To read Cy Neff's story, go here.
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MICHAEL DUNNE: I'm Michael Dunne. Perhaps it's a sign of the times, but we're almost getting strangely accustomed to ICE raids happening in nearly every community in America, armed and masked agents pulling people out of cars or out of their homes or businesses, and for most of us, the saga ends after the news segment switches to another topic. But what about what happens after the agents take their prisoners away today on the show, you'll hear from a reporter who spent time with a local family that has gone through this upheaval and how they're trying to cope. Yes, it's a story about how ice operates, but more so, it's a story about how families try to pick up the pieces when one of their members is taken away. Today on the show, you'll hear from a journalist who picks up the story of the aftermath of ice activity in the Willamette Valley wine region. Cy Neff, who wrote a recent story for The Guardian as well as the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Cy, thanks so much for coming on and talking with us.
CY NEFF: Thank you so much for having me.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I thought it was a very interesting piece, and certainly we in Oregon had seen this story, but you really brought out a lot of the human element. Why don't we start with this? Just generally, tell us about what you wrote and what you found out about this. You know, this family in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.
CY NEFF: So, this most recent piece was the second of a right now two part series, and it looked at a girl in her mid-20s, Alondra Sotelo Garcia, and how she's dealing with the deportation of her father, whose name was Moises, who was a beloved figure in the Oregon wine community, and she's sort of putting together the pieces after he left and has taken on the mantle of his business that you know, he has 30 years of experience in the Oregon wine industry, and she's trying to keep the business running with just a few months under her belt.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Tell us about Alondra as a person. And what I thought was very interesting in your piece is, you know, she really felt that this was her duty to take over the family business. And also, you know, they had kind of put it, put in place some procedures for if something like this were to happen. Talk about that as well.
CY NEFF: Yeah, so her father was taken this summer, and just weeks before he was taken, he Well, he runs a small vineyard management company, and another employee of his was taken just a few weeks before. You know these stories that are now so familiar to people in Oregon and across the country, masked agents, not identifying themselves, snatching somebody out of the car. So, he had some conversations with Alondra about, what if that happens to him, you know, what if that happens to me? And she said that she, just before he was taken, she said she put his iPhone location on her phone, and she started tracking it, and then, you know, just a few days later, if not the day after, he was taken by ICE agents. And to her when she was talking about it, what she told me was that her father spent, you know, decades building a level of experience in this field, and the money he made, made her life possible, and she just kind of felt that if she was going to leave the work behind, then it would just kind of cancel out the legacy that he was leaving, or sort of leave that behind as well. So, she did have this there was a pragmatism here, where it almost seemed that she was seeing around the corner or saw the writing on the wall, but she also just was refusing to let those decades of work that her father did just be tossed to the side.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Yeah, maybe talk a little bit more about how Moises was taken. We're all so familiar with we've seen videos and eyewitness accounts of like, like you said, you know, masked agents just appearing out of nowhere. I mean, was this a surprise raid and where he was? Can you talk a little bit about sort of that process that he had to go through?
CY NEFF: Yeah, of course. So, his process was pretty was pretty intense. It was he went through a pretty intense process, for sure, he was taken pretty close to the family's house, just a few minutes up the road, Alondra. I've heard this second hand through Alondra, okay, but he said that when he started driving out of their house, you know, headed to work that morning, he saw a truck parked in just a spot off the side of the road where locals know you don't park it's a no Park zone. He saw that, and he thought to himself, that's kind of strange. And then this truck started following him. And I think my understanding for us, you told me, is that's when he started realizing what was going on. Eventually, he was corralled in by a few trucks, and you know, the familiar you can get out of the car, or we're going to take you out of the car. So, he chose to get out of the car. And within, I believe within, even just that same morning, some neighbors called Alondra, got word to Alondra somehow, and said, Hey, your dad's truck is parked on the side of the road and it's empty. There's nobody in it. So, she starts tracking his location, and she says she sees it's hot on i Five and is headed to Portland, so for the next few weeks, he's getting bounced around. So, he's in Portland, and he calls her from a number that they don't recognize, and he says, Hey, I've been taken and she says, I know we're taking care of it. We're on top of it. And they hang up. And so, for the next few weeks, he's in Portland. He's getting sent up to a facility in Tacoma. He's getting sent down to a facility in Arizona. And she goes, Alondra gets on a plane to try and find her father. She goes down to Arizona. It's a town called Florence, Arizona, and she goes there. And she asked to see her father, and the employees say, we don't know where he is at the facility. And she says, you know, the tracker says he's here. I came all the way. I came all the way here from Oregon to come find my father. And the employees just didn't know where he was. So, it was a lot of that trying to kind of trace her father through the belly of the ice system with a lot of difficulty. And at some point, there was a decision and a hearing that did not go his way. And they're at a crossroads where, you know, he he could fight it, they could try to keep fighting it, knowing that they would likely lose. Or he just kind of told her, I I don't know what the benefit is is of continuing to fight these decisions and continuing to fight this, I think it's just going to be easier if we let this happen.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Yeah, I know in talking with Alondra, and certainly in your reporting, she seems like she's a very strong person who is almost pragmatic in what's happening. But I am wondering, did she express to you what were the emotions that she was going through at this time? It must have been a whole host of things, anger, frustration and sadness, but, but I want to hear from you what she expressed to you.
