In the early morning hours of 12 June, Moises Sotelo woke up to go to work in the rolling hills ofOregon’s Willamette Valley wine country, a place he has called home for decades.
But this morning was not business as usual. A car tailed Sotelo as soon as he left his driveway, according to an account from his coworker. Trucks surrounded him just outside of St Michael’s Episcopal church, where he was detained by federal immigration agents. By the end of the day, Sotelo was in an Ice detention facility.
“He was in chains at his feet,” Alondra Sotelo-Garcia tolda local news outletabout seeing her father arrested. “Shoelaces were taken off, his belt was off, he didn’t have his ring, he didn’t have his watch. Everything was taken from him.”
His detention has sent shockwaves through the tight-knitOregonwine community. Sotelo is a fixture of local industry – in 2020 he was awarded with the Vineyard Excellence Award from the Oregon Wine Board and in 2024 he established his own small business maintaining vineyards.
Left in the lurch is Sotelo’s family, the church he attends, the employees of his small business, the vineyards he works with and friends made along the way. Requests to Ice from family or attorneys regarding next steps in Sotelo’s detention are hitting dead ends.
Anthony Van Nice, the owner of a local vineyard, first worked with Sotelo in the mid 1990s when Van Nice was a “cellar rat” getting his start in the wine industry.He considers Sotelo a friend and said he was “disappointed and disgusted” by the arrest, and the government’s treatment of immigrants.
“My concern is about my friends and neighbors who are getting rounded up by Ice,” Van Nice told the Guardian. “We built this country on the backs of immigrant labor … To just round them up like criminals and throw them into these overcrowded detention centers, send them packing without telling their family or attorneys where they are or where they’re going, it’s inhumane. It’s a human rights issue.”
Sotelo’s detention comes as Ice raids on farmworkers are heating up in Oregon’s wine country and across the US. The Trump administrationbriefly directedUS immigration agents to shift their focus away from farms, onlyto abruptly reverse coursethis week. Meanwhile, reports ofmasked, unidentified agentsconducting workplaceraids have become commonplace. America’s agricultural industry, where at least42% of workersare estimated by the US Department of Labor to be undocumented, is exemplifying the practical limits of Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.
Victoria Reader, who works for Sotelo as a vineyard manager, would know. She was in the car on 6 June, a week before Sotelo’s arrest, when another employee was also taken. Reader says that agents were masked and refused to identify themselves.
“They didn’t identify themselves. They just came out. They didn’t even say anything. They just started trying to open the doors,” Reader said. “I kept asking, who are you? What are you doing? And they wouldn’t answer.”
Reader said that agents would not tell her what immigration laws her employee violated, threatened her with assault of an officer for asking questions and told her she was not allowed to follow their cars or know where her employee was being taken.
“I’m doing the best I can to keep my crew safe and protected, but there’s only so much I can do,” Reader said. “But long term, this isn’t sustainable for human life, it’s not sustainable for business, it’s not sustainable for this industry, it’s not sustainable for agriculture and this country.”
Bubba King, the Yamhill county commissioner, said that he’s seen fear spread through his community in response to the raids.
“When a large part of the workforce is afraid to come to work or of being detained, everything is affected,” King said.
In astatement sent to local outlet KGW, Ice alleged that Sotelo “first entered the United States illegally in 2006” and has a “criminal conviction for DUI in Newberg, Oregon”. Sotelo’s family says that he came to the United States in the early 1990s. The Yamhill county district attorney’s officetold local outletsthat they had found no evidence of DUI charges.
Sotelo was first taken to a detention facility in Portland. By the weekend, he was in anIce processing centerin Tacoma, Washington. On Tuesday, Van Nice drove up to Tacoma to visit his friend. But Sotelo wasn’t there.
“The Ice official told me they are under no obligation to tell the family or the attorneys of the detainees that they have been apprehended, or that they’ve been moved to another state, to another facility, or that they’ve been deported,” Van Nice said. “I told him I thought that sounded wrong, and he said, ‘Well, that’s the way it is.’”
On Wednesday morning, Ice’sdetainee locatorshowed that Sotelo had been moved more than 1,500 miles south-west to theAkima-runFlorence service processing center in the Arizona desert. Ice did not notify the family or their lawyers about the relocation.
In response to a Guardian inquiry about whether Ice had no obligation to inform families and attorneys of a detainees status, a spokesperson for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) replied, “that is correct”. Ice did not respond to other questions about the case, including whether officers had a warrant or any documentation of a criminal record for Sotelo.
The Sotelos have seen a flood of support from Oregon’s wine-growing community, including a GoFundMe that has raised over $100,000 so far.
Tributes to his character have also poured in. Reader said she came to Oregon two years ago with ambitions of working in the wine industry. Sotelo, with decades of experience and roots in the area, gave her a chance to make it her home as well.
“He took me under his wing and guided me and made Oregon feel like home,” Reader said. “If he did that for me then there’s so many other countless people that he’s done that for.”
Van Nice is grateful for the attention and support Sotelo has received and said he, and others, will keep fighting for his friend to come home. He also wonders, in the Willamette Valley and beyond, about the people that aren’t as well known.
“Moises is well known in our community,” Van Nice said. “There’s countless other people that we don’t know. We don’t know their names, we don’t know how many have been detained, and they’re just lost in this system, which seems designed to make them disappear.”