“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” —Jeremiah 8:20
Earlier this summer, there were several news stories that ICE raids were frightening away or deporting farmworkers, endangering the harvest. But the harvest is now over and somehow the crops got harvested. What happened?
Here’s the lead of an emblematic story from Reuters dated June 30, titled “Immigration Raids Leave Crops Unharvested, California Farms at Risk”:
OXNARD, California – Lisa Tate is a sixth-generation farmer in Ventura County, California, an area that produces billions of dollars worth of fruit and vegetables each year, much of it hand-picked by immigrants in the U.S. illegally. …
“In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,” she said in an interview. “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don’t want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”
Well, it’s now October. And by all accounts, this was a pretty normal harvest. Wine grape production, heavily dependent on migrant pickers, is up 3 percent over 2024. Apples, also reliant on immigrants, had a bountiful year, with a 6 percent increase, according to the USDA.
Basically, two things happened. Farmer organizations, from the American Farm Bureau Federation representing large growers, to the National Farmers Union representing family farmers, and the United Farm Workers union, went into high gear. They pressured both the White House and their elected representatives to get ICE to stay away from the harvest.
It largely worked. ICE, which is nothing if not political, was substantially redirected to harass and arrest immigrants in cities and factory towns but to leave the harvest mostly alone. ICE also backed off harassing meatpacking plants, especially in red states. We’ll see what ICE does now that the harvest is over.
But the full story is more sinister. As David Bacon has reported in the Prospect, the mere threat of ICE raids, combined with the occasional foray, has been enough to weaken union efforts in key farming areas. It’s taking a risk just to come to work and even more of a risk to protest low wages or organize other workers. So ICE is an ally of growers in keeping farmworkers available, cheap, and vulnerable. As he observed to me, there is “enough ICE activity to terrorize farmworker communities, but not massive raids to deprive growers of their workforce.”
Secondly, a good deal of the harvest labor is done by legal immigrant workers under the H2-A program, successor to the old Bracero Program for importing seasonal farm labor. For 2025, the Department of Labor certified the need for 385,000 H2-A jobs, mostly farm jobs, up from 48,000 two decades ago.
These jobs, which provide time-limited—typically ten-month—visas, basically make visa holders indentured servants to growers. And they have been targeted to displace local farmworkers, especially union members, to lower wages generally.
In short, our reliance on migrant workers is a double disgrace. America turns a blind eye to their lack of documentation when growers need them to work for a pittance, but then deports them, either legally under the H2-A program or viciously via ICE, when they are not needed.
The larger disgrace long predates Trump. Take a listen to the song “Deportee” by Woody Guthrie written in 1948, sung by Pete Seeger.