Standing beneath the shade of one of countless rows of grape vines in Bakersfield, California, Olivia Vasquez, who has worked these fields for more than 30 years, wipes away tears as she shares her fear of being separated from her children if she gets deported.
Her five children were all born in the United States, but, Vasquez is an undocumented immigrant, and so is at risk of being deported under President Donald Trump’s deportation program.
Vasquez is a crew leader in the grape fields. A friend who knows her well described her to me as “firm, but fair” to the more than 50 other farmworkers she oversees. Picking grapes is hard work, as is most agricultural labor. The workers get up early so they can be done before the midafternoon sun makes their jobs unbearable.
But Vasquez doesn’t complain about the work. She is worried about what could happen to her if she’s picked up.
“For me, it’s the hardest thing that could happen to you,” she said in Spanish. “So, when I touch on that subject, I can’t.”
Estimates are there could be close to 300,000 undocumented agricultural workers living in the United States, according to the Center for Migration Studies. Almost half of those immigrants live in California, like Vasquez.
Now, whole communities of agricultural workers, like the one in Bakersfield, are living on edge, worrying that they, or someone they love, could soon be forced to leave the United States.
Bakersfield is home to more than 400,000 people and is nestled in the Central Valley between various smaller towns. These towns, including Delano and Lamont, are known for their rich agricultural land where goods like grapes, citrus and almonds are grown and harvested.
McFarland, also a farming town, gained national attention in the late 1980s after its high school won the California cross country championship for the first time. Outlines of runners can be seen on the highway overpass as you whiz past the green and tan of the fields.
About 90% of the country’s table grapes are grown in the Central Valley. Wholesalers like Whole Foods work with growers in the area to purchase grapes for store distribution. Once they are picked and packaged in the field, the grapes go to a cold storage facility to be chilled before being shipped across the country, as well as exported to Asia and Australia.
Rows and rows of produce cover hundreds of acres that extend so far it appears they blend into the dusty mountain ridge miles away.
According to the Interior Department, the Central Valley makes up just 1% of the country’s farmland, but produces about one-fourth of the nation’s fruits, nuts and other table foods. In these dusty rows, underneath the blazing sun and leafy canopy, a largely-immigrant workforce will pick, prune and package produce year round to feed Americans.
The trouble with deporting America’s immigrant workforce
Trump seems to understand the problem of deporting all the migrant workers — to a degree.
After a Hyundai plant in Georgia was raided recently, and more than 400 mostly South Korean workers were detained, Trump’s first response was to wonder aloud if picking up all of the trained workers was a good idea.
Trump has at times seemed conflicted by his own immigration policies, acknowledging the difficulty companies face when their long-time employees work under the threat of deportation, particularly in the tourism and agriculture industry.
As a whole, the Trump administration has delivered mixed messages about deporting workers in the agricultural industry. Trump and his Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have shown some hesitancy to deport farmworkers, while others, like border czar Tom Homan, say all of the people in the country illegally need to be rounded up and sent back to their home countries.
Trump, Homan and others in the administration have encouraged undocumented workers to “self-deport,” offering cash incentives to those who leave the country voluntarily.
What should U.S. policy be for the people who have lived in the country for many years, working in an industry supported by immigrants, who have built families and communities and are contributing members of society? There are no easy answers, especially for those who now live and work under the constant threat of deportation.
It’s clear why Vasquez came, and stayed. She said she’s worked these long years in the fields to provide her children with a better life, the American dream. Her eldest son is a paramedic, while another just graduated as a respiratory therapist and another is in college.
“No one raises their kids to be farmworkers,” Joe Garcia, the president of the California Farmworker Foundation, said, standing beside Vasquez.
The immigration advocates who work with the farmworkers say while they do what they can to protect the workers, they can see how the fear of deportation has changed how they live their lives. Workers go straight home after their shifts in the fields, relying on their children or neighbors to run errands for them.
The streets in Bakersfield were unusually quiet during my recent visit. While many residents are still out and about, local advocates say undocumented immigrants stay home as much as possible in the hopes that this will protect them from being detained on a drive to the grocery store or doctor’s office.
While Vasquez’s older children say she shouldn’t be so scared, her youngest son wants to leave the country with his mother now because he is so fearful he could lose her. Her 10-year-old said he is afraid to go to school because someone will “catch him.” Vasquez tries to tell him he will be safe because he is an American citizen, but it’s hard to explain the complicated tangle of immigration laws and increased enforcement to him.
Vasquez doesn’t want to leave. She says she didn’t leave Mexico and work in the fields for decades to give up now. She and her husband said they pay taxes, while doing difficult work in the hot California sun. They love the lives they’ve built and don’t want to go back.
“All we want is to work. We’re not hurting anyone,” Vasquez said. “We just want to work happily.”
Why haven’t they just become citizens? The answer is complicated
Even though Vasquez and some of the other farmworkers I spoke to have lived in the country for decades, they haven’t secured legal status.
Garcia said while many immigrants in the area have taken steps to secure a green card or U.S. citizenship, the path comes with a high price tag. People will save money for years to be able to afford to go through the process because housing, food and the needs of their children always come first.
