After Bakersfield farmworkers Francisco and Santiago woke up well before dawn last week and worked an entire day picking the Central Valley’s mandarin crop, they were stopped as they went home by unmarked U.S. Customs and Border Control cars and detained for residing in the United States without documentation.

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Francisco and Santiago, both United Farm Workers members who were identified by pseudonyms in order to protect their identities, had their lives “completely uprooted,” Areli Arteaga Sanders, a political and legislative director at UFW, said at a press conference Thursday. By Wednesday night, they had been deported and were en route to their countries of origin.

“Their biggest fear right now is that immigration (agents will) return and target their families,” Arteaga Sanders said. “They are concerned about how they will provide for their families, given that they were both breadwinners in their homes and now their wives are alone.”

Francisco and Santiago, who had both worked in California fields for more than 15 years, were among the dozens of people rounded up in a raid last week. Many other workers were detained outside the local Home Depot — where day laborers frequently gather, hoping for work — as well as stopping at gas stations for a morning coffee and driving on side roads, said Ambar Tovar, immigration legal services director for the UFW Foundation.

The raids, which were carried out by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s El Centro division, rounded up 78 people in an operation they called “Operation Return to Sender” that began Jan. 7, according to a social media press release.

Based on the accounts of those rounded up, United Farm Workers representatives believe the raid could have resulted in the arrest of many more than has been reported, Tovar said.

“This raid has had a dramatic effect on the community, obviously a very intense and stressful impact on the families of the detained individuals as well as for the detained individuals themselves,” Antonio De Loera-Brus, UFW communications director, said at the press conference. “There’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of anxiety for everyone with an undocumented loved one, which is a significant portion of the Latino community in Kern County.”

In their press release, Customs and Border Protection said that some of the individuals rounded up had criminal records. They added that those arrested for residing in the U.S. unlawfully include people from El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, Mexico, Honduras and China.

“CBP did put out a statement sharing that they were focused on apprehending known criminals or those with ties to criminal organizations in our community,” said Arteaga Sanders. “We firmly believe that this operation went far beyond [that].”

De Loera-Brust said that the stops appeared to be “random stops and detentions based on profiling Spanish-speaking workers.” Those that UFW has been in contact with do not have criminal histories, Tovar said.

The raids have had a “rippling effect” on the communities in and around Bakersfield, Arteaga Sanders said, with parents keeping their children home from school and even putting off trips to the grocery store out of fear of being caught in a raid. Rumors of similar immigration round-ups were reported around communities in the Bay Area at the same time as the Kern County raids, but officials said they were not correct.

“This has already had a tremendous impact on the community, where folks are afraid to participate in going to work, taking their children to the doctor, taking their children to school, buying groceries,” she added.

Many of those who were rounded up signed voluntary return forms agreeing to go back to their native countries, Tovar said, including an estimated 50 Mexican nationals.

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“In essence, what that means for those individuals is that they have, to some degree, waived their right to see an immigration judge, which is very troublesome that they have not then been afforded their due process rights to have their date in court,” Tovar added.

Those individuals who were released but have a court date set to review whether they can stay in the country are part of an intensive supervision program that requires regular check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she added.

“We all feel it’s important for the country as a whole to understand what happened, to understand the impact on the local community and on the families that have been separated, and frankly, to take away lessons about what might soon be happening in other communities,” De Loera-Brust said. “We believe that fear itself is one of the worst consequences of this sort of operation.”