Lupita lives in a house among a quilt of rolling farm fields. On a recent weekday, she fried plantains and heated up the Mexican drink Atole for her kids and some visitors — a cozy treat for a chilly day.
Puedes leer la versión en español, aquí.
We’re only identifying Lupita by her middle name. She’s concerned about retaliation from the Trump administration, including detention and deportation, due to her legal status.
She’s part of the community of between 1,000 and 1,500 Latino immigrants currently in Vermont to work on farms, or to be with family members working on farms, mostly in the dairy industry.
Lupita says she and her father left their home in Tabasco, Mexico, because they could no longer grow watermelons due to pollution.
It was winter when they arrived in Addison County, one of the two biggest dairy counties in Vermont. Lupita was 16, and remembers the cold. She tears up while describing how hard it was to be away from her family.
“Those were very difficult times, because I missed my mom and my siblings a lot,” Lupita said in Spanish. “I don't know, I was very young, I didn't speak the language, and I always felt very alone.”
Now 30 years old, Lupita says that Vermont does remind her a lot of Tabasco. It’s small, rural and beautiful. And it’s grown to feel like home.
“I feel like I fell in love with Vermont so much,” she said.
A dairy-wide system
For decades, Vermont dairy farmers have hired immigrant workers due to a shortage in local labor.
This practice is widespread across the U.S., but there’s currently no path to legal status available to these immigrant workers. The H-2A visa, for example, is seasonal. And dairy cows must be milked every day, year-round.
The dairy lobbying group National Milk Producers Federation says it wants Congress to provide permanent legal status to current dairy workers and their families, as well as a viable guestworker program. Retired Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy made several legislative attempts for the latter.
In the meantime, the industry has had to contend with immigration enforcement.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised a mass deportation program beginning on day one of his administration. What it may look like in practice remains vague.
An official from Trump’s transition team declined to answer questions about immigrant farmworkers specifically, and instead sent a statement reading in part:
“President Trump will enlist every federal power and coordinate with state authorities to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history while simultaneously lowering costs for families and strengthening our workforce.”
But for former Vermont dairy farmer John Roberts, it’s hard to imagine mass deportations arriving in this state’s barns and fields.
“Is Trump really going to sweep into some dairy operation and seize all their workers and make those farmers angry at him?” he said. “I'm an optimist. I just don't see that happening.”
More people in the industry told me that many farmers share Roberts’ perspective on the likelihood of immigration raids on farms.
“That just is really unimaginable,” said Dan Baker, a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont who has studied dairy labor for a couple decades. “For certain farms, you know, when the farmer is injured, for example, or you don't have workers, that farm can go out of business very, very quickly.”
But Baker says farmers don’t want to become a target by speaking up, because they’re stressed out enough as it is — nearly a third of Vermont’s dairies have stopped shipping milk in the last four years.
Roberts was the only farmer, current or former, willing to go on the record for this story. State agriculture officials also declined to be interviewed.
Before he sold his herd of registered Brown Swiss cows in 2012, Roberts ran a dairy in Cornwall for 40 years. And in the final years of operation, he says he hired some workers from Mexico who were great, taxpaying employees.
“We had them through an agency with the assumption that the agency vetted their legality. I will say no more than that,” he said.
As someone who immigrated to the U.S. from Great Britain, Roberts says while he agrees that border security needs to improve — so do this country’s pathways to legal status.
“We need to figure out a process to get them on the avenue to at least green cards, or some kind of visa, or ultimately, citizenship,” he added.
What farmworkers want
Many farmworker advocacy organizations are opposed to policies like guestworker programs, which would guarantee dairy farmers a labor force without providing citizenship.
Teresa Mares shares that view. She’s an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont, where she studies immigration and the food system. She also sits on the board of the local immigrant farmworker advocacy organization, Migrant Justice.
And she says while the U.S. food system relies on immigrant labor, it also has a long history of exploiting workers, and then criminalizing them.
“Whether we're looking at internment, whether we're looking at the selective importation of workers under the Bracero program and then the refusal to let them stay,” she said. “The immigration system is pretty violent against immigrant workers.”
Mares says the threat of mass deportations follows this pattern. And what she says should happen instead is for the food system to give workers more of a say.
For Lupita, who has lived in the U.S. for more than a decade after coming to work on a Vermont dairy farm, she wants better protections of human rights. Workers in the industry face longstanding issues with living and working conditions, including women regularly reporting sexual harassment.
And at the first farm she and her dad worked at, Lupita says the boss didn’t pay her the same salary as the men, even though she worked up to 14 hours a day.
One of Lupita’s biggest worries is that, because of Trump’s threats of detention and deportation, immigrant farmworkers will be afraid to speak up about mistreatment.
“Because sometimes people, out of fear for their immigration status, accept any treatment from their employers or any abuse,” she said.
Whatever happens when Trump takes office, Lupita plans to continue what she’s done for many years: organizing with Migrant Justice.
Over the last decade, the group has helped stand up a housing and labor rights program called Milk With Dignity, won expanded access to driver’s licenses and pushed for state policy that reduces collaboration between local police and immigration authorities.
Lupita says farmworkers raising their voices against injustice is how to move forward.
“The world is not going to stop because Trump is president,” she said. “I keep organizing my colleagues, they want to organize themselves, as we have to continue doing this.”
President Trump’s second administration begins today.
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