Since November, the U.S. Coast Guard—the military branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has conducted regular raids at Louisiana fishing docks and in Louisiana bayous to arrest immigrant deckhands and oyster harvesters.
Seafood workers say that the Coast Guard, in a departure from the norm, has conducted about seven sweeps since early November, resulting in multiple arrests. They have concentrated efforts 40 minutes east of New Orleans, around Hopedale, Louisiana, a small unincorporated fishing community in St. Bernard Parish that’s composed of a string of docks lining a single road, Hopedale Highway.
The raids at the quiet St. Bernard Parish docks, and on the surrounding waters of Biloxi Marsh, conducted largely out of public view, are surprising to local immigration attorneys, seafood industry owners, and workers—because the Coast Guard has not historically conducted immigration enforcement at inland docks.
U.S. Rep. Troy Carter told The Lens that he didn’t agree with the shift in Coast Guard priorities, and that he worried it could divert resources from the Coast Guard’s work in Louisiana that keeps river traffic moving and rescues people after disasters. “Trump’s reckless Department of Homeland Security has placed deportations above all other priorities, making Louisianans less safe,” Carter said. “This has pulled our service members away from investigations into illicit activities and actual criminals that are endangering our communities.”
The government’s own analysts agree that the Coast Guard falls short on its other missions when it spends more time on migration enforcement: “According to Coast Guard officials, the maritime migration surge operation the Coast Guard began in fiscal year 2022 significantly exacerbated its inability to meet its drug interdiction mission,” per a Government Accountability Office report earlier this month.
Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, a staunch conservative who hails from St. Bernard’s coastal neighbor, Plaquemines Parish, also announced publicly that he is opposed to the arrest of immigrants who are undocumented but don’t have a criminal history. (The Department of Homeland Security has said it has made 560 immigration arrests in Louisiana, but has released details on just 40 of those arrested. Per Gov. Jeff Landry’s own claims, most of those arrested had no criminal history.)
In this part of St. Bernard Parish, Coast Guard officers have long been a common sight, as they patrol waterways in boats with red-striped hulls, make vessel safety checks, and rescue marooned boaters. But the Coast Guard’s change in norms has sent fear rippling along this part of the Gulf Coast among the undocumented workers that seafood companies have long relied upon.
That fear is what drove Honduran deckhand Walter Cerrato to flee the Coast Guard last month by leaping into Bayou La Loutre, where he drowned.
Similar sweeps happen every two or three weeks, Jose Dominguez, an oyster harvester from Honduras, told The Lens. (Dominguez asked his real name not be used due to fear of arrest or retaliation)
During the most recent sweep on January 29, two of Dominguez’s friends were arrested while working on another local boat, Croatian Pride.
Anthony Tesvich, captain of the boat the Rambler, from which Cerrato leapt and drowned, said it was the first time he’d seen these types of sweeps in his five years as a boat captain.
“Before all this, we would get boarded, but they never checked IDs for the other people working on my boat,” Tesvich explained. The Coast Guard or the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries would check his permits and licenses, he said, but they’d never before bothered his workers, even though sometimes he’s employed undocumented people.
Local immigration lawyers say this Coast Guard role also seems new to them. “Generally speaking, them going out on fishing boats and that kind of stuff to check people’s status has not historically been something that the Coast Guard did,” said Homero López, the director of the nonprofit Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy in New Orleans.
Fellow immigration lawyer Jeremy Jong agreed. Jong, from the nonprofit Al Otro Lado, told The Lens he’s never encountered anyone who was arrested by the Coast Guard during the 12 years he’s spent representing people arrested in immigration cases.
Workers create their own alert system, but it’s not foolproof
As the sweeps continue, immigrant workers make phone calls and text a group chat to warn one another of agents’ approach. Dominguez still works, though he lives with fear now. He leapt into the water alongside his friend Cerrato in December and would have drowned himself if he hadn’t been able to grab onto a branch and pull himself to shore, he said. They, too, got a warning that day as agents drove up the road, but they’d had nowhere else to hide.
