By Emmanuel Williams
It’s time to update my personal stance on immigration based on the raid on the farms of a cannabis company in California on Thursday, July 11.
My attitude about the ICE raids and the United States immigration question at large is that with Donald Trump’s administration, it feels like a purge by an elitist.
If not, an elitist regime. I say regime because at this point calling it The Trump Administration feels now like a formal courtesy, not an accurate assessment of the group now holding power in the White House.
The immigrant population in America is being targeted, imprisoned, and stripped from their preferred home as citizens of the United States based on whether or not they arrived illegally.
That begs the question of what does “illegal immigration to the United States” mean?
There are constitutional definitions, there are local definitions and federal definitions, even definitions that vary on a state by state basis, down to county by county. Especially as you get down to the southern border.
The message from this regime is that based on the new definition of illegal immigration which seems to have been elevated to “these people are only here to hurt us, and they are criminals trafficking fentanyl into the country at the very least.”
No one has said that complete sentence and used it in legal rooms, but that was the tone of Trump at the beginning of his term, brought in straight from his campaign for president.
Where is the evidence that immigrants from the southern border are arriving with fentanyl or any illegal substances? Why are such a high percentage (close to the entire population) of those who are detained by ICE members of the Spanish speaking community?
As if since someone speaks no English, but Spanish only, they should be detained and deported by ICE.
That is the sad full picture here. It’s American English Elitism. And it isn’t a new idea.
It reminds us of Colonial history where those who didn’t use English were members of the land being conquered by settlers who simply had to be pushed out or made to serve the regime of the day. They were typically called savages by the elite, organized, settler community and if they were not compliant they were displaced, held captive, or simply killed for their defiance.
How do I feel about the oppression of a beautiful language like Spanish and the bordering South American population by barring its people from being integrated into our previously welcoming nation who flourished alongside our Mexican and South American brothers and sisters for centuries before ICE became the Gestapo of the American President?
Enraged.
Incensed.
Furious.
Yet feeble, stuck, inadequate.
Because I can’t find the right thing to do about this.
I can’t stop the President of the United States from stretching the power of the oval office to include the eradication of an entire… race of people… from the country.
I feel like I’m eating at his restaurant and a large party wants to eat here but since they don’t speak english, he’s called the cops to escort them off the premises while making up a drug charge they all committed so they can be locked up and taken back to wherever he’d like them kept.
He needs to be fired. He needs to leave this restaurant that he inherited because his leadership cannot last.
You hear me?
It cannot last!
Because I’m booing at every headline, and I can’t wait to vote again.
The following is the New York Times article, in it’s entirety, which includes a link to 30 minute footage of the clash at a cannabis farm in California where ICE faced off with the surrounding community as they attempted to execute “criminal warrants”.
*
Federal Agents Clash With Protesters During Immigration Raid at California Farm
Officers appeared to use crowd control munitions and tear gas against protesters. The F.B.I. said it was searching for a person who appeared to fire a pistol at officers.
July 11, 2025, 2:09 a.m. ET
Federal agents raided a large cannabis farm in Southern California on Thursday, clashing with protesters and arresting multiple people, the latest confrontation in a state that has become a flashpoint for President Trump’s immigration agenda.
Footage taken by local news media from helicopters showed the agents firing tear gas and crowd control munitions during the operation in Camarillo, Calif. The agents were “executing criminal search warrants,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said on social media.
Rodney Scott, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said on social media that “10 juveniles,” eight of them unaccompanied, were found at one of the facilities raided on Thursday, and that all of them were in the country illegally.
The federal operation on Thursday was the latest in a series of immigration raids that have triggered demonstrations and caused panic in Latino communities across California, and prompted a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration to stop them. Some Republican lawmakers have also pleaded with President Trump to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants with criminal backgrounds.
Federal agents went to multiple cannabis cultivation facilities owned by Glass House Farms on Thursday. In addition to the facility in Camarillo, which is spread across 5.5 million square feet in Ventura County, there was also a raid around 35 miles away at the company’s farm in Carpinteria, Calif., local media and immigrant rights groups said.
The company said on social media that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials came to its facilities and that it complied with the search warrants. It is legal for licensed companies to grow cannabis in California.
It was not immediately clear how many federal agencies were involved in the operation, and if they were assisted by National Guard troops. Some footage aired by local media showed armored military-style vehicles at the farms. The Ventura County Fire Department said it deployed to the Camarillo area only to provide medical aid and was not involved in any immigration action.
During the clash near Camarillo, a person appeared to fire a pistol at law enforcement officers, the F.B.I. said, offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to that individual’s conviction.
Bill Essayli, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said that multiple individuals were arrested for “impeding” the operation, warning in a social media post that those interfering would be arrested and charged with a federal offense.
ICE and the Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to requests for information made outside business hours.
Thursday’s raids were sharply criticized by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, as well as Representative Salud Carbajal, a Democrat, who said that he tried to enter the area in Carpinteria where ICE was operating but was denied entry.
“This was completely unacceptable,” Mr. Carbajal said in a statement, criticizing what he described as a “troubling lack of transparency.”
SOURCES:
Albeck-Ripka, L. (n.d.). Federal agents clash with protesters during immigration raid at California Farm – The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/us/ice-raid-california-cannabis-farm.html
STICKFIST 
Leave a comment