By Johana Vasquez

Irvin Camacho speaks about AIRE at a monthly meeting for the Washington County Democrats on Feb. 17, 2025. Photo by Johana Vasquez

Decades ago, Irvin Camacho lost his father to deportation. Today, he’s co-founded an alliance of immigrants in Northwest Arkansas to combat Trump’s pledge of mass deportations nationwide.

One evening in mid-February, Irvin Camacho looked intently around the room, raising his shoulders and an arm to the crowd sitting in black foldable chairs at the Washington County Democrats headquarters in Springdale.

“I’m not sure what your social media looks like, but my algorithm, every time I wake up and check Facebook, there’s a new ICE sighting in Northwest Arkansas, whether it be in Rogers or Springdale. It’s like not good news to wake up to every day, right?”
His remarks were met with some heads shaking in disapproval and a few disgruntled noises. Camacho, 33, was one of several speakers at the Democrats’ monthly meeting to discuss immigration issues.

Camacho explained to the majority white audience the concept of an “ICE watch,” a term used do describe the monitoring of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers when they are spotted in local communities.

“We have a group of folks that actually go to the location where the ICE activity is reported, and we verify if that’s true or not,” he said. Once verified, members of the alliance spread the word on social media to community members to avoid the area.

A few weeks earlier, Camacho witnessed ICE agents going to people’s homes on Adrian Avenue in Springdale. Camacho said he went and saw the officers himself. He said AIRE informed people on social media once the officers left because some people were at work in the area and didn’t want to leave until it was clear.

ICE raids in 2010 pulled Camacho into the advocacy world out of concern for his undocumented friends and others in the community. But it was more personal than that. In 2008, he’d lost his own father, a U.S. resident, to a deportation. He never saw him again.
Camacho’s appearance at the Washington County Democrats meeting comes after he and his partner responded to Donald Trump’s re-election and the formation of a new grassroots defense movement for immigrants called AIRE [i-reh], the Alliance for Immigrant Respect and Education.

“Your immigrant neighbors are scared right now,” he said.

Trump ran on a campaign to crack down on immigration and enforce mass deportations nationwide. Within his first week back, Trump’s administration revoked a decade-long policy that limited immigration arrests at churches, schools, and hospitals. He expanded the use of “expedited removal,” which gives enforcement agencies broad authority to deport people without requiring them to appear before an immigration judge. ICE officials have been directed by Trump to ramp up arrests from a few hundred a day to at least 1,200 to 1,500.

This has set off alarms among immigrant advocacy groups and non-profits across the country as they face heightened challenges to protect immigrant communities. And Trump’s actions are energizing a new generation of activists to work with seasoned activists and organizers to advocate for people’s rights. Camacho was born in Salinas, California nestled along the Salinas Valley, an agricultural hub historically home to various immigrant populations and farm workers. Chinese labor workers settled in Salinas from 1870-80s, leasing 1,000 acres of valley land for agriculture. In 1898, over two hundred Japanese workers came to Salinas to succeed the Chinese in working in the sugar beat fields and introduced crops like celery, broccoli, and strawberries to the land. A vocal Filipino community superseded the Japanese in the early 20th century and organized as one of California’s first farm labor unions in 1934.

Mexican immigrants were interwoven into the community as fieldhands during the First World War and re-introduced in 1942 under the Bracero program, importing and permitting millions of Mexican men to work legally in the United States on short-term labor contracts. Camacho’s grandfather Demetrio came to benefit from this program, allowing him to eventually become a U.S. resident before the program ended in the ‘60s. As the United Farm Workers movement, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, moved from Delano and into the Salinas Valley, his grandfather became a member. Camacho has a photo of the identification card his grandfather signed in 1978 to have the union represent him.

Irvin’s grandfather, Demetrio Camacho, is pictured in the ID card on top. His uncle’s ID card is on the bottom.

Camacho’s parents were born in Mexico and grew up together in Chupicauro, Guanajuato. His dad, named Demetrio after his father, moved to the U.S. first in the early ‘80s and became a resident through his dad. He started working as a farmworker at 15, mainly in the lettuce fields. He eventually dropped out of high school and began drinking at a young age, peer-pressured by the older men he worked with.

He was also a construction worker before he fell off a roof and needed screws in an arm and his legs.

“He was always in pain,” Camacho said.

Camacho’s mother joined his father in the U.S. in the mid-’80s. She toiled in the onion fields and had an opportunity for legalization through Reagan’s complicated Amnesty law in 1986.

A community organizer, by Camacho’s definition, is someone who is grassroots on the ground talking to people, addressing community needs, and connecting people to resources they may not have access to.

Camacho has contributed to multiple grassroots efforts over the past 15 years, starting some of the more recent ones. His latest effort is co-founding AIRE, which aims to build a supportive community in the region for immigrants through education, advocacy, and language justice.

The last group he started, Equipo de Defensa al Imigrante, or Equipo for short, disbanded in 2018 after a three-year run. Camacho said the group put in equal effort and didn’t label himself as the leader.

He continued to do advocacy work, working for a national non-profit called the Bail Project in Benton and Washington counties until late 2022. In 2019, he started Arkansas’ first bilingual podcast at KUAF, the District 3 Podcast, at the local public radio station.

