A vineyard manager’s deportation shattered an Oregon town. Now his daughter is carrying on his legacy | US immigration

Alondra Sotelo Garcia made the same headlines as everyone else. Masked immigration agents are making increasingly daring arrests. Members of the community disappear without warning.

As the middle child of immigrants, she feared for her parents. She started tracking her father’s iPhone location, gave her job two weeks’ notice, and told her father she wanted to start working at the vineyard management company he founded after decades in the wine industry.

“Hey, I think I need to step in now with you, Dad, and help you and learn,” Alondra said to her father. “If something happens, are you going to leave nine people jobless?

A few days later, he called from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) center in Portland. His message was simple: “You know what to do. »

“We’re here. We’ll take care of it,” Alondra told her father.

“I know you are,” he replied.

His father, Moises Sotelo, was arrested in June. A pillar of Oregon’s wine industry, Sotelo’s arrest sparked a national outcry and an outpouring of community support. But that wasn’t enough to stop Sotelo from being deported to Mexico in July. Alondra’s mother, Irma, soon left voluntarily to join him.

She has since stepped up to take over her father’s business, finalize his affairs and help her parents establish a new life in Mexico. She also leads a new life alone, without the family she once had.

Alondra is just one of many Americans who have seen their immigrant parents deported this year during the Trump administration’s relentless immigration crackdown. She and others have had to rebuild their families and carry on the legacy of what their parents built, often on short notice.

She will enter the new year with a multitude of challenges: a newly divided family, a business to run and bills to pay – for herself, her brother and her parents. She straddled both worlds this holiday season, flying first to Mexico the week before Christmas to surprise her parents, then flying back to Oregon in time for a Christmas dinner at her uncle and aunt’s house, and a night of TV and presents alone with her brother in their usually packed house.

After her father’s arrest, Alondra left her remote job to help with shipping logistics for a dental supply company, as well as an apartment she was renting with a close friend. She returned to her family home in Newberg, a town of just over 25,000 people in Oregon’s wine country, and took the reins of Moises’ business. Faced with a global downturn in the wine industry, and with only a few months of wine experience to replace his father’s decades-long career, it won’t be easy.

“Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m doing with my work,” Alondra said this winter. “I haven’t been doing this for over 30 years like Dad. I’m not going to bring 30 years of experience into three months.”

The work itself is never far away. The family home doubles as an office, with workers coming and going. Alondra runs the show hand-in-hand with a former mentee of her father’s, who helps her with the ins and outs of field work, as well as an office administrator. She credits both men with keeping the company above water during the darkest months of her year.

The vineyards operate according to an exhaustive schedule, each season bringing new and meticulous work. Prune old forests in winter. Formation of shoots one by one to grow vertically in spring. Peel grape leaves to prevent mold. Donning hazmat suits and spraying sulfur in the summer heat to ward off mold. Installation of net against birds. Harvest each bunch of thin-skinned grapes carefully to avoid bruising.

Every vine. Each row. Acre by acre. Vineyard by vineyard. All this by hand.

Alondra is not afraid.

“I’m not going to give up this job and throw him on the ground and leave him for dead, because that would be very unfair to him,” Alondra said.

Although ICE previously claimed that Moises first entered the country in 2006 and had a drunken driving conviction in Yamhill County, Oregon, county prosecutors told local media in June that they had no record of drunken driving, and a winery owner interviewed by the Guardian said he had worked with Moises as early as the mid-1990s. Alondra said both of her parents submitted immigration cases to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in early 2025.

In early June, masked ICE agents took away a company employee on his way to work. A winery manager, who was in the car at the time, told the Guardian in June that the officers refused to identify themselves and threatened her with assault for asking questions. Alondra described this moment as “a wake-up call.”

A week later, his father was taken away. Since then, she has had no respite.

To find her father in the heart of ICE detention, she had to go to a facility in the Arizona desert, where, upon arrival, employees told her her father was not there, but they did not know where he was. Eventually, she was able to visit her father in Mexico after the deportation, on a trip she described as “me and dad against the world,” and she accompanied him as he acquired a new Mexican ID card and all the other pieces that go into preparing for a new life.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get those moments with Dad back,” Alondra thought at the time. “Everywhere he went, I went with him.”

His work did not stop there. Helping her mother, plunged into depression, leave the country to join her husband. Overseeing the GoFundMe money she sent after her father’s detention and organizing the family finances to buy a house in Mexico for her parents, in a country they hadn’t lived in for three decades. This also comes with a whole new set of bills.

“This house had almost nothing,” Alondra said. “We have to have electricians, we have to have plumbers, we have to have construction workers.”

Alondra hopes her parents can find a glimmer of hope in this upheaval by retiring to Mexico and letting her send money from the United States to cover costs. She expects it to be a difficult adjustment for two people used to working nearly 12 hours a day (“Let’s see how it goes” was their response), but she hopes they will accept her help. They did the same thing for her grandparents, and Alondra sees “history repeating itself again.”

With her younger brother just turning 18 and her older brother with five children, the new responsibility falls, for now, to Alondra. The wine industry, where it earns its stripes and its salary, is going through difficult times in Oregon and around the world. However, the relationships his father has built over the past decades help him get through it.

Dave Specter, co-owner of Bells Up Winery, has worked with Moises for years. “Here’s a guy who was a father, a business owner, an employer and an elder at his church,” Specter said. “He’s the kind of guy you want your kids to grow up to be. So when we lose these people, it only makes our society worse.”

World wine sales are at their lowest level since 1961, painting a bleak picture of the saturated market for the Willamette Valley’s more than 700 wineries. And the food industry as a whole has been upended by the ICE raids. In August, an Oregon cherry grower told CNN he had lost about a quarter of his crop. In California, crops were not harvested from the fields.

Bubba King, a Yamhill County commissioner, speaking on his own behalf, said the raids have affected not only the wine industry but the entire region.

“The longer this goes on, the more it will affect every part of our community. I know kids who are afraid to go to school,” he said. “I know parents who have to stay home from work because their children are too young to stay home alone and they are afraid to go to school. »

Miriam Vargas Corona, executive director of Unidos Bridging Community, a local nonprofit, also sees a severe long-term economic impact.

“All of these actions are going to have a ripple effect on our local economy as families focus on their safety and survival,” she said. “The businesses and industries that make Yamhill County vibrant depend on the full participation of immigrants and Latinx community members.”

Meanwhile, Alondra’s worries are far from allayed. This fall, she laid off an employee due to lack of work. A few weeks later, the former employee’s wife and brother-in-law were deported.

“It completely tore me apart,” she said.

Lately, she feels a kind of dark solidarity with her friends. She recently invited a friend to dinner whose father was taken by ICE on a Sunday morning on his way to the grocery store. Alondra gave her friend advice while playing at kitchen tables across the country, as the children of immigrants step up to take their parents’ place.

“I kept telling him,” Alondra said, “unfortunately, this is where you really have to step up for your dad and be strong for your dad.”

This story was co-published and supported by the nonprofit journalism organization Economic Hardship Reporting Project.