The Trump administration’s deadly raid on a California marijuana farm last week is terrifying farmworkers and has the state’s legal cannabis industry panicking that the administration is specifically targeting licensed farms for immigration enforcement.
Thursday’s raid hit two facilities owned by Glass House Brands, a publicly traded company and one of the state’s largest cannabis growers, and quickly descended into chaos. Masked federal agents fired tear gas to disperse protesting crowds — a protester was seen apparently firing a weapon at officers outside the facility — and one 57-year-old worker fell off a greenhouse while fleeing agents, suffering fatal injuries and becoming the first known death in the president’s immigration crackdown. Federal officers arrested multiple people, including a CSU Channel Islands professor.
The Department of Homeland Security said in an emailed news release that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested at least 361 people who were in the U.S. illegally during the two raids and additionally said 14 “migrant children” were found during the raids. The agency did not respond to an SFGATE request for the legal documentation behind those figures, nor did it specify the ages of the 14 young people.
The California Department of Cannabis Control said in a statement to SFGATE that Glass House was already under investigation for employing minors, defined as people under the age of 21, prior to the federal raids.
Glass House denied the accusations in a post to X last week, writing: “Glass House has never knowingly violated applicable hiring practices and does not and has never employed minors.” The company did not return multiple SFGATE requests for comment.
California’s licensed cannabis industry is particularly vulnerable to immigration raids because marijuana is still illegal on the federal level, giving federal law enforcement wide latitude to arrest both workers and employers. Even though the farms are legal according to the state of California, the crop that workers are cultivating is illegal in the eyes of the federal government, meaning even an entry-level worker at a cannabis facility could face federal charges for handling cannabis. Raiding cannabis farms is also an easier political sell for the Trump administration than, say, raiding the produce farms that are dotted all over California’s Central Valley, which is much more conservative than the rest of the state. (Trump already responded to criticism from his own base that the widespread raids were impacting farming economies.)
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These vulnerabilities have made cannabis farms a prime target for the Trump administration. Last weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters that federal agents had been building a case for “weeks and weeks” before they raided Glass House’s facilities. Federal agents had tried to raid the company’s Camarillo farm in early June when they conducted a widespread campaign at farms across Ventura County, but Glass House shut its gates on the agents when they didn’t supply a warrant during that June raid.
Federal agents returned to the Camarillo facility last week with warrants, according to a Glass House post on X. The operation also raided another Glass House facility 30 miles away in Carpinteria but did not raid a single other farm in the entire region, according to Lucas Zucker, a co-executive director of the farm labor group the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy.
Jim Araby, a strategic campaigns director at the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents cannabis workers, said he wouldn’t be surprised if more cannabis farms are raided in the future.
“The sad thing in all of this is that you have a group of people just trying to make ends meet, and now they have become pawns in this administration’s attempt to crack down on illegal immigration,” Araby said.
Trump’s violent crackdown on immigration has already started to polarize his political base, with major conservative pundits like Joe Rogan questioning the ethics of deporting noncriminals, and Republican leaders arguing that Trump’s fight against farmworkers will hurt the supply chain and industry profits.
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Thursday’s raids had some of the most chaotic scenes yet in Trump’s crackdown, yet they also apparently gave Republicans a safe talking point on the otherwise controversial issue of raids in farm country. House Speaker Mike Johnson posted to X in support of the actions at Glass House’s facilities, and the White House employed its now-common tactic of sharing memes to promote raiding the cannabis farm, using a digitally manipulated image of California Rep. Jimmy Gomez to say that the raid wasn’t targeting produce but rather “PRODUCT.”
Cannabis farms like Glass House are an “easy target” because people don’t sympathize with them as much as they do with other types of farms, according to Zucker.
“This administration are masters of stagecraft, they know how to set up a situation that’s made for the cameras, and that’s certainly what played out here,” Zucker said. “There was some incredible community resistance to this, but they want to pick something that’s unsympathetic.”
*This article first appeared on SFGATE.com