Four days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, farmworkers and community members gathered in Half Moon Bay to commemorate the two-year anniversary of a mass shooting at two nearby mushroom farms that left seven farmworkers dead.
The change in administration cast a shadow over the event. The turnout might have been larger if not for the fear the undocumented farmworker community has experienced since Trump took office, said Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, founder and executive director of Ayudando Latinos a Soñar (ALAS), a nonprofit that advocates for farmworker mental health and the organizer of the commemoration.
“We did know that people are already starting to be afraid to gather and to be in certain spaces,” Hernandez-Arriaga said. “There were community members that would have liked to have been there but are taking precautions, and rightfully so.”
Farmworkers who were affected by the shooting have spent two years trying to heal from the trauma of Jan. 23, 2023. But with a new political administration aggressively pursuing detention and deportation, healing is taking a backseat to anxiety.
“Can we heal with this upon us? No,” Hernandez-Arriaga, a licensed clinician, said. “We were a vulnerable, fragile community coming out of something so traumatic. And we’re still hurting for our seven that we lost…with gun violence and now we see societal violence added to this.”
On the night of the vigil, guest speakers shared messages of support to undocumented farmworkers. San Mateo County Supervisor Ray Mueller said the county would stand behind farmworkers. “Everyone at the county I spoke to had one thing to say, and that’s that we stand with the undocumented community,” he told the crowd of about 70 attendees.
Still, the days since Trump took office have left Half Moon Bay farmworkers and their advocates reeling Hernandez-Arriaga said the organization is fielding reports of harassment, false accusations of an immigration enforcement presence and received a postcard telling the organization to pack their bags. For the first time, ALAS has hired security.
The stressful conditions, she said, make it impossible for undocumented farmworkers to maintain their mental health.
“The fear that everyone’s waking up to now is a heightened alarm,” she said. “This is what I call immigration trauma…A heightened sense of fear, on alert, physically ill, can’t sleep. It impedes your daily functioning, affects your well-being. People are scared, having nightmares, not sleeping. And so we need to be thinking about what we’re doing to the children, what we’re doing to families, what we’re doing to individuals.”
