The arrest of an award-winning Oregon vineyard manager by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has sent shockwaves throughout the local community.
Moises Sotelo-Casas, 54, has resided in the United States since the late 1990s and worked his way up from being a “cellar rat” at the local vineyard to owning his own vineyard management business, called Novo Start Vineyard Service, for which he was awarded a Vineyard Excellence Award by the Oregon Wine Board in 2020.
As he drove to work on June 12, Sotelo was arrested by ICE officers outside St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Newburg, 25 miles outside of Portland. Within hours, he was in an ICE detention facility in Portland awaiting deportation.
“I was crying. I was a mess,” his daughter, Alondra Sotelo-Garcia, told local news outlet KGW8. “He was in chains at his feet. 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.”
Sotelo-Garcia added that her father had taken steps to apply for legal citizenship under the Biden administration.
His arrest comes after the Trump administration this week directed ICE agents to target farms and agricultural workers, where up to 42 percent of employees are believed to be undocumented, after President Donald Trump instructed officials to steer clear of farms days before.
“My concern is about my friends and neighbors who are getting rounded up by ICE,” vineyard owner Anthony Van Nice, who worked with Sotelo in the 1990s and considers him a friend, 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.”
In a brief statement to the media, an ICE spokesman claimed that “Sotelo first entered the United States illegally in 2006, was arrested by US Border Patrol that resulted in an expedited removal to Mexico. Sotelo has a criminal conviction for DUI in Newberg, OR and he will remain in custody pending removal.”
A search of public records by the Daily Beast found no record of a DUI conviction. The Yamhill County District Attorney’s office told KGW it had no record of DUI charges against Sotelo-Cases.
Sotelo’s only offenses include a small number of speeding offenses over a period of nearly 20 years, with the first one issued in 1997.
Following his arrest, Sotelo was initially taken to a detention facility in Portland. Several days later, he was reportedly moved to a different facility in Tacoma, Washington. But when Van Nice traveled to the facility to see his friend on Tuesday, officials said he was no longer 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 told the Guardian. “I told him I thought that sounded wrong, and he said, ‘Well, that’s the way it is.’”
“Moises is well-known in our community,” Van Nice added. “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.”
The Guardian reported that, as of Wednesday morning, Sotelo appeared to have been moved to a detention facility 1,500 miles away in Arizona run by the same firm that operates Guantanamo Bay. On Friday, ICE’s detainee locator claims he is now back at the facility in Tacoma, although his whereabouts cannot be confirmed, and personnel at the Northwest Detention Center did not respond to the Daily Beast’s calls.
The Daily Beast has contacted ICE for information on Mr Sotelo-Casas’ detainment and whereabouts.
His daughter has set up a GoFundMe to help with legal and other expenses, as her father was the family’s primary provider.
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