Alexandra, a 55-year-old undocumented migrant, was recently on her way to work at a watermelon farm in the border city of Edinburg, Texas, when her oldest son stopped her before she could leave her old trailer.
“Please don’t go. They’re going to deport you,” she told Alexandra, who asked that her last name not be used because she didn’t want to attract the attention of federal immigration agents. Her son then showed her detailed videos of federal agents chasing and handcuffing migrants apparently all across Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. “That could be you,” he said.
President Donald Trump’s conflicting orders to exempt, then pursue, and then exempt farmworkers from his aggressive immigration workplace raids have wreaked havoc on the agricultural industry nationwide, where about 42 percent of farmworkers are undocumented, according to the Department of Agriculture.
But perhaps nowhere is the fear among farmworkers more palpable than on the farms and ranches along the southwestern border between Mexico and the United States, where for centuries workers have viewed the border as more porous than forbidding.
Government officials have vowed to fulfill Trump’s once-popular campaign promise to deport millions of undocumented workers, in what he has said will be the largest mass deportation in U.S. history.
While raids on worksites have eroded that popularity and sparked angry protests across the country, the border region has remained eerily quiet.
The Trump administration has effectively eliminated crossings for those on the Mexican side seeking asylum or simply illegal work in the fields. On the U.S. side, where undocumented migrants continue to make up a large part of the workforce, many of those workers are afraid to leave.
“Right now, I don’t have any workers,” said Nick Billman, owner of Red River Farms, a farm in Donna, Texas. He wonders whether to plant if he doesn’t have anyone to maintain the fields and harvest them. “We have to figure out what we do, you know?”
Elizabeth Rodriguez, who helps farmworkers, shows her phone screen to a silhouetted undocumented worker.
Elizabeth Rodriguez, of the National Farmworker Ministry, shows an undocumented farmworker a WhatsApp group chat where people share the risks of raids in Edinburg, Texas. Credit…Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The New York Times
It’s hard to estimate how many workers have stopped coming to work. But Elizabeth Rodriguez, an activist with the National Farmworker Ministry, says she’s seeing fewer workers at the farms she visits as watermelon season draws to a close.
“Most of the workers here are longtime residents who, for one reason or another, don’t have legal status,” Rodriguez said. “And now, they’re terrified to go to work. The fields are almost empty.”
Undocumented workers have long been the lifeblood of farms in the border region. In the most recent survey released by the National Center for Farmworker Health, nearly 80 percent of workers surveyed in Hidalgo County said they were undocumented. And that county, the largest in the Valley, as the region is known, has more than 2,400 farms.
Legal farmworkers with H-2A visas, which allow Mexican citizens to work and live while working on farms, make up only a small percentage of the workforce, according to the same study.
“It’s clear these farmers need these workers,” Rodriguez said. “How are Americans going to get the food they eat?”
Peak harvest season came before raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents sent waves of panic through the Rio Grande Valley. But as the current watermelon season draws to a close, many growers are wondering what they will do next season, said Jed Murray, director of government relations for the Texas International Produce Association, a produce industry advocacy group.
“From our industry’s perspective, farmworkers who may have documentation issues have worked with their growers for 10 or 15 years. There’s a good relationship,” Murray said.
“But in this current environment,” he added, “many growers are looking into hiring more H-2A workers.”
Many farmers fear that speaking out will make them a target of the government. Conservative Texas Republicans, who control all branches of state government, have made aggressive immigration laws a priority and have promised to assist the Trump administration in its offensive.
But Texas lawmakers have overlooked a telling detail: they have not required most private employers to use E-Verify, a federal program that checks workers’ legal status—an oversight that has not gone unnoticed by border farmers. That means most Texas employers are not explicitly required to confirm the immigration status of those they hire.
Billman said new employees fill out their own paperwork, and it’s up to the government to verify their status. His job is to find capable hands willing to do relentless work, and he’s already struggling to find workers to prepare his fields for pumpkin seeds and help him clear debris from the recent storms.
He estimates he could lose between $100,000 and $150,000 in profits from his farm if he doesn’t go ahead with his harvest plans.
“It’s a huge deal for us,” he said.
Contradictory signals from Trump aren’t helping. In late May, one of his top advisers, Stephen Miller, said ICE would target a “minimum” of 3,000 apprehensions a day, initiating a visible crackdown that impacted cities and farms across the country. Then, on June 13, at the president’s urging, immigration raids on farms, hotels, and restaurants were halted. They resumed a few days later, only for the president to say last Friday that farmers would be helped.
“We’re looking at doing something so that, for good, reputable farmers, they can be held accountable for the people they hire,” Trump told reporters en route to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. And she added: “We can’t put farms out of business.”
For farmworkers in the Rio Grande Valley, the president’s latest pronouncement was little comfort.
“At first, he said he wasn’t going to come after us. Then he did,” Alexandra said in an interview. “You can’t trust what he says.”
Alexandra said she risked losing even more than the farmers she works for. The old trailer where she lives, which she has kept standing with duct tape patches and pieces of plywood, cost her only $800. But her five children have to chip in to help her scrape together the $450 she needs each month to cover her food and electricity bills.
“I’m desperate,” she said. “If I leave home, they’ll catch me. If I stay here, how am I going to eat?”
She has considered self-deportation to end her uncertainty, but said she worried about drug cartel violence in her native Mexico. “It’s worse there,” she said.
Reports of ICE agents showing up at the farms where she works are so frequent that she says she’s willing to try a new kind of employment.
She contacted a friend who works at one of the many convenience stores in the area, who told her about a possible shift. But then her phone started filling up with videos of an ICE raid at a business called El Tocayo Drive Thru in Edinburg. Locals were engrossed in WhatsApp group chats and social media posts following every moment of an eight-hour standoff between plainclothes officers and a 25-year-old worker who hid in a kitchen until officers presented her with a warrant.
Elda Garza, owner of El Tocayo Drive Thru, said officers gave her no information other than that they needed to detain her worker, who had been there for a year, because she had a “prior record,” Garza said.
“They told us they were only looking for her and no one else,” Garza said. “But the incident has left us all reeling.”
Rosy, a 57-year-old resident of McAllen, Texas, said she had stopped going to her cleaning job for the past three weeks because she was convinced immigration agents were lurking everywhere. She hides behind the windows whenever a stranger knocks on her door. She asked that her last name not be published because she has been living illegally in the United States for almost 25 years.
What’s worse, she said, is that her U.S.-born daughter dropped out of nursing school to work as a medical assistant to support her.
“I know sometimes it seems like I’m paranoid,” Rosy said, wiping away tears. “Even when I walk my dogs, I rush them when I feel like every car that drives by belongs to immigration agents. I can’t live like this.”
Her fear isn’t simply being returned to Mexico. She said she was more terrified of being taken away by masked agents who could send her to a third country with which she has no connection. That policy was upheld Monday by the Supreme Court.
“I have family in Mexico, I can stay with them,” she said, considering the possibility of leaving on her own. “But I don’t want to abandon my daughter.”
Alma, another farmworker who also declined to give her last name because she is also undocumented, said she didn’t know when she would be able to return to work in the cilantro fields she has known for 15 years. Like the others, she isn’t sure the $200 she could earn in a week is worth the risk of being deported and leaving her legal relatives behind.
“I need to earn money, but I also don’t want to be separated from my family,” she said. “They’re putting us in a dead-end situation.”
Source: nytimes