CY NEFF: It sounded to me like for a while, yes, she was overwhelmed. Yes, she was sad and frustrated. But it wasn't necessarily a luxury, like feeling all those things at that point in time was not a luxury that she had. It was kind of tires, you know, rubber needs to hit the pavement and we need to keep going. So, her mother was very distraught throughout this, and so the burden sort of fell on Alondra to be the one that was coordinating with the people that were left at the business, so the one that was talking to lawyers, arranging interviews with the media and just kind of keeping the ship moving. She's used the word traumatized more than a few times, and she was speaking with me, and especially regarding her father's experience in the ice system. He has not told her everything that happened to him, and she does not expect him to but, yeah, she said she was generally traumatized, but also you just kind of, when things are happening like that, you don't have the time to process. You just have to keep moving.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I'd love for you to also kind of explain how the community saw Moises and sort of, you know, talked about the kind of. Person he was to that community.
CY NEFF: Yeah, so when I was interviewing people for the original piece and this follow up piece, the characterizations that I repeatedly were hearing was, you know, this is the man that gave you the shirt off of his back, a level of mentorship, especially for some people in the Oregon wine industry, where I was talking to people who said, you know that he is who helped them get their start when they came here, he was working in the industry for about 30 years, who is very involved in his church as well. And so when I spoke with Alondra, she one thing that she was saying is, you know, with both her parents now down in Mexico, as her mother chose to follow her father down there, that they're not necessarily sure what to do with all this empty time that they have because him and her Mother, Irma, are both so used to this constant grind of work, work, work, go to church, take care of your family, but really, however, the community. Are the words that people kept saying to me again and again when I was conducting my interviews here.
MICHAEL DUNNE: And then I'm wondering too, you know, taking somebody like Moises out of the community, out of the industry. And obviously, for people listening, they know how important the wine industry is in the Willamette Valley and for the state. I mean, this is, this is someone like you said, who's been working in this industry for a long time, and I imagine, has very important work to do. How does this impact just the general community?
CY NEFF: We're seeing the collision of policy and the reality that we have right. You know you can there is the argument that can be made, and that people have made to me through emails since these pieces published, that at the end of the day, this is somebody who was not documented and has to go. But it does also raise the question, when those people are here for so long, and when they become so entrenched in community, when they own businesses, what then, right like? The answer is never that simple. We now have a daughter that is left to pick up where her father left off when she, by all accounts, was looking to have maybe more of the liberties that you would expect from being in your mid-20s, maybe more of the choices that you get to decide what your life path will be.
MICHAEL DUNNE: As I was reading your piece, I was thinking, this is sort of the classic example of the ripple effect. Is that one action taken for one person that that creates ripples throughout the community?
CY NEFF: Yeah, I would agree with you on that it's he's not alone, as you know, in the valley, there's been a lot of people taken and looking at communities like this, I do wonder how many similar stories there are. How many other children are stepping up to pick up where their parents left off, or how many businesses are kind of being run with the skeleton crew, or maybe no longer being run at all?
MICHAEL DUNNE: Cy, maybe you've done a little bit of this, but to pull the thread a little bit more, you know, put into context what Alondra is having to do, but how so many other families are trying to fill this void, as we've talked about. I mean, when you take a person out of an industry, out of a family, out of a community, talk about, through Alondra’s eyes what her life is like now?
