On Friday, Jan. 10, four men worked quickly in a cold storage facility in Downtown Los Angeles, loading a van with vegetables. The normally chatty crew were nearly silent as they transferred potatoes, carrots, beets, radishes, cabbage, greens and other produce that they had just trucked in from the fields near Bakersfield. The rest of the ordinarily bustling facility, with 20-some loading docks, was empty.
The owner of the farm, one of the best-known stars of the L.A. restaurant and farmers market scene, had revealed in an earlier phone call that agents from U.S. Border Patrol had been to the gates of their farm the day before, and many other farms in Bakersfield, looking to detain undocumented workers — including these men. The farmer asked we not use the name of the farm or any of their longtime workers, because they feared being targeted in an immigration raid.
