Federal agents detain 56-year old Orland homeowner while a private for-profit prison corporation thrives
By Ken Magri
Paulo Frutos-Perez is a 56-year-old undocumented farmworker in Butte and Glenn counties who’s worked in California for almost 40 years. But now he is a statistic, a consequence of President Trump’s promise to deport one million people annually.
On a rainy Friday morning in February, officers from US Immigration & Customs Enforcement, or ICE, waited for Paulo to come out of his Orland home and begin his work day. While getting into his truck, Paulo was confronted by several men in his driveway. His family says the officers called for a black unmarked SUV to appear. Waiting for it, the officers knocked on the family’s front door to hand Paulo’s truck keys to his wife. Then they loaded Paulo into the SUV and drove him away.
Paulo now sits in a prison north of Bakersfield as his family members, friends and employers desperately try to prevent him from being deported.
Whether intended or not, these round-ups of undocumented people have brought fear to farmworkers and their families across the state. According to Governor Newsom’s office, “an estimated 50% of California’s farmworkers are undocumented.”
Only 4% of the nation’s farms are located in California, but the state supplies the U.S. with half of its fruits, vegetables and nuts. In Butte, Glenn and Tehama counties alone, agriculture represents a combined billion-and-a-half dollar industry.
Since March, ICE has been working with a $72 million budget to hire more personnel. The newcomers are tasked with processing detainees in order to free up ICE field officers to make more arrests, according to a recent article in USA Today.
Paulo’s story
Paulo entered the United States four decades ago as a teenager looking for farm work. He found harvesting jobs in the walnut and almond orchards around Chico and became a skilled laborer. Sometimes Paulo traveled to southern Oregon during fruit harvest season, but he always returned to the Chico area.
Over the years, Paulo became an expert at pruning, which is important in the early years of a nut tree’s growth. He learned how to run the big harvesters and other farm vehicles as well.
“He is highly skilled in all aspects of nut farming, including operating specialty equipment,” said one of his farm labor clients, Tom Bush, who manages a 20-acre walnut orchard in Chico (Bush’s wife is a CN&R employee).
“No job was too big or small for Paulo,” noted Paulo’s work friend, Jose Juarez. “He was always careful with the equipment. He always came with a good attitude and never complained.”
“Work is work” Paulo would say. And he kept with the same orchard for 34 years.
Bush describes Paulo as “honest and productive,” adding that his skills “would be difficult if not impossible” to replace in the current atmosphere of rounding up undocumented farmworkers.
Paulo settled in Orland, bought a house, raised three children, paid taxes and worked hard to build a decent life for his family. His wife works for the Corning School District and his daughter, Daniela, works for Butte County. The patriarch’s oldest son, Paulo Jr., is a U.S. Marine veteran, while his younger son, Fabian, was a multi-sport athlete at Hamilton High School who later worked for an emergency services company.
Everything about Paulo Frutos-Perez’s family and their accomplishments look like a fulfillment of “the American Dream”—except for the head of household’s lack of documentation.
Where is Paulo now?
Paulo was taken to the Golden State Annex, a detention facility for undocumented immigrants in McFarland, California, which is 27 miles north of Bakersfield.
Golden State Annex is one of five California prisons contracted by ICE and operated by the highly controversial GEO Group Corporation. Founded in the 1980s as a for-profit chain of private prisons, 65% of GEO Group detainees in the United States are currently undocumented immigrants.
GEO Group has benefited from huge contracts with the federal government through many presidential administrations, though in 2024, the corporation invested heavily in Donald Trump’s campaign and his promise of “mass deportations.” GEO Group gave well over $500,000 in corporate and private executive donations to several pro-Trump political action committees.
GEO Group also made major 2024 donations to election-denying Republican candidates and incumbents, according to CitizensforEthics.org.
As a detention facility, Golden State Annex has a pleasant name but not a good reputation for its treatment of inmates: Guards at the facility were accused of attacking inmates in dormitory A4 during an early morning raid on April 15, 2024, according to a legal complaint filed jointly on behalf of those inmates by the American Civil Liberties Union, the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
“During the raid, guards…physically assaulted the people in their custody, destroyed their personal property, used pepper spray indiscriminately, verbally abused them and committed additional violations,” the complaint alledges.
The raid came days after inmates conducted two peaceful sit-ins to “protest overcrowding, inhumane living conditions and deprivation of basic necessities such as toilet paper, ice, and cold water during extreme heat.”
