Thursday, October 8 | Volume 40 No. 30

ICE Detains Indigenous Mixtec Farmworker, a Single Mother, for ‘Asking Questions’

By Araceli Martinez

Westsidestory Newspaper

For Black Voters, Midterms Hinge on Uneven Turnout, Redistricting

By Selen OZturk

OXNARD, CA — On the morning of September 18, as the first rays of sun began to appear in the sky, María made her way to the strawberry fields in Oxnard, Cali fornia. Riding with a friend, she was barely a block from her home when their car was suddenly surrounded. “Three or four vehicles approached, with masked men inside. They flashed their lights or dering us to pull over,” recalled María, 35, who asked that we only use her first name for fear of gov ernment reprisals. “They told us they were looking for a man,” she continued. “My friend told them he wasn’t the person they were looking for, but they demanded he show ID. And when they realized that he was undocumented, they detained him immediately.” ‘My world came crashing down’ Oxnard, located in Ventura County, is an agricultural community about an hour north of Los Angeles. The city — where nearly 80% of residents identify as Latino — is home to a sizable migrant farmworker population, many of them, including María, from Mexico’s Indigenous Mixteco community. Many are also undocumented. A single mother of four — ages 17, 12, 10 and 2, all born in the US — María first came to Oxnard in 2007 after leaving her home in Oaxaca, in the far south of Mexico. It had been months since she had last worked. Her friend, the man arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), had offered to drive her to a nearby farm that morning where he said she might find a paying job. Later, as María watched nervously while agents handcuffed her friend, she decided to speak out in his defense. “Why are you taking him if he isn’t the one you were looking for,” she demanded. “At that moment they turned toward me and said they would arrest me, too, for asking questions and complaining,” María recounted.

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As Black voters remain the country’s most reliably Democratic bloc, their impact on the Nov. 3 midterms will depend less on party loyalty than on whether they turn out and whether their voting districts let them elect a candidate of their choice. Legal protections for Black political representation have weakened considerably since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision striking down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The ruling effectively did away with “preclearance,” which required states and local jurisdictions with an “extensive history of racially discriminatory voting practices” to get federal approval for changes in voting laws or maps. Without that protection, challenges to allegedly discriminatory maps have relied increasingly on Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits voting practices that dilute minority voting power. During an Oct. 2 virtual news briefing, Evan Milligan, founder and former executive director of the grassroots civic engagement organization Alabama Forward, described the current legal framework as, “So you can’t pro-act, but you can react.” Alabama as a representation testing ground In 2023, the Supreme Court upheld Section 2 in Allen v. Milligan, ruling that Alabama’s congressional map violated Section 2 by packing Black voters — who constitute 27% of the state’s population — into one of seven districts. The court required that the state draw a second majority-Black district. “Our state didn’t listen to these rules,” said Milligan, the case’s lead plaintiff. “They continued to thumb their nose at it, so we remained in court.” Alabama’s Legislature responded with a new map with still only one majority-Black district, which a federal district court ruled also violated Section 2 by intentionally discriminating against Black voters. Ultimately, a court-appointed special master drew a map that increased the Black voting-age population in the state’s 2nd District, helping lead to the November 2024 election of Democrat Rep. Shomari Figures, the first Black representative for the district in over 150 years. But Black voters are now “in a more vulnerable and precarious position” than when this case began, said Milligan. On April 29, 2026 a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais raised the bar for Section 2 challenges by requiring plaintiffs to prove that a state legislature intentionally practiced racial discrimination in drawing districts.

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