BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KERO) — One year after U.S. Border Patrol carried out a three-day immigration enforcement operation in Kern County, residents and advocates say its effects are still being felt across the community.
The January 2025 operation, dubbed “Return to Sender,” resulted in the detention of 78 people and later prompted a lawsuit by the United Farm Workers Foundation. The suit led to a federal injunction restricting similar enforcement actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in California’s Eastern District. The federal government has since moved to lift that injunction, with a hearing scheduled for Feb. 5.
For Sara Fuentes, manager of a Chevron gas station near Merle Haggard Drive and Highway 65 in Bakersfield, the memory of that week remains vivid.
“When you kind of think back to that year and you look at sort of everything that's happened since then, what kind of runs through your head about what that operation here really was?” Fuentes said. “What it really was? That we lived it.”
Jan. 7, 2025, began as a typical morning at the station, with field and farmworkers stopping in for breakfast. That changed when Border Patrol agents began stopping customers outside the store, blocking vehicles and detaining people.
“She was just actually standing there, looking, and I asked her, what’s going on,” Fuentes recalled of a coworker who witnessed the arrests. “She was, ‘I don’t know, what’s going on? Why are they arresting these people?’”
Fuentes said she initially believed the activity would pass quickly, but the enforcement continued for three days and spread widely across social media. At the conclusion of the operation, Border Patrol said agents were targeting individuals with criminal and immigration histories.
But businesses reported an immediate downturn.
“They didn’t come in,” Fuentes said of customers. “Some of them, I heard, stayed home. They didn’t go out the whole week. They were scared.”
The economic impact extended well beyond individual storefronts, according to Aaron Hedge, executive director of the Grimm Family Center for Agricultural Business.
“If I were to estimate, for the economy, if all these individuals stayed at home for a week, then we’re looking at at least maybe a $10 million to $15 million impact onto the broader economy,” Hedge said.
Hedge estimates Kern County has roughly 50,000 farmworkers and believes as many as half may not have worked or gone out during that week. Some farms, he said, reported 30% to 40% of workers failing to show up, leaving crops unharvested.
“So there may be an element of those farms who didn’t see 30 to 40% of their workers coming in for even a week,” Hedge said. “That means a lot of the fruit didn’t get picked.”
In the months that followed, an independent investigation challenged Border Patrol’s account of the arrests. The investigation found that 77 of the 78 people detained had no prior criminal or immigration history, a discrepancy that became central to the lawsuit.
“The fact that so many individuals that were arrested as part of these raids had no prior criminal history, did not have warrants against them, signals that this has been a constitutional, unconstitutional practice,” said Edgar Aguilas Ocho, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs.
A federal judge ultimately issued an injunction halting similar raids. Aguilas Ocho said the Kern County operation foreshadowed recent enforcement-related incidents in other states, including Minnesota and Oregon.
“This was a foreseeable harm that was caused specifically by the Department of Homeland Security’s unlawful, unconstitutional raid in these communities,” he said.
Civil rights leader Dolores Huerta said the operation intensified fear among immigrant communities.
“It creates more fear about what ICE can do to our people in this community,” Huerta said.
She added that recent high-profile cases underscore those concerns. “If this can happen to an Anglo woman in Minnesota, then imagine how people of color and farmworkers here feel,” Huerta said.
Hedge said broader national trends could worsen labor shortages if enforcement actions continue.
“We’ve noticed in the U.S. — about 1.2 million undocumented migrants have left the country in the last year, and not as many are coming across the border,” he said. “If this continues for another three, four, or five years, it will be harder to get ag labor.”
The raids have also spurred legislative action in California, including Assembly Bill 49, which bars immigration agents from entering schools without a warrant, and renewed scrutiny of the federal H-2A farmworker visa program.
Rep. David Valadao said agriculture’s reliance on migrant labor should not be undermined by enforcement policy.
“There’s huge gaps in the system that we need to resolve,” Valadao said. “That’s some of the things that farm worker modernization helps us with.”
Valadao said immigration cases can be complex and sometimes involve past criminal records, while others raise questions about enforcement priorities.
“I’ve heard a couple of them where it was a grandma in California that I couldn’t find anything wrong and I didn’t understand,” he said. “So obviously we would reach out to the administration.”
While the injunction has reduced enforcement activity in Kern County, Fuentes said the emotional toll of the January 2025 operation lingers.
“Whatever’s going on out there, we already lived it,” she said. “Not as violently as recent activities, but we lived it. We know what they’re going through. It’s really sad what’s going on.”
The government’s motion to lift the injunction is scheduled to be heard Feb. 5.
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