WA farmers reckon with Trump’s immigration policies

On his Skagit Valley dairy farm bordering tulip and daffodil fields, Jason Vander Kooy called President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown a touchy subject.

I support Trump,” said Vander Kooy. “I respect him.” As a volunteer firefighter, he sees fentanyl overdoses he believes stem from drugs brought across the border as a record number of migrants arrived during the Biden administration.

Yet, his views don’t exactly match those of a president who has pledged to deport the entire undocumented immigrant population in the U.S., estimated to include nearly 14 million people, and whose administration has detained green card holders, student visa holders and at least one citizen.

While Vander Kooy supports deporting immigrants who have committed crimes, he’d like to see workers with a clean record given a path to staying legally in the U.S.

The son of a Dutch immigrant and father of three children adopted from China, he intimately knows how much immigration policy affects people and families. As he noted, he’s “kind of surrounded by immigrants.” They constitute most of his workforce.

Sharing that same reliance on immigrants are farmers throughout the state and indeed the country, who tend to lean right. In largely agricultural Grant County, for instance, Trump won 67% of November’s vote. Yet, if Trump carries through with his plans, the agriculture industry could not continue operating as it does now.

As the president’s immigration crackdown ramps up and spring kicks off labor-intensive work on many farms, owners and employees are trying to figure out what vast changes in immigration policies mean for them and an industry that in Washington produces goods valued most recently at $14 billion a year.

Calm prevails on the surface in some quarters, while anything but can be seen in others — along with stirrings of dissent.

“While farmers applaud the federal government’s efforts to protect Americans from anyone perpetrating criminal acts, the current crackdown threatens the future of our farms and our entire food system, and fails to provide meaningful reform,” read a February statement by the advocacy organization Save Family Farming. “The mishandling of deportation policies has created an atmosphere of fear, silencing voices and stripping away the dignity of those who contribute daily to our nation’s food supply.”

“Even those with papers are concerned about being wrongly targeted,” elaborated Dillon Honcoop, a spokesperson for the group, characterizing the federal government’s approach as “arrest first, ask questions later.”

Listening to farmers across Washington, one can discern the seeds of immigration reform that have failed to take root for decades. At the same time, these conversations help explain support for a president that makes such reform seem further away than ever.

There’s a dual way of thinking among some farmers that puts recent migrants and those who have committed crimes in one camp, and agricultural workers — even if undocumented — in another. Farmers interviewed by The Seattle Times focused on Trump’s tough stance toward the former and hoped for the best regarding the latter, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for years, raising families, filling schools and taking physically demanding jobs that are out of favor with many Americans.

The president doesn’t seem to be as popular among these workers as their employers, judging by interviews throughout the region on farms, at homes and in a business located amid Central Washington’s orchards, dairies and fruit packing plants. An undercurrent of fear is more apparent, but so, too, are complex views.

Asked about the border, Dario Madera Madera, foreman on a dairy in Central Washington’s Sunnyside, remarked upon “a lot of people coming and coming and coming.”

“We need hands here,” he added, but maybe not enough to provide jobs for everyone.

State and local governments were slow to provide help for recent migrants arriving in the Seattle area, many of them crowding into a Tukwila church offering shelter. But Washington lawmakers eventually allocated $25 million for the newcomers. And Madera Madera, a U.S. citizen who immigrated from Mexico decades ago, sees them as getting support unavailable to those coming to the U.S. in times past.

“We work hard and never receive help,” said Madera Madera.

Yet, the foreman knows other hardworking immigrants so afraid of being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement that they are avoiding grocery stores where officers might lie in wait.

Other farmworkers tell of curtailing visits to parks, locking a church door and stationing a U.S. citizen nearby, calling in sick when hearing of ICE sightings and sensing hate directed even at immigrants who are legally in the U.S.

“They don’t want you here,” one farmworker, a lawful permanent resident, said, crying.

Another is giving up on the American dream.

“He’s practically forcing us to leave,” said the worker, who is undocumented and, after 20 years in the U.S., saving money to go back to Mexico.

It’s hard to say how many workers the state’s agricultural industry could lose in this way, or due to detention and deportation. But the possibility of a growing labor shortage adds another stress to a segment of the economy already dealing with complex regulation, low market prices and a Trump-instigated tariff war that trade-dependent farmers are also carefully watching.

“We depend on each other”

The sounds of Spanish are everywhere on Washington’s farms. Many workers speak it. Some Anglo employers have picked it up too.