Amid the more recent raid on January 29, Dominguez’s two friends, Jose and Arron, were arrested while working aboard Croatian Pride, an oyster boat in Shell Beach, just northwest of Hopedale. The sweep was a joint operation conducted by a CBP (Customs and Border Protection) patrol boat with about four agents, a Coast Guard boat with one agent, and at least one dark blue SUV labeled “U.S. Department of Homeland Security” and “United States Coast Guard,” said Dominguez, who witnessed part of the operation from a safe distance and shared pictures with The Lens.
“All the people that they took right now was hard workers,” said Dominguez later that day, parked around the corner from Shell Beach once the coast had cleared. “Jose was working with [the boat captain] for about eight years.” Throughout the area, his friends were known for being both good-natured and diligent, he said. “Nice guys.”
Though St. Bernard has long voted Republican, residents near Hopedale seem to be sympathetic to immigrants who work on and near the water. Even the place names near this part of the coast give a sense of the deep immigration history here: Hopedale, settled after the Civil War by Isleño fishers and trappers from the Canary Islands, is sometimes referred to as La Chinche, or bedbug, named for the way the small dwellings cluster along the bayou. Drivers from New Orleans enter Hopedale after crossing the bayou on a small iron lift bridge in the town of Ycloskey, named for the Croatians who arrived there after the Isleños and also became known for working with oysters and seafood.
Robert Campo, the owner of a crabbing business whose dock stands on Hopedale Highway, is unhappy with current immigration enforcement. “I voted for Donald Trump, but I don’t personally agree with hauling all these people off,” he said. Give undocumented people a possible pathway to legal status, he said. “(Don’t) just haul them off to a jail cell and ship them back.”
Jennifer Domingo of Salty Girl Oysters, a Hopedale native, doesn’t remember anyone else drowning in the bayou. But since workers have jumped overboard during other sweeps, according to locals, the risk of injury or drowning lingers.
Campo, who has lived in Hopedale all his life, also knew Cerrato. “He was a good dude,” he recalled. “Straightforward guy, worked every day.”
“I’m gonna jump”
For Walter Cerrato and other workers in St. Bernard Parish, the beginning of the raids coincided with the opening of wild reef season the first week of November. On a sunny Monday, agents approached with speed boats, “kind of like a surprise attack,” Tesvich recalled.
As agents boarded boats in the joint state and federal operation, Louisiana Wildlife personnel checked for oyster fishing regulation compliance while Coast Guard and Border Protection agents arrested 10 people for alleged immigration violations.
Jose Flores sometimes worked with Cerrato on the Rambler. The two men were from the same village in Honduras. Flores came to Louisiana decades ago, to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Cerrato had come around the same time. But in mid-December, Flores got caught up in a different local immigration hotspot, as Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office deputies pulled over a car he was riding in and handed over the driver and Flores, a passenger, to immigration agents.
So Flores was already gone on December 18, when Cerrato, Dominguez, and Tesvich had tied up at the dock on the bayou in Hopedale after a chilly day of pulling nets of oysters aboard the Rambler.
It was a week before Christmas. Cerrato was excited to get to Houston, where his wife and children live. While he’d worked on boats in Hopedale for about twenty years, he tried to visit his family in Houston every month. “They were his world. He loved them a lot,” recalls Dominguez. Cerrato, who Tesvich recalled as shy and careful, already had his children’s Christmas presents ready.
But before they finished their work and got off the boat, the two men got a warning call about an unmarked white van carrying federal agents up Hopedale Highway.
Dominguez and Cerrato both already knew people who’d been deported. They saw the van, driving slowly towards them. At first they hid, hoping the agents would pass. But instead, the van parked. Agents from Coast Guard Sector New Orleans got out and started approaching the Rambler.