The system is also “so backlogged,” he said, and under previous presidential administrations, they largely felt safe enough in the rural areas to not deal with the complicated process of securing documentation.
Vasquez expressed frustration that the immigrant community in the Central Valley is facing an uncertain future, saying that not many Americans would be willing to pick, prune and package acres of grapes like they do.
“They don’t do the work that we do. They can’t stand the heat, they can’t stand the dirt,” Vasquez believes. “They say we steal jobs. We steal because they aren’t doing it. We, the immigrants, do it.”
She is one of about 40,000 women working the fields in California who pick the produce that ends up on Americans’ tables. Women in the fields wear masks, hats, gloves, neck coverings, long-sleeved shirts and pants to protect themselves from the dry heat in the valley and the dust that is kicked up while they work.
They typically begin work around 6:30 a.m., break for lunch around 10 a.m. and leave around 2 or 3 p.m. to beat the afternoon heat.
Garcia said this summer was relatively mild, despite the 100-degree temperatures. The produce, and worker productivity, relies heavily on the climate. If it’s a particularly wet summer, it will impact the grapes. If it’s a warmer year, workers will need more breaks.
Generations grow up around farms
One woman I spoke to as we sat around her kitchen table, Elizabeth Morales, clutched her first grandchild, 4-month-old Emmanuel, to her chest as she recounted the story of her husband’s detention nine years ago, forcing her to be the sole earner for their four children for months.
“It’s something that pains me a little to talk about, especially because he and I had always worked together and suddenly he was no longer there and my children suffered because of it,” Morales, who is undocumented, said in Spanish.
Morales’ daughter, Priscilla Sierra, had Emmanuel prematurely and via cesarean section. Sierra expressed gratitude her mother was still in the area and able to help her during her recovery. She wondered aloud what it would have been like to recover had her mother been deported.
When the Border Patrol raids happened in January, Morales chose to not go to work for several days. While her children are older now than they were when their father was detained, “there’s still the trauma of reliving what you’ve already experienced and that’s what I didn’t want,” she said.
After her husband’s detention, he applied for a green card with the help of an attorney. Now, he is safer than she is, and since they work in the same field, Morales said he drives her to work then waits with her to check the coast is clear.
Even though Morales is scared to be detained or deported when she leaves for work, she said she has found comfort in prayer and her faith.
“I know that when we leave that door, God takes care of us, lets us go and lets us come back because there’s someone waiting for us,” she said of her children, later adding, “So, what does one do? Entrust oneself to God.”
Morales said she has begun to see her friends less. Some she sees at work, when they pick on nearby rows. But for others who are not in her crew, she has resorted to maintaining friendships via phone calls. “It is better” to not see each other right now, she said.
Her choice to not attend church, go out to eat or socialize with friends and other family is reflected among immigrants across the area. During a visit in August, the rural downtown of Delano was quiet, and the local Walmart in McFarland is described as a ghost town compared to what it was previously like. People are afraid to go get a gallon of milk, Garcia said.
Local business owners are hurting due to the lack of customers. Activists in Lamont told me they try to consume local goods and give back to small businesses in the area, but some owners are closing their doors as customers opt to stay home.
When an immigration raid happened in January, in the waning days of the Biden administration, the community was even more determined to stay home and businesses lost millions, Garcia claimed.
Garcia’s organization, California Farmworker Foundation, hosts food distribution services and mobile health centers for farmworkers. The food banks previously saw lines of cars waiting to pick up groceries, but now they’ve scaled back their distributions because no one is coming. The health clinics in the past treated 150 farmworkers at a time. Now, they’re lucky if 30 people show up.
According to Labor Department data, 17% of farmworker families in California live below the poverty line.
“We’re a sector that is persecuted right now because we have the misfortune of not having the documents to be here or having a valid work permit,” Morales said, later adding, “The truth is, I think we all deserve a chance.”
Pre-Trump raid
The January raids conducted by U.S. Border Patrol agents in California’s Central Valley left a lasting mark on the people here.
The three-day raid sparked fear among the immigrant farmworker community and caused confusion among local activists, who say Kern County was used as a “test” ahead of Trump’s promised increase in immigration enforcement nationwide.
Garcia pressed local, state and federal officials in the months after the January raid, wondering why the Bakersfield area was targeted and why it happened under the Biden administration.
The raid targeted thousands of immigrant farmworkers. They were pulled over driving to work or apprehended at local stores and detained. While many were released from CBP’s custody, the raids resulted in the arrest of 78 immigrants who were in the country illegally, The Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
The operation came as a surprise to higher-ups who said Border Patrol Chief Agent Gregory Bovino did not work in tandem with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and was working outside CBP’s normal operations at the border. It was viewed by insiders as a way to show that there was a new administration on its way in, the LA Times reported in February.
Garcia and his organization worked with the produce companies and farm owners in the area to ensure farmworkers knew they would be safe on the farms, that companies were educated on their right to refuse ICE agents access to their property and what to do if the presence of federal agents increased in the valley.