A week later, the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, which oversees ICE, made an unannounced inspection of Golden State Annex. It returned for a follow-up inspection in late July. In a 2024 Inspector General’s report, and an additional report by DHS, Golden State Annex was cited for several deficiencies in operational standards it is required to guaranty.
These problems included incomplete paperwork, leaks in some facilities, lost security footage, deficient custody classifications, poor communication with inmates, inconsistent food offerings and a lack of staff training for emergency situations.
Prior to GEO Group focusing on immigration detainees, it was repeatedly brought to court for its practices and cost-cutting measures around other prisoners. As News & Review documented in a 2017 story called “Prisoner of Policy,” an investigation by the Department of Justice in 2012 concluded that officials at GEO’s juvenile detention center in Mississippi “were turning a blind eye to officer brutality, inmate-on-inmate rape and teenage prostitution and were ‘deliberately indifferent to gang affiliations within the ranks of the correctional staff.’ Reviewing similar findings in a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, federal Judge Carlton Reeves called GEO Group’s Mississippi facility ‘a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts.’ In 2014, GEO Group was hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging it pushed thousands of immigration detainees into forced labor in violation of American anti-slavery laws.”
Paulo’s driving history is used to justify his deportation
Paulo had previous issues that may have doomed his chances of staying in the country. According to his son, Fabian Frutos, Paulo had already been deported back to Mexico in 1996. While there, Fabian said that his father “was kidnapped, and the truck he was tied up in was set on fire.” Frutos added that Paulo has burn marks on his body from that.
Paulo also had two past DUI convictions, the most recent being in October, 2024. As the last part of his sentence, Paulo was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor for ten days. It’s believed this is how ICE found him.
GEO Group also operates the ankle monitors used by the Butte County Sheriff’s Department. While Paulo was arrested in Glenn County, their DUI sentencing program is run by Butte County. Whether locals directly participated in his detainment or not, Paulo appears to have been targeted by GEO Group from the moment his ankle monitor was strapped on.
“The Department of Homeland Security reinstated his prior order of deportation,” said Paulo’s lawyer, Jordan Schweller. “This basically means that they used his old order of removal/deportation to remove/deport him again. Once an old order … is reinstated, this greatly limits the ways you can stay in the U.S.”
Paulo’s only option was to claim asylum. His case was referred to an asylum officer to determine whether he had a “reasonable fear of persecution or torture,” based on the prior kidnap incident in Mexico.
If so, Schweller said he would be placed in immigration court proceedings “and permitted to apply only for withholding of removal and protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture.”
But after an interview, the asylum officer determined Paulo did not have reasonable fears if he was returned to Mexico. Schweller told News & Review that the immigration judge agreed with the asylum officer.
“Unfortunately, it is not taken into consideration how long you have been here or what family you have in the U.S.,” Schweller noted.
Paulo was ordered deported pursuant to his old order from 1996.
Fear spreads through Butte County, more California farms and across the nation
Since January, ICE raids have happened in Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, New York City Phoenix and Los Angeles, according to NBC News. On April 27, ICE detained over 100 undocumented immigrants in a late-night raid of a Colorado Springs nightclub. Earlier that week, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis boasted that over 800 undocumented people were detained while ICE works with that state’s local law enforcement agencies under a campaign named Operation Tidal Wave.
“Florida is leading the nation in active cooperation with the Trump administration for immigration enforcement and deportation operations,” said DeSantis, according to News-Press.com.
Meanwhile in Butte County, Jose Juarez talks about the anxiety and fear among Californians who have undocumented family members.
“I know a lot of people communicate with families from down south as [ICE] works its way up north,” Juarez observed. From San Diego to Kern County, Fresno and Merced, “they will call and tell them not to go out, but a lot of people don’t want to miss work, or they think ICE won’t catch them.”
Some non-profit organizations are helping undocumented workers with crucial information and free legal services.
“When legal aid is stripped away, so is a family’s chance at safety, dignity and justice,” writes the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, a non-profit organization that offers free legal services for low-income people in the state’s more remote areas.
The Service Immigrant Rights Education Network is another non-profit that offers free legal consultations by phone to California’s undocumented immigrants and those eligible for DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
The fact that it is also illegal to knowingly hire undocumented workers doesn’t seem to affect private and corporate farmers who have been doing such hiring for as long as Paulo was in America. Business owners don’t appear to be getting questioned by ICE about their own brush with illegality, but as harvest times approach, they are seeing their work forces slowly disintegrate, one person after another.
Scott Thomas Anderson contributed to this article.
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