For the Coast Guard officers, the stop didn’t seem unusual, said LCDR Rachel Ault, Public Information Officer for the U.S. Coast Guard, who said that the team was “conducting a routine Ports, Waterways, and Coastal Security patrol” that afternoon.
But Cerrato and Dominguez, knowing the possible consequences, panicked. “I ran onto the deck and I told my friend that immigration was coming,” Dominguez said. “I told him: “I’m gonna jump.”
Below them, in strong winds, the current of Bayou La Loutre was moving fast.
Dominguez leapt first.
Immigrant labor crucial to seafood industry, expert says
The fishing boats that ply Gulf Coast waters frequently employ undocumented people. Immigrant labor is “integral to the industry,” said Marguerite Green, statewide director of the Louisiana Food Policy Council. The same is true nationally: across the country, about 10% of fisheries workers, and 25% of seafood processing workers, are foreign-born, according to data from the American Immigration Council.
“Immigrant labor has literally developed Louisiana’s seafood industry,” Green said, referring to the Croatian, Isleño, Acadian, and Vietnamese immigrants who settled the state’s coast.
Immigrant seafood workers typically rely on H-2B visas, which are sponsored by U.S. employers who document that they cannot find “qualified, willing, and able” U.S. workers to fill their positions. But the visas are temporary, and so workers often go in and out of compliance. So it isn’t unusual for migrant workers to spend part of their time undocumented, Green said.
“People’s status changes a lot throughout the lifetime of them developing the skills to be harvesters or deckhands,” Green said. Once immigrant workers build relationships with specific boat captains, they may keep getting rehired each season even after their visas lapse. The visas are awarded to employers who pay high fees to apply through a capped lottery, making the visas both expensive and difficult for most independent boat captains to obtain—and virtually impossible for someone like Tesvich, who only oysters a couple times a week.
Among those interviewed in St. Bernard Parish, the Coast Guard’s focus on individual fishing boats was a frustration among onlookers, who say that higher numbers of undocumented workers can be found in larger, more exploitative parts of the industry— like seafood processing plants – which also happen to have more powerful lobbies.
Since the sweeps began, the smaller operations with docks on Hopedale Highway have been hurting, with many workers staying home. “People are coming up short with harvest because they just don’t have enough labor to do it,” Green said.
“It sucks because we really rely on them,” said Tesvich. “We appreciate them and we need them.”
Immigrants are also key to the operation of Motivatit Seafoods, an oyster processor in Houma. “We’ll run an ad and hire Americans: if they last two days, we’re lucky,” said controller Dotty Madden, who said her employees are paid about $13.22 an hour, below Louisiana’s living wage. “Nobody wants to do this kind of work,” she said. “The pay scale isn’t all that great.” All of their immigrant employees have HB-2 visas, Madden said, noting that, to date, they hadn’t had any visits from immigration agents.
A job listing for HB-2 visa oyster deckhands in Hopedale lists the wage as $20.22 per hour. Cerrato’s former employer said that Cerrato did have a legal visa at some point.
Every boat captain interviewed by The Lens stressed that they would not be able to continue fishing without immigrant workers: “No white man’s coming to do these jobs,” Campo said.
Weighed down by rubber boots
Dominguez leapt far from the 53-foot boat, reaching almost the middle of the narrow channel. Ten seconds later, Cerrato jumped too, landing in the water closer to the boat.
Up aboard, the Coast Guard was not aware that they had jumped. Down in the water, the men were already struggling.
Dominguez is a decent swimmer. But the rubber boots the deckhands wore had filled with water, weighing them down. “My boots were sinking me,” Dominguez recalled. He started swallowing water as the current swept them down the channel. “I was ready to give up in the middle of the water, and I said, ‘I’m going to die here.’ The current was too strong.”
Dominguez caught sight of Cerrato, also struggling to keep above water. He thought it was the end. He began to sink. “At the last minute, I was going all the way down, and I said: ‘I can’t, I cannot die here.’ I started to try to go up. And I saw a little branch.”
