Coast Guard Begins Targeting Fish Boats’ Foreign Crews

Lousiana Parish Recoils in Grief as One Worker Drowns

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The author writes for THE LENS of New Orleans, a non-profit news outlet. This story was first published on February 11, 2026 and is reprinted here with permission. The story has been shortened for the Loose Cannon audience. It can be read in its entirety here.

By DELANEY NOLAN

Since November, the U.S. Coast Guard—the military branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—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, 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.

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.

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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 Jan. 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.

Alert System

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.

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.”

Immigrant Labor Crucial

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 percent of fisheries workers, and 25 percent 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Coast Guard’s New Role

The delineations used to be clear: ICE operated within U.S. borders, Customs and Border Patrol 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 continued raids have shaken people like Dominguez. “It’s very scary,” he said. While he continues to work so he can support his 5-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.”