from 2019 to 2023. Since 2023, 28 states have introduced bills to roll back child labor protections, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), and 12 states have enacted them. Most of these rollbacks are happening in red states; last year in Alabama, for instance, state legislators passed a law that removed work permit requirements for 14- and 15-year-olds. It also removed a provision that revoked a child’s work permit if their grades suffered at school. In Florida, a Senate committee advanced a bill, SB 918, that would’ve allowed children as young as 14 to work overnight shifts, and permitted 16- and 17-year-olds to work more than eight hours a day without mandated breaks. The bill died in June in a second committee.
Republicans have claimed that the rollbacks to child labor law are intended to safeguard parents’ rights to have a say over their child’s work activity. But as an EPI report found, many of the reported child labor violations have impacted unaccompanied migrant children, “left in limbo by a broken U.S. immigration system.” EPI notes that migrant youth are “particularly vulnerable to exploitation by employers and networks of labor brokers and staffing agencies who recruit workers on their behalf.”
This may have been what was occurring at Glass House Farms. But the Trump administration’s raid did not save young people suffering from labor exploitation — it’s part of the same broken immigration system that made those exact child labor conditions possible.
According to an analysis by LexisNexis, the push to roll back child labor laws is in part due to the fact that the mass deportations of immigrants could put stress on the labor market. Correspondent Brian Joseph writes that, when considering SB 918, Florida lawmakers were “candid about the fact that it was aimed in part at filling jobs vacated by undocumented immigrants, who made up 7.5 percent of the state’s total labor force as of 2022.”
“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be able to do this stuff,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a March panel discussion with White House “border czar” Tom Homan. Less than 7 percent of college students are under the age of 18, so despite DeSantis’s comment, the child labor laws in question would rarely ever apply.
But policy changes aren’t only being considered at the state level. As Truthout reported in October, Project 2025 proposes the repeal of a federal labor law that, since the 1930s, has banned children from working in “particularly hazardous” occupations. Currently, the federal government says that certain jobs, such as ones that require operating power saws or working in mines, are too dangerous for people under 18. But Project 2025’s authors argue that, “With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.”
Let us not fall for the Trump administration’s attempts at redirection. Instead, let’s listen to the voices of immigrant youth, who have wholeheartedly opposed ICE’s reign of masked terror.
“For weeks, armed ICE agents have lurked outside of courthouses and school graduations to carry out its mass abduction agenda, sweeping up moms and dads while they cry out for their children, kidnapping students and elementary kids on their way to volleyball practice, and detaining leaders and activists,” wrote Anabel Mendoza, director of communications for United We Dream Action — the largest immigrant youth-led network in the country — in a June statement about ICE raids in Los Angeles. “Now more than ever, this moment demands working people continue to build the unbreakable people power resistance needed to protect each other.”
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