They Built the Cannabis Industry. Now They’re Being Deported for It.

The morning Jaime Alanís García died, he was doing what he had done most of his adult life: working the land. He was a longtime farmworker, employed at a state-licensed cannabis operation in California, when federal immigration agents moved in. In the chaos that followed, Jaime fell from a building. He was a husband, a father, a provider. The raid was lawful by federal standards. The cannabis he was harvesting was lawful by state ones.

That contradiction — a legal industry employing workers who can be detained and deported for participating in it — is not new. What was new was what happened next.

“To our frustration, the greater cannabis community was largely silent,” wrote the founders of the Latino Cannabis Alliance, a newly formed national organization that launched in direct response to Jaime’s death and the broader silence that followed it. “This tragic event forced many of us who work within the cannabis ecosystem to realize that we did not have an organized and credible Latino voice.”

Now they do.

The Numbers the Industry Doesn’t Talk About

The cannabis industry’s equity narrative has centered, almost entirely, on Black Americans — and rightly so, given the disproportionate toll of the War on Drugs. But the Latino experience has been documented in devastating statistical detail for years, with almost none of it translating into industry accountability.

In 2023, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reported that Hispanics accounted for 70.8 percent of all people sentenced for federal marijuana possession in the prior five fiscal years. Not a plurality. Not a majority. More than seven out of ten.

Between 2002 and 2020, approximately 127,387 people were deported for marijuana-related convictions. Last year alone, at least 600 individuals were deported for marijuana-related charges — a figure LCA founders say is almost certainly an undercount.

This year, the Department of Homeland Security published what it calls its “worst of the worst” list: a public profile database of deportees it wants the country to know about. A review by Marijuana Moment found at least 77 people on that list whose sole listed offense was marijuana possession. Not trafficking. Not violence. Possession of a plant that 24 states have legalized and that the Trump administration has simultaneously moved to federally reschedule.

The cognitive dissonance is difficult to overstate.

Who Gets to Own This Industry

The Latino Cannabis Alliance was founded by policy advocates, academics, attorneys, community organizers, and people who have spent decades in cannabis reform. Their stated mission isn’t just advocacy — it’s representation across business, policy, and culture.

Because here, too, the gap is stark. Latino workers are a significant and largely invisible part of cannabis agriculture — harvesting, trimming, growing, transporting. But Latino ownership in the licensed industry is minimal. The LCA points to three interlocking barriers: prior convictions that disqualify people from licensing; immigration status that makes participation legally dangerous; and the prohibitive cost of entry into a capital-starved industry that already squeezes out small operators.

In other words: the same communities criminalized to build the War on Drugs are being kept out of the legal industry the War supposedly gave way to.

The cannabis industry has been quick to declare itself a social justice movement. It’s slower to examine who that movement has actually reached. social equity licensing bottlenecks licensing programs in states like New York and Illinois have stalled, been challenged in court, or been captured by better-capitalized applicants. Federal expungement has gone nowhere. And the Latino workforce that keeps cultivation operations running has, in many cases, been invisible in those conversations entirely.

A Political Climate That Has Raised the Stakes

The LCA’s launch comes at a moment when the risks for Latino cannabis workers have escalated sharply. The Trump administration has explicitly tied immigration enforcement to marijuana — including actions that cannabis advocates and legal scholars argue are disconnected from any meaningful public safety rationale.

A House Cannabis Inquirer’s legislative tracker currently under discussion would allow law enforcement to classify people who regularly gather to use marijuana as criminal gang members subject to deportation. That framing — applied in states where recreational cannabis is fully legal — would essentially criminalize the act of consuming a legal product if done while undocumented. The LCA cited that bill by name in its founding statement.

“With the Trump administration ramping up harassment of Latino youth and bragging about marijuana-based deportations,” the organization wrote, “our work is more important than ever.”

The timing is not incidental. It reflects something the cannabis industry is still grappling with: that the political battle over marijuana has never been only about marijuana. The plant has always been a proxy for other things — race, immigration, labor, fear. Harry Anslinger chose the word “marijuana” over “cannabis” in the 1930s deliberately, to make prohibition sound like protection from Mexican immigrants. That framing calcified into law, and some version of it is still operative today.

What Comes Next

The LCA describes itself as a “central forum for analysis, commentary and guidance on cannabis issues from a Latino lens.” That’s a starting point. But the organization also has more structural ambitions: cultivating relationships with Latino lawmakers, building bridges across diverse Latino communities, and fostering cross-border connections with Latin America on equity and reform.

Whether that translates into political leverage — the kind that moves legislation, shapes licensing rules, or creates actual pathways to ownership — remains to be seen.

What’s clear is that Jaime Alanís García’s death did something the cannabis industry’s own equity campaigns had not: it made the silence visible.

The industry that benefits from Latino labor has a choice to make. It can continue to count diversity on its boards and in its press releases while its workers are deported. Or it can reckon with the full picture of who actually built what it’s now selling.

The Latino Cannabis Alliance is betting the reckoning is overdue.

Maya Torres covers equity, medical access, and the human side of cannabis policy for CannabisInquirer.com.