Trump’s Deportations Haunt Workers in the Fields of Rural New York
” class=”css-dc6zx6 ey68jwv2″>Ana Ley
Visuals by Hilary Swift
Ana Ley and Hilary Swift drove hundreds of miles through rural New York to meet with farmworkers and their children.
In the vast farmlands of northern New York, where horse-drawn buggies and tractors wind through miles of apple orchards and raspberry bushes and flocks of grazing sheep, workers wait. And watch.
They have seen federal agents sweep away a mother and her three children from their home on a dairy in the village of Sackets Harbor, N.Y. And they have heard about the food vendor arrested by the immigration police after she hit a deer in a snowstorm and sought help from a neighbor who reported her to the authorities. Officers then took her husband from work and their daughters, 6 and 9 years old, from school.
As the nation’s battle lines sharpen on immigration, tension engulfs farmworkers who, in many respects, embody the fraught, sometimes contradictory nature of the debate.
The business owners who depend on migrant work — many of them supporters of President Trump — feel anxious about the prospect of losing a crucial labor force. In the surrounding communities, there is palpable acrimony between those who think migrants should be allowed to stay in the country and those who want them to go.
Afraid of being next amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, some laborers have not left their homes for weeks except to go to work, canceling dance parties and quinceañeras. Two longtime housemates said that they ended their weekend ritual of going shopping at the mall. One woman decided not to go to church with her family over Easter. A teenage girl burst into tears at the kitchen table as her mother explained that she was afraid to go out for ice cream.
More than a dozen laborers and their children shared their stories with The New York Times, saying they feel tormented by what they described as cruel and chaotic deportation efforts aimed at their community. In rural New York, some immigrants have been briefly detained and then released, while others with legal papers languish in custody, leaving many confused about who is being forced out of the country and who gets to remain.
“I feel outraged by what is happening,” Luis Enrique Gomez García, a lumber mill worker from Guatemala, said in Spanish. Eleven days after his wife crashed into a deer on Jan. 24, Mr. Gomez García was arrested on his way to his job and held at a detention center with his two young daughters despite having a work permit. He and his wife are seeking asylum.
“The way they took me — I was furious because I was 100 percent sure that I was doing things correctly,” he said. “But they took me.”
President Trump has vowed to remove immigrants from the country by the millions, but his administration has so far fallen vastly short of that goal. To boost deportations, immigration officials have detained workers at their homes and jobs — a method that, in the past, had been reserved for only the most violent criminals.
Don Pitcher lives in Sackets Harbor, the town that was in the national spotlight after the detention of the mother and her children. Mr. Pitcher believes that federal officials are confronted with a difficult task as they try to rein in soaring immigration numbers.
“It’s the ones that are the gang members who are causing trouble or living off the system without trying to make an effort to be part of the fabric of America,” Mr. Pitcher said. “Those are the people I don’t agree with being here, and if they want to come in the legal way, that’d be great.”
Most Americans support deportations of undocumented immigrants — an issue that Mr. Trump campaigned on and won. Yet in recent months, voters have expressed concern about how Mr. Trump has handled immigration, with some believing that he is overreaching. Mr. Trump has doubled down, and on April 28, he signed three executive orders to force local jurisdictions to cooperate with his crackdown.
Hurting farmers is not the point, the administration said.
“Two things can be accomplished at the same time: enforcing our immigration laws and supporting America’s vital agricultural industry,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said. “The Trump administration is already delivering relief for America’s farmers by slashing regulations, ending unfair trade practices and lowering energy prices.”
Toiling Out of Sight
New York’s countryside, where in some areas verdant hills are dotted with bright red barns and clustered farmhouses, is a popular retreat for city dwellers and a tourism destination for recreational fruit picking, beer tasting and hayrides. It is also famous for producing more apples than any other state except for Washington — supplying the nation with one of its most-consumed fruits.
