I was recently reading about numerous ICE “raids and disappearances” that have taken place, which brought me to a story about the raid of Glass House Brands, a company that owns several organizations related to Cannabis sales and advocacy. Recently, Glass House Brands had a subsidiary farm raided by ICE, where over three hundred workers were arrested and deported – but perhaps worse, fourteen of those workers were children.
In researching this, I often try to read articles from both sides of the political aisle – and I’ll be referring to the article on the LA Times’ site (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-04/glass-house-cannabis-major-changes-after-ice-raid) but will pepper in several articles to demonstrate a point we all need to be aware of.
First, I don’t support the Right on this wholesale: legal immigration is what this country is built on. But the bullshit from the Left – which is absolutely crafted in a manipulative, skillful manner – does nothing to actually correct the issue of illegal immigration, and it does so in a draconian manner.
Let’s look at the LA Times article first. Here’s what actually happened: Glass House Brands (which itself has to be named after the trope of ‘throwing stones in a glass house…’) employed hundreds of illegal immigrants to farm marijuana, when ICE stormed into the compound and made mass arrests. A man fell off a building running from the police. Over a dozen children – who were very young – were detained. Glass House Brands – we’ll call them GHB for the rest of the article – had seven people on-premises, but claimed they knew nothing about the migration status of these people, including the children. They blamed it on a contractor, as if their eyes did not work.
These people did not enter our country legally – and I can say for sure that given a legal way to enter, the story might have been different. But the Left doesn’t want that; they want limitless importation (so long as it’s from the correct countries, it would seem…). They want us to believe that any immigration law is tantamount to genocide, and that any attempt to control who we allow in
How did the LA Times report on this?
- It led to a man’s death and the ‘disappearing’ or detention of 360 people. They were disappeared! Did the hyperbolic comparison to despots disappearing their political enemies make you think of that murderous political despots, or did you presume they were just sent back home?
- The company reports it will make ‘significant changes to labor practices‘ and will ‘use verification policies to avoid legal entanglements with ICE‘ – who are they making the problem here, when the company chose to hire an almost entirely illegal workforce including CHILD LABOR? Did they properly shift the blame such that you let them off the hook?
- The company then refused to comment further, beyond that they will “make sure we never have a situation that we had on July 10. We can’t have this ever happen again” – was it the ICE raid on July 10th that was the problem, or the company’s illegal hiring practices? That date certainly seems like a finger might be pointing anywhere but to themselves.
- Oh yeah, the article tells you that “On that day, federal agents in masks and riot gear stormed across Glass House operations in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in the state’s largest ICE workplace raid in recent memory. Agents chased panicked workers through vast greenhouses and deployed tear gas and less-lethal projectiles at protesters and employees.” – because ICE is the problem, and the protestors who showed up and attacked the police weren’t pushed back with reasonable force, it was “less lethal”. God forbid we mention that protestors used force against the police and were bolstered by local politicians.
- You’re then told, basically, that ICE killed someone: “One worker, Jaime Alanis Garcia, died after he fell three stories from the roof of a greenhouse trying to evade capture. Others were bloodied from shards of broken glass or hid for hours on the roofs or beneath the leaves and plastic shrouding.”
Whose fault was this? I guess if ICE just let people illegally enter our country to be abused by corporations who don’t want to follow the law, none of this would happen, right? - Regarding the children who worked alongside Glass House’s at least 9 employees (we know it was at least that many, because they stated at at least 9 were detained): “while the identities of the alleged minors have not been disclosed, the company has been able to determine that, if those reports are true, none of them were Glass House employees“. Right, if those reports were true, none of their on-site employees noticed or paid out salaries to fucking CHILDREN? Did you feel the doubt they put in your mind? Did you take the focus off the shitty company hiring these people?
- More plays on your empathy, more hyperbolization: “The raid devastated Glass House and its workforce. Numerous workers were detained or disappeared, terrified to return. Those who remained were so distraught the company called in grief counselors.” … again, with the disappeared. Almost as though the LA Times knows which ditch they were supposedly lined up and shot in. This article just drips with messaging about how you should feel without explicitly saying it. Oh, those poor people had no idea what would happen when they illegally entered the country at all. They figured they were just going to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
- And then we have “Many in California’s cannabis industry feared the raid on Glass House was a signal that the federal government’s ceasefire against cannabis — which is legal in California but still not federally — had come to an end” … ICE isn’t about immigration, they’re coming after our dank nugs!
- Just to double down on the point that it’s not about immigration, we’re then told “In the wake of the raid, the United Farm Workers and other organizations warned farm laborers who were not citizens — even those with legal status — to avoid working in cannabis” – see, it’s definitely about weed! Don’t go apply for citizenship, hoard the nugs before they’re all gone!
- The one part of this whole fucking article I agree with was the quote “This shows the double standards of our legal system, where corporations can profit from the immigrant workers their businesses depend on, yet wipe their hands clean when it becomes inconvenient“, which is then shat all over by three paragraphs where Glass House says over and over again that they just want to pay these poor, innocent people. “We don’t want anyone to be shorted” – don’t you just feel warm and fuzzy for the abusive bullshit practices this company underhandedly pulled off?
Now, let’s talk a moment about the prinicipals at Glass House Brands. I did a quick OpenSecrets search for Kyle Kazan and Graham Farrar – Chairman and President of Glass House. Almost a hundred donations to Democratic leadership, with a few exceptions for Republicans who would make their farming operations a bit less regulated.
What wasn’t said in the article at all?
That a massive company – the Walmart of Weed, as the article quotes – sidestepped state and federal law and illegally employed these people for likely very substandard wages, not paying any taxes, and structured the operation so there was no liability?
That they had at least nine people working on-site who had to have seen over a dozen kids working on these farms?
That their website brags endlessly about social justice organizations to right the wrongs committed to, often, the very same people they illegally employed?
That the Californian government did nothing to oversee these farms? That criminal behavior and child trafficking was happening at a drug farm and nobody sounded an alarm? With an industry as regulated as legalized Marijuana nobody overseeing these farms asked about a single fucking immigration paper or why there were tweens running around farming weed?
Do you see through this bullshit, or is it just me?
In related news, if you don’t see through it, here’s a clip from a semi-related news article (https://progressive.org/latest/anti-cannabis-hmong-california-weinberg-210813/) where an illegal immigrant pulled an automatic weapon on emergency service workers directing traffic away from a wildfire and had fire returned by the police:
Do you see how the left is manipulating you?