Alondra Sotelo Garcia saw the same headlines as everybody else. Masked immigration agents making increasingly bold arrests. Community members disappearing without warning.
As the middle child of immigrants, she feared for her parents. She started tracking her father’s iPhone location, put in her two weeks’ notice at her job, 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 says she told her father. “If something happens, are you just gonna leave nine people without a job?”
Just days later, he called from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland. His message was simple: “You know what to do.”
“We’re on it. We’re taking care of it,” Alondra told her father.
“I know you are,” he replied.
Her father, Moises Sotelo, was detained in June. A pillar of the Oregon wine industry, Sotelo’s arrest sparked a national outcry and a flood of community support. But that wasn’t enough to stop Sotelo from being deported to Mexico in July. Alondra’s mother, Irma, soon voluntarily left to join him.
Since then, she’s stepped up to take over her father’s business, finalize his affairs and help her parents set up a new life in Mexico. She’s also navigating a new life on her own, without the family she once had.
Alondra is just one of many Americans who saw their immigrant parents deported this year during the Trump administration’s relentless immigration crackdown. She and others have been left to stitch their families together again and carry on the legacy of what their parents built, often at a moment’s notice.
She will enter the new year with a raft of challenges: a freshly split family, a business to run and bills to pay – for herself, her brother and her parents. She straddled the two worlds this holiday season, first flying down to Mexico the week before Christmas to surprise her parents, and then back up to Oregon in time for a Christmas dinner at her aunt and uncle’s, and late-night TV and gifts alone with her brother at their usually packed house.
After her father was detained, Alondra left her remote job helping with shipping logistics for a dental supply company, as well as an apartment that she rented with a close friend. She moved back to her family home in Newberg, a town of just more than 25,000 people in Oregon’s wine country, and took the reins at Moises’s company. In the face of a global wine industry downturn, and with just months of her own experience in the wine business to replace her father’s decades-long career, it won’t be easy.
“Sometimes I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing with work,” Alondra said this winter. “I haven’t been doing this for 30-plus years like Dad has. I’m not going to bring 30 years of experience into three months.”
The job itself is never far away. The family home doubles as the office, with workers coming and going. Alondra runs the show hand in hand with a former mentee of her father’s, who helps with the ins and outs of field work, as well as an office administrator. She credits the two with keeping the business above water during the darkest months of her year.
The vineyards operate on an exhaustive schedule, with each season bringing new and painstaking work. Pruning off old growth in the winter. Training shoots one by one to grow vertically in the spring. Peeling leaves away from grapes to prevent mildew. Donning hazmat suits and spraying sulphur in the heat of summer to keep the mildew away. Laying netting against birds. Harvesting each bunch of thin-skinned grapes with care to avoid bruising.
Every vine. Every row. Acre by acre. Vineyard by vineyard. All by hand.
Alondra isn’t shying away.
“I’m not going to leave this work and lay it to the ground and leave it for dead, because that would be very unfair for him,” said Alondra.
Although ICE previously alleged that Moises first entered the country in 2006 and had a DUI conviction in Oregon’s Yamhill county, the county’s district attorneys told local outlets in June that they had no record of a DUI, and a vineyard owner interviewed by the Guardian said that he had worked with Moises as early as the mid-1990s. Alondra said that both of her parents had submitted immigration cases to US Citizen and Immigration Services in early 2025.
In early June, masked ICE agents took one of the company’s employees as they were on the way to work. A vineyard manager, who was in the car at the time, told the Guardian in June that the agents refused to identify themselves and threatened her with an assault charge for asking questions. Alondra described the moment as “a wake-up call”.
A week later, her father was taken. She hasn’t caught a break since.
Tracking her father through the underbelly of ICE detention meant a trip to a facility in the Arizona desert, where, upon arrival, employees told her that her father wasn’t there – but they didn’t know where he was. Eventually, she was able to visit her father in Mexico post-deportation, on a trip that she described as “me and Dad against the world”, and she tagged along with him as he acquired a new Mexican ID and all the other pieces that go into laying the groundwork for a new life.
“I don’t think I’m gonna ever get these moments with Dad back,” Alondra thought at the time. “Anywhere he went, I went with him.”
Her work didn’t end there. Helping her mother, deep in depression, leave the country to join her husband. Overseeing the money from the GoFundMe she posted after her father’s detention and arranging the family finances to buy a house in Mexico for her parents, in a country they hadn’t lived in in three decades. This comes with a brand new set of bills as well.
“This house had just about nothing,” Alondra said. “We have to have electricians, we have to have plumbers, we have to have construction workers.”
Alondra hopes that her parents can find a silver lining in the upheaval by retiring in Mexico, and letting Alondra send money from the US to cover the costs. She expects this to be a hard adjustment for two people used to pulling near-12-hour workdays (“Let’s see how that goes” was their response), but has hope they will accept her help. They did the same for her grandparents, and Alondra sees “history repeating itself again”.
With her younger brother freshly 18, and her older brother with five children of his own, the newfound responsibility, for now, falls on Alondra. The wine industry, where she’s earning her stripes and paychecks, is facing a tough time in Oregon, and around the world. However, the relationships her father built over the last few decades are helping carry her through.
Dave Specter, co-owner of Bells Up Winery, worked with Moises for years. “Here was a guy who was a dad and a business owner and an employer and an elder in his church,” Specter said. “This is the kind of guy that you want your children to grow up to be. So when we lose those people it does nothing but make our society worse.”
Wine sales around the globe are at their lowest level since 1961, which paints a grim picture for Willamette valley’s saturated market of more than 700 wineries. And the food industry as a whole has been upended by ICE raids. In August, an Oregon cherry farmer told CNN that he lost about a quarter of his crop. In California, crops went unpicked in the fields.
Bubba King, a Yamhill county commissioner speaking on his own behalf, said that the raids have affected not just the wine industry but the whole region.
“It will affect every piece of our community the longer this goes. I know kids that are afraid to go to school,” he said. “I know parents that are having to stay home from work because their kids are too young to stay at home by themselves, and they’re afraid to go to school.”
Miriam Vargas Corona, executive director at Unidos Bridging Community, a local non-profit, also sees a harsh economic impact down the line.
“All of these actions are going to have a ripple effect on our local economy, because families are focusing on their safety and survival,” she said. “Businesses and industries that make Yamhill county vibrant depend on the full participation of our immigrant and Latinx community members.”
Meanwhile, Alondra’s concerns are far from over. This fall, she laid off an employee due to the lack of work. Weeks later, the former employee’s wife and brother-in-law were deported.
“It just absolutely tore me apart,” she said.
Lately, she’s been finding a sort of bleak solidarity with her friends. She recently invited a friend over for dinner whose father was taken by ICE on a Sunday morning when headed out for grocery shopping. Alondra gave her friend advice playing out at kitchen tables across the country, as children of immigrants step up to fill their parents’ shoes.
“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 journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
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