This report from the LA Times, published on 12 July 2025.
Trump administration officials defended the aggressive campaign to find and deport unauthorized immigrants even as a cannabis farmworker was taken off life support two days after he plunged from a roof amid the mayhem of a Ventura County raid.
The death of Jaime Alanís Garcia, 57, announced on Saturday 12 July 2025 by his family, comes amid a climate of increasing tension marked by weeks of militaristic raids, street protests and violent melees involving federal agents.
Alanís’ family said he was fleeing immigration agents at the Glass House Farms cannabis operation in Camarillo on Thursday, 10 July 2025, when he climbed atop a greenhouse and accidentally fell 30 feet, suffering catastrophic injury.
But the Department of Homeland Security said that Alanís was not among those being pursued and that federal agents called in a medevac for him. Federal authorities said afterward that they detained 361 purported unlawful immigrants in the crackdowns at the site in Camarillo and another cannabis grow operation in Carpinteria owned by the same company, as well as protesters who allegedly sought to shut down the raid.
Four U.S. citizens were arrested on suspicion of assaulting or resisting officers, according to the DHS.
Alanís was taken to the Ventura County Medical Center, where he was put on life support. His niece announced his death Saturday on a GoFundMe page, which described him as a husband, father and the family’s sole provider. The page had raised more than $149,000 by noon Sunday, well over its initial $50,000 goal.
“They took one of our family members. We need justice,” the niece wrote.
Alanís was not the only Glass House worker to take to the roofs.
Irma Perez said her nephew, Fidel Buscio, 24, was among a group of men who climbed atop the high glass greenhouses. He sent her videos, which she shared with The Times, that showed federal agents on the ground below, and told her the workers had been fired at with tear-gas canisters. One image shows the broken glass of the roof. In another, Buscio has blood on his shirt and his arm is bandaged, she said. He eventually was apprehended.
Federal officials said that among those picked up in the raids were 14 minors.
Several of the teens had no parent with them, officials said. Because of that, federal officials said the legal cannabis farm, one of California’s largest, is now under investigation for unspecified child labor violations.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, speaking at an event Saturday in Tampa, Fla., told reporters that getting the children out of the farm was part of the plan from the start.
“We went there because we knew, specifically from casework we had built for weeks and weeks and weeks, that there was children there that could be trafficked, being exploited, that there was individuals there involved in criminal activity,” she said.
Glass House has said it did not violate labor law.
The assertion of a prior child labor investigation comes on the heels of a federal judge’s order barring federal immigration officials from picking up people at random, based on their ethnicity or occupation.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said Saturday on X that one of the men apprehended in the raid had a criminal record for kidnapping, attempted rape and attempted child molestation.
Noem decried what she called the “horrendous” behavior of demonstrators who protested Thursday’s raid in Camarillo, referencing videos showing rocks being hurled at the vehicles of federal agents, breaking windows.
“Those individuals that were attacking those officers were trying to kill them,” she said.
“Let me be clear. You don’t throw rocks at vehicles like that, and you don’t attack them like that, unless you are trying to do harm to them physically and to kill them and to take their life.”
Decades of work helping cannabis workers through the ordeals of federal drug raids didn’t prepare Ventura County activist Sarah Armstrong for the mayhem and trauma she witnessed during the Glass House Farms raid, she said.
A military helicopter swung low over fields to flush out anyone hiding among the crops, while federal agents fired tear-gas canisters at protesters lining the farm road. In the crush of events, someone shoved a gas mask into Armstrong’s hands and pulled her to safety.
“It was, in my opinion, overkill,” the 72-year-old woman said. “What I saw were very frightened, very angry people.”
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