Nearly one year ago, Jaime Alanís García quickly climbed a greenhouse roof to escape a violent immigration raid. He died from the fall. Alanís was one of more than 360 farmworkers detained when a massive force of federal agents descended on Glass House Farms in Carpinteria and Camarillo on July 10. More than 360 farmworkers were detained and 14 children were taken into custody in what is now one of the largest single-state ICE worksite operations in American history. As that anniversary approaches, his story, and those of the hundreds detained alongside him, would not be told without the community’s own insistence.
The silence that pervades local and national coverage about ongoing ICE raids is not coincidental.
As director of a research center at UC Santa Barbara focused on poverty and inequality, and as a scholar who has spent years embedded in the communities now living under this enforcement surge, I have watched the gap between what is happening and what is being recorded grow wider by the day.
Many regard the persecution of immigrant communities on the Central Coast in the past tense, not realizing that the number of detentions grows by the day. Organizers with the 805 UndocuFund and the 805 Rapid Response Network have carefully documented 2,153 incidents of ICE detentions across the Central Coast since early 2025: 1,038 in Ventura County and 870 in Santa Barbara County. This is data collected by people who have lived closest to ICE’s impact in these counties. Families have been separated. Children have been left without parents. Local economies built on immigrant labor have been destabilized. And fear has become the daily condition of life for those most impacted. This is not a past event — it is very much present and continuing.
Last week, Congress handed ICE $70 billion — enough to fund the agency at more than three times its annual budget through the end of Trump’s term — with virtually no oversight requirements attached. ICE is now the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency in history.
What we urgently need and do not yet have are “testimonios”: the first-person accounts of the people living through this — the people who are confined to their homes, who are afraid to seek medical care, who are no longer able to work, and whose children are suffering from the detention and deportation of their parents. Without their stories, we cannot know what is truly happening in real time, how their day-to-day life has been affected, or how often the law is being disregarded by ICE agents.
This is why the UCSB Blum Center on Poverty Inequality and Democracy and the UCSB Community Labor Center are collaborating with 805 Undocufund to launch two powerful data projects: first, Archives of Survival, a community-centered documentation project will gather testimonios from families affected by ICE enforcement across the Central Coast. We are also developing urgent, one-to-two-page research briefs that map the fiscal and human costs of raids, detentions, and deportations, designed for use at County Supervisors meetings, in civic advocacy, and in state-level policy conversations where data from 805 UndocuFund has already begun to shape legislative discussion.
We draw inspiration from the Works Progress Administration’s oral history projects of the 1930s, which produced the largest collection of first-person slave narratives ever assembled in the United States. Those accounts did not merely document; they transformed our understanding of American history. Gathered in a moment of urgency, these ethnographies anchored scholarship, legal arguments, and moral reckonings that continue to this day.
We are in such a moment now.
Some will argue that scholars should observe and analyze, not intervene. But the first principle of engaged scholarship is that universities and communities are stronger when they work together. Some of the most consequential social research in American history has been built on exactly this kind of partnership: collaborative, accountable, and rooted in the lives of those most affected. This project stands in that tradition.
Others may question whether testimonios constitute evidence. They do. First-person accounts have anchored landmark legal cases, shaped federal policy, and shifted public understanding on issues from labor rights to environmental justice.
ProPublica’s reporting on the Dilley detention facility, built on accounts from detained children, is one recent example of what testimony can make visible. What communities know, and how they name what has happened to them, is data. It is history. It deserves the same care and rigor as any other source.
Dehumanization is what makes mass enforcement campaigns possible. It requires neighbors not to see and institutions not to record. There are too many instances in history that have demonstrated that the opposite of accountability is not cruelty: it is indifference.
Archives of Survival is our refusal to be indifferent. It is a commitment to ensuring that the peoples’ histories are written by and for the people who live them.
Gaye Theresa Johnson is the Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.