The people who tend to its farms are mostly Latino immigrants. Labor Department data shows that almost 68 percent of crop workers employed in the United States during the 2021-22 fiscal year were foreign-born. About 42 percent of farmworkers are not legally authorized to work in the country, providing an easy target for immigration officials searching for people to deport. In New York State, experts at Cornell University estimated in 2019 that about half of all farmworkers were undocumented.
Dairy is the state’s biggest agricultural sector, and New York is the fifth-largest dairy state, according to statistics released by the state’s Agriculture Department in 2023. Dairy farmers have long employed people without legal status to tend to their cows because they cannot find U.S. citizens to reliably perform jobs that are “physically demanding, dirty and socially denigrated work,” according to research conducted by Mary Jo Dudley at the Cornell Farmworker Program, which advocates for the rights of agricultural workers in New York and studies their impact on the state.
“We have not made the effort in this country to develop farm work as a respected vocation that’s properly compensated with health insurance and retirement and workers’ compensation and all the things that you should have if you’re working for somebody else,” said Elizabeth Henderson, a retired fruit and vegetable farmer near Rochester.
Antonio De Loera-Brust, a spokesman for the United Farm Workers, a union for agriculture laborers, said that the mood in New York mirrors what others are experiencing across the United States in ebbs and flows. People hide when they hear about a sighting of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, emerge when they are eager to return to normal life and retreat if they are scared again.
David Fisher, president of the New York Farm Bureau, a nonprofit industry group, said that recent deportation efforts had created anxiety not only for farmworkers, but also for their employers.
“Local sources of labor are simply not available in most cases,” Mr. Fisher said in a statement. “It is essential that we work effectively with this administration to make our voice heard.”
Immigrant laborers are now in hiding, out of sight from federal agents and the American neighbors who have treated them with growing suspicion. One woman, an apple picker, said that even though she is a naturalized citizen, she avoids leaving her trailer home because she is afraid of being racially profiled. Her husband was deported to Mexico in 2017, and her youngest daughter said that she now barely remembers him.
When religious leaders gathered for a vigil outside a Border Patrol station in Rochester last month to sing hymns and plead for mercy from immigration agents, some passers-by taunted the group of about 120 people, shouting:
“Truuuuuump!”
“Deport, deport, deport!”
‘Eye-Opening For Many’
Kevin Mallaber grew up in a farming community in Holley, N.Y., that relied heavily on immigrants. These days, he lives in a ranch home surrounded by farmland that mostly produces grain corn for livestock feed.
A barn on his property was decorated with an oversized navy blue flag with gold lettering that read: Trump/2024 The Return/Take America Back.
Mr. Mallaber said that people who “want to come to America for a better job and better life” must follow the legal steps to do so.
“Once you do those steps, I don’t see why it would be an issue for anybody to be able to work any way they want to work in America,” he said.
U.S. farm owners voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, as did the electorate across rural parts of New York. But because many farm owners depend on immigrant labor, their industry is imperiled by the president’s deportation efforts. Mr. Trump sought to relieve that tension last month by vaguely suggesting that farmers will be able to petition the federal government to retain some workers who are undocumented, but he did not clarify how or when the government would do it.
In a statement, Agriculture Department officials said that Mr. Trump’s administration was working to improve visa programs for temporary and year-round workers but did not provide specifics.
Just outside the village of Spencerport, N.Y., Robert J. Colby’s family has run Colby Homestead Farms for seven generations. Mr. Colby, a Republican member of the Monroe County Legislature, said that he supported the detention of immigrants who have arrest warrants.
“If people are concerned about ICE’s activities, the solution is for the Congress and Senate to get to work and get an immigration program together,” said Mr. Colby, who said that he does not employ undocumented workers. He added: “We should be able to vet people’s backgrounds and process them within six months in order for them to be able to come and become citizens.”
Mr. Pitcher, the Sackets Harbor resident, said his children were upset to hear about the family’s detention, but he explained to them that federal officials were enforcing the rules, and eventually, the family was returned home.
