During a virtual event last week organized to release a report on the struggles of farmworkers across the U.S. and Canada, one word came up early and often: fear.
“With this current administration that is going to be coming in, there’s a lot of fear and uncertainty,” Luis Jiménez, a dairy worker from western New York who is a founding member of Alianza Agrícola, said in Spanish through an interpreter. “I think it’s going to increase more. So, this is the moment to join together as workers, as allies.”
Back in March, Jiménez joined a group of farmworkers from six states and Ontario to testify about their experiences at the Bi-National People’s Tribunal on the Struggles of Farmworkers in North America in New York City. The tribunal was organized by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, a coalition that represents individuals working along the entire food supply chain, and the report released Wednesday summarizes the takeaways from farmworker testimony shared that day.
However, in the time between the tribunal and the report release, even more urgent challenges for farmworkers have arisen. A majority of farmworkers are immigrants, and anti-immigrant rhetoric and promises of mass deportations formed a key plank of the platform President-elect Trump ran on. Since his election, Trump appointed immigration hardliners to key posts. Last week, he confirmed that he plans to use the U.S. military to help carry out mass deportations.
“I believe that this country without immigrants’ hands wouldn’t be the same. We are not here to steal. We’re here to work.”
As a result, the struggles shared at the tribunal and the possibilities that came out of the solidarity established there are now being shared in a new light. Workers and allied organizers expect the incoming administration to slow—and in some cases reverse—progress they’ve made, but they are also working quickly to prepare defenses to protect the people who power the American food system.
In the report, farmworkers shared experiences that put their health and safety at risk, including broken windows and lack of heat in farmworker housing on New York dairy farms, injuries from malfunctioning equipment, sexual harassment, and pesticide exposure.
These risks are likely to continue in a second Trump administration: During his last term, Trump proposed weakening rules that protect workers from pesticide drift. Advocates also expect him to end a deferred action program started by the Biden administration that allowed immigrants to stay in the country legally in exchange for helping improve workplace conditions for all workers.
Other workers addressed the issue of what they call “freedom of movement.” Because they fear being apprehended by border patrol and local police, farmworkers are often reluctant to go to the grocery store or pick their children up from school. Jiménez talked about New York farmworkers’ successful efforts to let immigrants earn driver’s licenses as a crucial victory, but workers in Florida and Washington pointed to the fact that farms are increasingly using the H-2A program to hire foreign workers.
That can result in farmworkers being even more isolated and more vulnerable to exploitation on farms, since their ability to live and work in the U.S. is tied exclusively to a single employer who also controls their housing.
The H-2A program has grown exponentially over the last decade, and in the first Trump administration, his U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed changes that would have weakened housing safety rules and lowered wages for H-2A workers. He was supportive of the program as a legal way for farmers to address their labor needs and many expect the program to continue to grow on his watch, although the conservative policy blueprint Project 2025 proposes phasing it out.
Regardless of what happens to H-2A, immigrant farmworkers are already moving around with less freedom. At the event, Patricia Lopez, a farmworker in western Massachusetts, said rumors are circulating in her community about detainments and whether the Trump administration will once again separate families. In 2018, Trump’s attorney general instituted a policy of immediately detaining and prosecuting individuals crossing the border illegally and in the process, separated more than 5,500 children from their families.
