Dolores Huerta, United Farm Workers co-founder, dies at 96

Dolores Huerta died Wednesday at 96.

Her family said she co-founded the union that became the United Farm Workers alongside César Chavez and spent her career organizing farmworkers and immigrant communities. Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodless Clinton both called her a champion of working Americans.

Huerta also spoke publicly this year about Chavez. Her family said she revealed that Chavez had sexually abused her in the 1960s, and that the relationship produced two children. She said she kept it quiet for decades because she worried that coming forward would damage the union's work.

Huerta received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her organizing. She also helped run the 1965 grape boycott that pushed growers to bargain with workers. In a 2018 WMNF interview, she said the boycott drew widespread consumer support.

She said at the end of the boycott, roughly 17 million people had stopped buying grapes. Growers then agreed to put toilets in the fields, provide cold drinking water, allow rest periods, and recognize workers' right to organize. California later extended unemployment insurance to farmworkers, a benefit she noted most states still do not offer.

In the same 2018 interview, she was asked about a federal court ruling on DACA, the program shielding some young immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation. She said she was grateful for the judge's decision.

She said she hoped the ruling would stand, noting other judges had issued similar decisions and that some students had stopped applying out of fear. She said she hoped the decisions would prevent the threat of deportation that DACA recipients face.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled in Washington against the administration's move to end DACA. He called the Department of Homeland Security's reasoning arbitrary and capricious, and wrote that the decision must be set aside. He gave the department 90 days to explain why it views DACA as unlawful, and said it must accept new and renewal applications if it cannot.

Huerta was scheduled to speak at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, in Fox Hall.