But circumstances beyond his control always pull him back to organizing. A month or two before the November election, Camacho worried when he heard about deportations targeting the Marshallese community in Springdale. He lamented not having an active group to help inform them of their constitutional rights.

Citizens and non-citizens alike are not required to interact with ICE agents and allow them into their homes without a warrant signed by a judge.

The Marshallese are lawfully present here under a Compact of Free Association between both nations, free to permanently move to the U.S. with only a passport. But their status isn’t entirely secure.

Consulate General Anjanette Anjel said she tells the Marshallese who come to the consulate office in Springdale that if there is a warrant for their arrest or they’ve done something wrong, officers might come to their home to detain them. ICE detained 21 local Marshallese men in January, according to the Marshallese Consulate.

Anjel said she has noticed increased anxiety about deportations among the Marshallese community and an uptick in the number of people coming to the office, applying for passports, and updating documents.

After Trump’s election, Camacho said he felt more pressure to start an immigrant advocacy group. Once Camacho’s partner agreed, he began posting on Instagram seeking immigrants and children of immigrants who would be interested in starting a group. He arranged a meeting for those interested at the end of December where they established their goals.

When Camacho was roughly four years old, his family moved to Gonzalez, a town 20 minutes from Salinas. He lived in a two-room apartment with his parents and older sister under the city’s Housing Authority on 9th Street. Before he knew what it meant, Camacho grew up thinking the apartments were named Housing Authority.

His parents received unemployment during the off-season when they worked in the fields, but it wasn’t enough. Camacho said they could barely make ends meet, so during the off-season, his dad worked as a semi-truck driver, which he enjoyed. To still collect unemployment, his dad worked under a different name and social security number.

Social security fraud using fake identification was easier then, at least until 2001 when the Social Security Administration made stricter changes. With few opportunities in the area and an uptick in local gang violence, his parents decided to move to Arkansas in the early 2000s.

“We packed everything in my dad’s black Camaro and moved across the country to my uncle’s house in Lowell,” Camacho said.

He recalls going with his parents to Tyson’s application center and waiting with his sister as their parents applied for jobs. Camacho said his dad’s role in the poultry industry was short-lived due to his pains. His dad returned to what he knew and loved, driving a semi-truck.

AIRE is made up of roughly 80 members and has four committees.

The Public Education and Workshop Committee strives to inform the general public about their rights when interacting with ICE officers and speaks to the media about AIRE. The Halting Anti-Immigrant Legislation (HAIL) members monitor bills at the state level that propose anti-immigrant policies and speak with legislators. In an ICE watch committee, members verify ICE activity in the local communities and bring flyers about constitutional rights to people’s door steps. The Language Justice Committee works to disseminate information about constitutional rights in multiple languages.

Know Your Rights fliers and information at an AIRE public event on Feb. 28. Photo taken by Johana Vazquez.

Camacho, is currently works with a developing coalition of non-profits and organizes full-time. Aside from his work, he balances AIRE work and the podcast. He said the biggest need AIRE is addressing in the community is spreading Know Your Rights information to as many different people, businesses, and churches.

“The best way to fight getting detained by ICE is knowing what they need to legally detain you.”

Zita (who wanted to use an alias for the interview) is the co-chair of the Language Justice Committee. When AIRE was in the early stages of its formation, Zita pitched this as a committee to ensure information was reaching communities that spoke languages apart from English and Spanish.

She said Spanish-speaking communities were not the only ones at risk of deportation.

The committee has translated Know Your Rights fliers into Marshallese and Korean and is working on Hindu and Arabic translations among others. They try to find members in the region that can help translate and spread this information.

Zita said the inclusion of different languages allows people to have autonomy and dignity.

She witnessed her mother try to navigate spaces in the U.S. in her second and third languages— Spanish and English.

Her mother’s first language was Kaqchikel, an indigenous Mayan language. She was born at the cusp of Guatemala’s brutal civil war, spanning 36 years from 1960 to 1996. The Guatemalan government committed a mass genocide against the indigenous population with military aid from the United States, Israel and Argentina. Zita’s mother witnessed her brother get kidnapped by militia.

“Community was in her blood,” Zita said. “They had to take care of each other when nobody else would.”

In 1995, Zita immigrated to the U.S. with her mother when she was four. Her stepdad, a Fayetteville native, was traveling through Guatemala when he met her mom and they fell in love and married. Zita said her mother had to build a community here. Despite language and cultural differences, she became active in organizing spaces, advocating for queer people and immigrants’ rights.

“She always told me, we’re fortunate enough to be documented, so we have to show up for our community.”

Zita said contributing to advocacy groups like AIRE helps keep her mother’s memory alive and carry her legacy.

The last time Camacho saw his dad alive was one early morning in 2008. He was sleeping in the living room when the noise of his dad getting ready to leave woke him up. He raised himself a little in the dark room and looked at his dad as he left through the front door.

He would never walk in through that door again.

