When the Napa Valley Register reported on the quiet but urgent work happening across Napa Valley, the headline captured a truth that immigrant-serving organizations have known for years: “Knowledge gives you power.” In a region famous for its rolling vineyards and world-class wineries, there is another Napa that doesn’t often make the tourism brochures—a Napa of hardworking immigrant families, farmworkers, restaurant cooks, hotel housekeepers, day laborers, and small business owners who are trying to build a life in a place that is both their home and, increasingly, a source of deep anxiety. Recent waves of fear have swept through these…

It begins in the kind of darkness that no family should ever have to know. In the early hours of a June morning, in the quiet village of Rogate, a teenage girl woke from sleep to find a figure standing over her bed. He was dressed entirely in black, his face hidden behind a balaclava, his hands covered in black latex gloves. In one hand he held pre-looped cable ties, and attached to a carabiner on his belt were ten more. It was not a random intruder, not a shadowy stranger from outside their world; it was Christopher Buxey, a…