CY NEFF: Before her father was taken, Alondra lived, I believe, about a half hour from her family, home with a friend. She was working a remote job that had nothing to do with wine. After her father was taken, that Job was quit, she moves back home, and now her father's work, sort of her life, is sort of centered around it. The family home is also serves as a de facto office for the business. So, you have workers coming and going to grab lunch breaks, use the bathroom, things like that. It's kind of gone from, you know, pretty relatively normal 20s existence to much closer to what the life that her father is living directly and as well she's having to her parents are down in Mexico. Her younger brother that lives with her just graduated high school. He's 18 years old, so there's also a lot of responsibilities, financially, just food on the table, bills to pay, both in Oregon and down in Mexico that she. Now has to figure out that at the beginning of 2025 were not a question for her. It's an entirely different life than the one that she probably had lined up for herself even a year ago right now.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Do you have any idea how Moises and Alondra’s mother are doing in Mexico? Is she able to get somewhat regular reports about their welfare and how things are going?
CY NEFF: So, they're very close, and she has told me that she's actually been able to go down there a few times when her father was initially deported, she went down there for first time with him, to help him sort of settle in for a new life. You know, go get a Mexican ID, go do all of those little things that you have to do to start rebuilding a new life. I believe that she was down there once again with her mother, father, and then it was either her third or fourth trip down there. She flew down to surprise her parents just before the holidays and made it back up to Oregon to spend Christmas with her brother. But she said it was a really sweet visit in many ways, but it was also a really hard goodbye, you know, coming back to the States just a few days before Christmas. And she's also been clear that, while it's great to share these memories and to see, you know, like a little more of this town that her parents came from, she's been really clear that this isn't for her, like, it's not a vacation. It's great to share this with her parents, but it's just hard, it's heavy, and it's not what she asked for.
MICHAEL DUNNE: While this is all happening, is some of your reporting talked about the fact that this is a tough time for the wine business right now as well, isn't it?
CY NEFF: So, you're seeing a pretty sizable downturn in consumer demand for wine across the world. You add in the tariffs that are, you know, always adding a level of uncertainty for any export heavy industry. And you're also adding in for the Willamette Valley, specifically, you guys have, I believe it's over 700 wineries there, so it's a pretty saturated market. It's just, it's just not the easiest industry to get into right now or to cement yourself in. And there's, it's not all doom and gloom, but consistently for the winemakers I was speaking with, it's definitely it's not the easiest times they've had. And you're also adding in this labor market instability, right, where a lot of your workforce and a lot of the agricultural workforce is definitely in a much more tenuous position under this administration. So, you're looking at all these factors lined up, and you're in a laundry shoes, right? And you're trying to figure out, how do I keep this ship steady in some very choppy waters?
MICHAEL DUNNE: There has been so much heated rhetoric about immigration, and there's a lot of people who say, you know, hey, if you're here illegally, you're breaking the law, and you should be deported. And there's also this undercurrent that oftentimes come comes from the political hard right about, you know, and from the president himself about, you know, crime and and drugs and this sort of a thing, given how much time you spent with Alondra and learning about Moises, and, you know, paint a picture of this family that perhaps, you know is, is, is the reality on the ground in in a place like the Willamette Valley here in Oregon, about a family just trying to live the American Dream, and, and, and, you know, live their lives and how that might be in in contrast to what that narrative has been painted.
CY NEFF: So, you have this family, you have a father who was enough of a figure in the community that, you know the guardian. We picked his story up due to intense local media coverage, due to the amount of people in the industry that rallied around him, from his industry, from his church, from across the state of Oregon. This is a story that was on everybody's radar for that contrast that you're talking about, right? This was not, this is not the kind of person who was advertised as a potential deportee on the campaign trail. And I recognize, since writing this piece with a lot of the mail I've gotten, that for some people, it will always be as black and white as what is. Legal and what is not, and that's not something that this piece necessarily explored. It was more just looking at who, who are the families that are left behind. I think it's clear, in regards to your question, that looking at this man who is a consistent presence in his church, and who and his family made this GoFundMe to see if the community would rally behind him. Raised money from across the state, across the country, and notably from a lot of big names in the Oregon wine industry. This is not the worst of the worst that was promised on the campaign trail, right and with Alondra stepping up to fill his shoes, it's not like this is just simply not what or who we were told would be gone after and I know from reading the feedback that journalists like me and other journalists who write about this, that they're at the end of the day will still be the folks who hold their hard line on illegality or not. But this does, to me, call in the questions of humanity under these policies, under this or past administration, and what, again, the real applicability is here and where the black and whiteness of laws just intersects with the reality of what's happening In communities in America everywhere.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Cy Neff, who wrote this story for The Guardian as well as the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Cy, really appreciate your reporting and coming on and talking about it.
CY NEFF: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on, Michael.
MICHAEL DUNNE: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon On The Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. He's the award-winning former conductor of the Eugene symphony, and he's back for a special event. Tomorrow on the show, you'll hear from Giancarlo Guerrero. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon On The Record, thanks for listening.