His dad would be pulled over for a broken tail light, taken into custody, and fingerprinted. The false identity he used to work during the field’s off-season would resurface and he was sent to a detention center in Louisiana. Eventually, his residency was revoked for fraud in his employment history, and he was deported to Mexico without so much as a chance to say goodbye.

Irvin with his dad in the early 1990s.

Camacho was around 15 at the time. His family lived in a small, cheap apartment on Fink Dr. in Springdale and could not afford a family trip to visit his dad in Mexico. His mother visited him when she could.

Two years passed and Camacho was a senior at Springdale High School. He was the news anchor for the school’s morning broadcast and slipped in stories about immigration when he could. A friend invited him to an organizing group that met at her house every week. A majority of the members were young and undocumented, unable to receive in-state tuition for college. They called themselves the Arkansas Natural Dreamers.

“I was hooked,” Camacho said. “It sounds cringey but it felt like community organizing was my calling and I went every week with friends.”

They had no blueprint on how to address ICE raids in the community– who to talk to and how to inform people of their rights. He said they didn’t know what they were doing.

“Back then people didn’t want to fuck with us. We were a group of young people between 17-25,” he said. “The Democrats wanted nothing to do with us then, now they love us. Back then we were ‘troublemakers’ even though we weren’t, we were just trying to help people.”

Camacho said he’s learned from all his past organizing efforts and the importance of structure in an advocacy group. He’s also mindful of how he treats young people in groups he leads.

“I want them to be in front of the camera to feel empowered,” he said. “When I was young, I constantly heard from older people that I wasn’t doing things correctly, too radical, burning bridges, and not good enough to be in front of the camera.”

Nayeli Carranza, 23, is a stay-at-home mom who woke up to a message on Jan. 23 from her cousin that ICE was in Rogers. A high school friend posted on her Snapchat that her uncle was detained by ICE. Local reports revealed two men and brothers were detained after immigration officers stationed outside their home followed them to work for a Northwest Arkansas landscaping company.

Carranza said she was shocked that deportations were starting in the community so soon after Trump’s election and her immediate reaction was to arrange a protest. As a result, she posted on Facebook: “Voice your rights with me today at 5:30 and Saturday at 2 p.m. we will meet at the parking lot of La Villita where usually everyone does car meets and line up along the 71 business road!! Use your voice for those who are afraid to!! Spread the word make your signs, bring your flag!!!”

This was the first time in her life that she organized and attended a protest. She grew up in Rogers but was never aware of local protests for immigrants like the ones she saw in California on TikTok.

“I winged it,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

Nobody online confirmed with Carranza they were going to her Thursday night protest on the day the men were detained but she still went. She arrived at La Villita, a Mexican grocery store in Rogers, expecting five people and 15 showed up to protest ICE raids.

Within two days, Carranza was back on the sidewalk, a megaphone in hand, and this time with close to 100 people for three hours. She said people came together and it was a communal effort. Members of AIRE answered her request for donations and were present, providing people with snacks, water, and fliers with Know Your Rights information.

Nayeli Carranza at the protest against ICE raids on Jan. 25. Photo by Jonathan Barajas.

Carranza said the protestors received love and support from those who drove past and some people who flipped them off and screamed at them to go back to the country they came from. She would remind people with her megaphone to not pay them any attention. Carranza was relieved that it didn’t get out of control and happy with the turnout and media attention “to show people they are not alone.”

A member of AIRE invited Carranza to join the group. At her first meeting in early February, members approached her, praising her for organizing a protest and offering their help for her next public demonstration. Carranza, with a little guidance from Camacho and other AIRE members, is planning a march in March.

Carranza, who admits to being sometimes shy and a homebody, said she feels compelled to do this, especially since she has time. She said she didn’t want to just sit at home and see deportations happen in the community and not do anything.

In August 2010, Camacho was reunited with his dad at his funeral in Mexico. After drinking alcohol all his life, his dad developed cirrhosis of the liver, and his condition worsened.

His dad’s immediate family raised funds so Camacho and his mom and sister could be there. He remembers looking down at his father’s coffin and thinking, ‘This is the worst that life is going to get, life can’t get any worse than this.’

When he returned to the U.S. after his dad’s funeral, there was a big shift in who he was as a person– he was not easily scared and more outspoken in his activism. But he didn’t talk publicly about his dad.

Years later, Camacho realized it was the loss of his father that propelled him to unapologetically advocate for those faced with the same family separation and given years of his life preventing it from happening to others. This was hard to realize before when he witnessed his undocumented friends go through obstacles he wasn’t faced with.

“I never thought about myself as anything other than privileged,” he said. “I’m a U.S. citizen. I was born here.”

But Camacho now reckons with the effects of not having a father during a pivotal period of his life. On Feb. 28, Camacho spoke publicly about his dad for the third time during a community conversation about AIRE at Casa Magnolia, a coffee shop in Springdale.

“I know the effect that family separation can cause an individual, and I know that even though I’m a U.S. citizen, I’m still affected by the system,” he said to a small crowd seated outside on the wooden porch.

He told them he was affected by the loss of his dad- who he can’t say made a mistake in his eyes- he was trying to feed his kids and provide them with a better place to live.

“I don’t want other people to go through that.”