The state does not track how many local farmworkers, which at last count numbered 125,000, including nearly 36,000 temporary workers with H-2A visas, are foreign-born. A rough idea comes from a national survey of farmworkers by the U.S. Department of Labor, released in 2023. It found 68% of those the department interviewed were immigrants, most coming from Mexico.

Forty-two percent of farmworkers participating in the survey said they were undocumented. In conversations with The Seattle Times, some local farmworkers estimated the percentage of those who are undocumented runs as high as 60% or 70%.

Farmers say they ask prospective hires for documents showing their legal status but have limited ability and authority to investigate paperwork that might be false. Some employers are trying to cultivate more American-born workers, said Mike Gempler, executive director of Washington Growers League. But farm jobs, often seasonal, are a tough sell when there is low unemployment, as now, and year-round opportunities that don’t involve physical labor, Gempler said.

Some see farmers as taking advantage of workers who have few options. One undocumented worker interviewed in Central Washington said he earns roughly the state’s minimum wage, $16.66 an hour, after close to 40 years in the industry.

The Skagit Valley’s Vander Kooy objects to the idea that farmers exploit cheap labor. He said he and his brother, who together run the Mount Vernon dairy, provide jobs offering more than $20 an hour, without health insurance but with paid time off and free housing. When real estate was cheaper, the brothers bought a little more than a dozen houses around their dairy’s two parcels for employees and their families.

“We depend on each other,” Vander Kooy said.

Like many dairies, the brothers’ operate on a 24-hour cycle, during which their 1,400 cows are milked three times. Passing a “loafing” shed, where cows poked their heads through grates, Vander Kooy showed off one of the dairy’s milking barns. Here, octopuslike contraptions, emanating tubes through which milk flows, do the actual squeezing of teats. But a worker was there, as always, in a blue apron and boots.

Felix Sánchez, who came from Mexico many years ago, walked down a floor continually hosed down to clean it of muck. On either side were 15 cows. Sánchez cleaned the cows’ teats and attached the contraptions.

Outside the milking parlor, David Avilas, also from Mexico and a longtime U.S. resident, brought cows to the milking barn, cleaned their pens and pushed feed within their reach.

Reliability of workers is essential to keep the place running, Vander Kooy said. “I can’t shut down for one hour,” he said. If the cows aren’t milked on schedule, “they’re uncomfortable, they’re screaming.”

His immigrant workers have not let him down. “A lot of times, it’ll be the middle of the night, we might have a sick cow or something to take care of,” he said. “They’ll get out of their beds and help me.”

The Sunnyside dairy where foreman Madera Madera works has twice the number of cows as Vander Kooy’s, producing more than 30,000 gallons of milk a day. Owner Jason Sheehan’s dairy boasts a maternity wing for pregnant cows. Rows of white hutches, nestled in straw, house between 12 and 15 calves born each day.

Like Vander Kooy, Sheehan said he heavily depends on his workers, most of whom are immigrants. He called them “the face of who we are,” particularly Madera Madera, who calmly keeps the whole place running, and his brother Javier Madera Madera, who also came from Mexico long ago and whom Sheehan calls “the best equipment operator you will ever have in your life.”

Sheehan laughed when he recalled going into town and not being recognized at hardware and auto parts stores, which know the names “Dario” and “Javier,” not his.

“You’ve got some of the hardest-working people who are immigrants,” Sheehan said during a recent visit to his dairy, whose barns and fields for cow feed and a couple of other crops are within sight of gently rising hills.

“Somehow, some way, we need to figure out how to get immigration working so we can bring people here who want to work,” he continued.

An open border brings more people than there are jobs to be filled, he said, raising a similar concern as his foreman. But a closed border, he said, means “we don’t have the amount of workers we need to get the job done.”

A collective waiting

Sheehan said he agrees with Save Family Farming’s highly critical statement about Trump’s crackdown, as did other farmers interviewed.

Still, as raids and highly publicized ICE arrests began around the country, Sheehan said he told his workers “Trump is going after the problems” and that as long as they keep their nose clean, they should be fine. “Work is the safest and best place to be,” he added.

An April raid of a Bellingham roofing company didn’t shake him from those sentiments. So far, workplace raids hadn’t hit agriculture, he said, though he allowed: “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Only three months into Trump’s presidency, there’s a sense of collective waiting in farm country, and maybe some wishful thinking.