While the dust has settled from the January raid and production has returned to its regular pace, there is still a sense of underlying unease that changed daily life for those in the community.
Uncertainty about where immigration enforcement stands under the Trump administration, particularly for farmworkers, has left the community wondering, will ICE come back? If so, when?
Children of the fields
Paulina P., 24, has worked on and off in the Delano grape fields since she was in high school.
Pointing to her cellphone, Paulina explained how she tracks her undocumented father’s location. She watches him leave home, head to the fields for work and then travel back home again when the workday ends in the mid-afternoon to beat the heat.
“Having to worry about where he is and if he’s ever going to come home is the hardest part personally,” she said, wiping away tears. “He’s been working in the fields his whole life. That’s all he knows. It’s all we ever need.”
Paulina, who apologizes for becoming emotional, expressed frustration about immigration enforcement, not only for her father, but pointing to the others working in the field.
“We’ve been here for so long. We help our community, we do all this for the country,” she said, pointing to the harvested grapes.
Garcia noted that much of the workforce in California’s Central Valley has been in the area for decades. The farmworkers are not a “migrant workforce anymore,” he said, because they have put down roots, raised their children here and created a community.
Those children, like Paulina, even if they are U.S. citizens, are feeling the effects of ICE enforcement and fear for their parents.
“It’s a mental anguish on the children just as much as the workers,” Garcia said.
Hernando Rodriguez, 18, was wrapping up his second week of work in the grape fields, picking and packaging alongside his mother, who has worked in the fields since before he was born.
He said he has friends who came to the country from El Salvador or Guatemala and he worries they could be deported. Describing his mother as his “best friend,” he explained that while his parents have their documentation, he would be “ten times” more scared if they didn’t.
“They came illegally, but obviously they contribute to the U.S.,” he said. “They help out and there’s such a big impact of this community in the U.S.”
Rogelio Rodrigez, 26, a forklift driver at the grape cold storage facility that receives the shipments after they leave the fields, said he has friends whose family members are undocumented. He no longer takes trips to Los Angeles or plays pickup soccer with his friends. He describes a “dramatic” change in the community that has made life “different” for him and his friends who stick to the same “basic routine.”
“I will understand the criminal ones, but they’re targeting innocent people who work in the fields, providing food for everybody around them,” he said, later adding, “It’s upsetting. Why the innocent?”
The work must go on
In June, raids in Oxnard, 70 miles from Los Angeles, reignited fear of deportation raids in the Central Valley, Garcia said. Just after the Oxnard raid, Trump backed off his enforcement plans by highlighting the concerns agriculture and service industries have about losing their largely immigrant workforce.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump said in a June post online.
While Trump may have softened on the deportation of agriculture workers, others in his administration have not. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been steadfast in her commitment to deport undocumented immigrants and border czar Homan said in late May that more worksite enforcement would occur than ever before.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to the Deseret News that ICE will continue to target the “worst of the worst”
“70% of ICE arrests are of criminal illegal aliens who have been convicted or have pending charges in the U.S. — that doesn’t even include known or suspected terrorists, foreign gang members, convictions for violent crimes in foreign countries, or Interpol notices,” McLaughlin said.
While DHS said it remains committed to finding criminals, many of those in the Central Valley say they have no record and just want to work.
Luis Kats, the director of operations at a table grape cold storage facility in Delano, said if a raid were to happen during the region’s harvest season, it would cost companies and the industry millions of dollars. Advocates have also noted that if large numbers of farmworkers were to be deported, it would drive up costs of produce across the country.
“If it happens today? Oh forget it,” Kats said. “It’s detrimental. We will lose fields.”
As community leaders, Garcia and Kats say they are frustrated with politicians on both sides of the aisle after receiving no answers about the January raid and on whether their workers will be safe from deportation in the future.
“Upper management, us, we’re trying to focus on the politicians. We believe that they’re the ones that are going to be able to make a difference for them,” Kats said. “The problem right now is with the Sacramento politicians and the Washington politicians. They’re very far apart.”
Kats said for months, his employees have asked him what’s going to happen with immigration enforcement moving forward. He said he hasn’t been “able to give them answers.” Garcia expressed similar frustration. Every week he has to “verify or quell” rumors about ICE in the community.
The farmworker foundation is in the unique position of being on the ground, able to speak with the more than 90,000 farmworkers it represents and then advocate for them at the state and federal level.
Garcia said he’s been advocating at the federal level, hoping lawmakers can see that there are communities and real lives impacted by immigration policy.
“We get no answers and we have no policy reform,” Garcia said. “People don’t want to live in fear. They don’t even want citizenship, they want legalization just so they can go to the store or take their daughter to a birthday party.”
While the workers show up to Central Valley’s grape fields despite the fear, Garcia said advocates will continue to push state politicians and Congress for meaningful immigration reform for the people who have been in the area for decades.
“They’re hardworking people and they’re not criminals, they have their lives here,” he said. “They pay taxes, they don’t take government aid. They’re barely surviving but they have a better life here than they would in any other country. They’re living the American dream.”