Will Barclay is a Republican state lawmaker whose district covers a swath of central New York. He said that although recent deportation actions have rattled some people, Mr. Trump was rectifying a broken immigration system.
“The size, scope and speed of the deportation program is understandably eye-opening for many,” said Mr. Barclay, who is the Assembly minority leader. “But from my perspective, the reckless open-border policy of the Biden administration is the outlier — not the effort to restore the laws and citizenship priorities of the past.”
‘Working as a Team’
Latinos in rural New York have mobilized to help the most frightened among them. WhatsApp chats buzz about ICE sightings. Those with legal papers are ferrying groceries and giving undocumented people rides so that they avoid encounters with the police. Advocacy organizations that defend immigrant rights such as the Rural & Migrant Ministry and the Finger Lakes Rapid Response Network have held workshops to teach immigrants about their legal rights and to discourage them from spreading panic with unverified reports.
Beatriz Adriana Aguilera Fonseca, a former apple picker, works at a Mexican food market in Sodus, N.Y., about 40 minutes east of Rochester, where shoppers began to request deliveries in recent months. Ms. Aguilera Fonseca, who has a green card, drives children to confirmation classes at church when their mothers won’t risk an encounter with ICE.
“We are working as a team,” Ms. Aguilera Fonseca said in Spanish. “It makes me sad to see people feel afraid and unsafe.”
Politically progressive Americans in rural New York are working behind the scenes to persuade their Republican neighbors to empathize with undocumented residents. Last month, about 50 gathered at a church building where the interior walls were covered with signs denouncing ICE and praising immigrants in English and Spanish:
THANK YOU FARM WORKERS
WAYNE COUNTY DEPENDS ON YOU!
They distributed bright yellow pamphlets urging people to stop asking others about their immigration status, to “be kind to your neighbors” and to “think critically” about the criminal justice system. The group had planned to hold the event outdoors but worried about drawing attention from people who might report them to ICE, so they moved to a private location where a lookout watched for federal agents.
A Flash of Hope
On a chilly March morning, a mother was getting her children ready for school when ICE agents arrived at their home at North Harbor Dairy in Sackets Harbor. They were taken into custody after immigration agents showed up to arrest a South African man sought for distributing images of child sexual abuse.
Teachers gathered in protest, amassing a crowd of about 1,000 who took advantage of their location: Thomas Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, owns a vacation home in the village. They marched through downtown Sackets Harbor to Mr. Homan’s doorstep. Gov. Kathy Hochul called Mr. Homan and demanded the release of the family, whose names have not been publicly disclosed.
Days later, they were returned home.
Ana Mendez-Vasquez, who is a niece of the formerly detained mother, did not expect Americans to come to the family’s defense. Ms. Mendez-Vasquez, who grew up in the area and is an organizer with the Rural & Migrant Ministry, said Latinos there often endure racism, and people keep quiet.
“For there to be some kind of progress, there definitely has to be sacrifices, whether we like it or not, right?” Ms. Mendez-Vasquez said. “I hope that this fuels people’s need to speak out.”
Mr. Gomez, the lumber worker, is fighting a lonelier battle.
In his family’s living room, he shook with anger over the arrest of his wife, Delmy Rendón, who has spent months in a detention center in Louisiana despite being on a path to legal residency after fleeing gang violence in Guatemala, according to immigration court records and the family. They fear for their safety if they have to return there.
After Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Gomez’s sister and brother-in-law were also arrested by ICE on their way to church and deported to Guatemala. They once shared a full house that has dwindled to three residents — Mr. Gomez and his daughters.
He wondered whether he might be arrested again despite following the rules. What would happen to his girls, the younger of whom is an American citizen?
“It makes me sad, because I really love my mom,” said his older daughter, Skarleth, 9, who kneels every night to pray for her mother’s return. “I never thought this nightmare would be really long.”
David Andreatta, Steven Rich and Hilary Swift contributed reporting, and Alain Delaquérière and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Ana Ley is a Times reporter covering immigration in New York City.
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