“I’m not at all worried,” said Kent Karstetter, taking a break amid pruning season on his 450-acre orchard of apples, pears and cherries in Quincy, about 85 miles north of Sunnyside.

As he sees it, the Biden administration let so many “bad people” across the border that Trump “has to be tougher,” he said, “or he at least has to give the perception of being tougher.”

He hints that reality may not match perception by asking this question: “Who does Trump hire?” News reports have documented Trump employing Hispanic immigrants, including some who are undocumented, at a winery and golf courses he owns. Which leads Karstetter to ask another question: “Why would he go against the people who are working for him?”

The possibility the president might do so, though, seems to percolate in the back of Karstetter’s mind. Asked what message he wants to get out about immigration, he said: “Don’t bother anyone who’s done nothing wrong.” It would be unfair, he elaborated, for ICE to arrest an undocumented worker who has been living here for, say, 20 years.

Karstetter is following new instructions for workers with H-2A visas, who constitute much of his workforce, in case they are stopped by ICE. As advised by agencies that work with his orchard, he is making sure the temporary foreign workers carry their passports and a form that verifies their immigration status and work authorization.

Gempler, of the growers league, is less sanguine than some farmers appear to be. Trump clearly seems frustrated that deportations have not moved as fast as he would like, Gempler noted. An analysis released last month by the bipartisan Migration Policy Institute shows the administration is on track to deport roughly half a million people this year, half its stated goal and fewer than under the final year of former President Joe Biden’s presidency.

Gempler expects worksite actions on farms as Trump pushes to speed things along. Likely, Gempler believes, will be the kind of efficient and “silent” raids practiced under former President Barack Obama, consisting of audits looking for suspect employee documents.

Those who keep their noses clean may not be let off the hook, judging by an array of aggressive immigration arrests made so far under Trump. Some of those detained have committed crimes, including rape and murder. Others have been taken in for minor infractions like driving without a license, according to Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

Incomplete data released by the Trump administration does not offer a full picture of what crimes those arrested have committed, but Muzaffar Chishti, also of the Migration Policy Institute, said in a recent webinar that many may simply amount to entering or reentering the U.S. illegally.

Breaking down the door

ICE came to Ramon Rodriguez Vazquez’s door, a 15-minute drive away from Sheehan’s dairy in the town of Grandview, at about 6 a.m. on Feb. 5. He was preparing lunch for the day’s work at a local orchard.

He had been laboring on farms since he came to the U.S. from Mexico, without authorization, in 2009. When Trump was elected for the second time, promising even more vigorous immigrant enforcement than during his first administration, Rodriguez Vazquez thought the risk to him was small.

He didn’t have a criminal record. Living in a trailer he was proud of buying for his family, “I was being quiet,” Rodriguez Vazquez said in Spanish.

He was arrested along with two family members, however, when officers from several agencies, including ICE, the Border Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Administration, executed a search warrant on his family’s home. They found drugs and a gun, which were claimed by one of the family members.

The agents asked Rodriguez Vazquez if he was living illegally in the U.S. He admitted he was. “They handcuffed me right away,” he said. He was taken to the jail-like Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, from where he talked recently about his case by phone.

Rodriguez Vazquez’s arrest caused a stir among his co-workers. “He’s been here for many years,” said Cipriano Rodriguez Cortes, a foreman at the orchard where Rodriguez Vazquez transported apples to be sold. “He never misses work. He doesn’t cause any problems.

Rodriguez Cortes has been taking stock of other ICE arrests, too. He was near Sunnyside’s Fiesta Foods in late January when ICE detained a couple in the parking lot, causing shoppers to run in panic. Some left groceries they had paid for behind, according to Luis Moreno, business manager at Fiesta Foods.

Rodriguez Cortes has seen news reports of ICE arrests in which officers wore masks, as if they were encountering terrorists requiring extreme measures.

The orchard foreman is a U.S. citizen who has lived and worked in the country since 1974, when he arrived from Mexico as a teenager. But he worries that ICE officers might stop him and fail to believe his declaration of citizenship. So in March, he began carrying a license-size passport card in his wallet.

Like others, Rodriguez Cortes says it’s too soon to tell whether Washington’s farm country will begin to see large-scale arrests and raids. But the climate, as his wallet attests, has already changed.

Correction: This story has been updated to clarify that only one gun was found inside the home of Ramon Rodriguez Vazquez.