Using all his remaining strength, he seized the branch with his right hand. Finding another burst of energy, he pulled himself up, gasping, onto dry land on the far side of the channel.
It was very cold, but Dominguez felt nothing. He laid in the brush, catching his breath.
Then he realized he didn’t hear Cerrato anymore.
“I said, ‘Walter!’ I was screaming his name.” He got no answer.
Once the Coast Guard left, Tesvich fetched Domingue from the bank and called 911 for help locating Cerrato. When a St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Office deputy arrived, “Walter Cerrato was nowhere to be found,” the incident report recorded. The deputy called in the sheriff’s Marine Division.
The Coast Guard returned, this time to assist in the search for Cerrato in the water. Darkness fell. Around 7 p.m., they found his submerged body.
Dominguez feels sorrow at the loss, and says the experience has been traumatizing. “That was bad, bad, bad. I feel real bad, because he was a nice person, a good man,” said Dominguez. “We lost a real good man.”
The Coast Guard spokesperson issued condolences. “We are deeply saddened by the loss of life,” Ault said, “and remain committed to working closely with our local partners to fully understand the circumstances surrounding this incident.”
Walter Francisco Cerrato Cabrera, 47, drowned in the waters of Bayou La Loutre while fleeing DHS. He had been in the U.S. for 20 years. His memorial was held in Houston on Christmas Eve.
“I never thought something like that would happen to me,” said Tesvich, who had worked with Cerrato on and off for years. He attended Cerrato’s service virtually, and his father helped pay for the air transport of Cerrato’s body to Honduras.
Like other federal agencies, Coast Guard is shifting resources to immigration
The delineations used to be clear: ICE operated within U.S. borders, CBP operated at ports of entry and the border, and the Coast Guard operated in open waters around the coastline. Not anymore. “That type of division of jurisdiction has been, for all intents and purposes, done away with,” said López, the immigration attorney, describing how, across the country, immigration has become a federal agency free-for-all. “Hence we also see ATF folks and DEA folks and whatnot participating in these raids,” he said.
The Coast Guard’s shift in southern Louisiana is likely part of a larger policy shift that is pushing federal agents of all kinds to redirect their resources to immigration enforcement, Lopez said. The Trump administration, he said, wants “to coordinate every agency, every way that you can, to target anybody.”
The Coast Guard’s leadership announced a “surge” in some areas after a Trump executive order in January, though it named only maritime borders – not inland waterways – as areas of focus.
A Coast Guard spokesperson declined to share the number of immigration arrests it had made since the start of the DHS immigration operation dubbed “Catahoula Crunch,” and directed The Lens to file a FOIA request. The St. Bernard Sheriff’s Office does not maintain records of immigration arrests made in the parish, a spokesperson said.
During patrols, Ault emphasized, “Coast Guard personnel may encounter situations that involve potential immigration violations.” At those times, “Coast Guard officers may initiate enforcement actions.” Typically, she said, Coast Guard personnel hand people over to DHS partners for processing and arrest.
Until officials begin to pull back on the wholesale arrests of all immigrants, anxiety will be high along Hopedale Highway, which has become its own cat-and-mouse game.
Coast Guard sweeps used to begin near the lift bridge, Dominguez said. But once workers who knew that pattern would watch and warn one another, the starting point moved around the corner, as the red-striped hulls began to pull up to Shell Beach and return to New Orleans using the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet.
The continued raids have shaken people like Dominguez. “It’s very scary,” he said. While he continues to work so he can support his five-year-old son, he fears for his safety after seeing a friend die and others be detained.
At this point, if agents come to a boat he’s working on, he won’t try to evade them. “I’ll just put my hands up and they can put the handcuffs on, and that’s it,” Dominguez said. “It’s not worth it to lose your life, to be here in a country [where] so many people don’t want us.”
