On her second day as President Pro Tem of the State Senate — the first Santa Barbaran, the first mother, and the first Latina ever to hold this high position — Monique Limón discussed her farmworker roots at a press conference convened on a 57-acre farm in Ventura that’s been owned by the same family for generations. Limón recounted how her grandfather picked strawberries on the Oxnard plain just as he also picked tomatoes up in Salinas.
While discussing the importance of preserving the land, the knowledge about it, and the excitement young kids feel just at being outside in the fields, Limón also reflected on the fear inflicted on farmworkers and their families by the ICE raids under the Trump administration.
“It’s not lost on us while we’re having this conversation, there are members of this community who feel the uncertainty, the fear, the concern about the safety issue, about the immigration issue,” Limón stated.
Limón shared the microphone with Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, among several other speakers, including Ventura Assemblymember Steve Bennett. Rivas noted that California agriculture has managed to thrive in spite of actions by the Trump administration. Tariffs have hurt, he said, but the “unprecedented enforcement raids,” he said, have caused “chaos; it’s caused fear; it’s caused uncertainty. It’s unacceptable.”
Showing up alongside Limón and Rivas was the head of the California Farm Bureau Shannon Douglass, not to mention the chair of the Assembly’s Agriculture Committee Esmeralda Soria.
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