In March, Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker who helped form the independent union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, was arrested by ICE and sent to a privately run immigrant detention center in Tacoma, Washington, where he was served inedible food. “Chicken was so undercooked that sometimes it dripped blood, and people got sick during the night,” he told the journalist David Bacon in August. Another farmworker, Jaime Alanís García, broke his neck and skull on July 10 when, attempting to flee from ICE agents, he fell from a greenhouse roof in Ventura County, California during a tear gas-filled raid that ended with the arrests of 361 people. García died in the hospital two days later. As of early November, almost half of the workers detained in the raid have been deported, while many others remain in federal custody.

Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has been one of mass immiseration: immigrant farmworkers must choose between starving and working in extremely degraded conditions for meager wages. The eight million undocumented immigrant workers the Trump administration is targeting constitute five percent of the U.S. workforce. (In California alone, nearly half of farmworkers are undocumented, and together, undocumented and documented farmworkers generate $56 billion in profits a year.) “Every day there’s a new ICE raid, a new unlawful detainment, new details about overcrowded and torturous detention facilities,” read a sobering July email from the Food Chain Workers Alliance. Undocumented farm laborers “don’t have big savings in the bank that they can live off for weeks, let alone months, let alone four years,” Antonio De Loera-Brust, of the United Farm Workers (UFW), told me. “So when raids happen, people hide, but then when the raids pass, those same people are even more desperate for work.” This dynamic, he said, “pushes farmworker wages down, because workers are so desperate for work they’ll take whatever there is.”

Even legal status does not protect farm workers in the U.S. from exploitation. Increasingly, the field hands picking our food are H-2A workers: migrants brought to the U.S. to take temporary jobs that agricultural bosses have shown can’t be filled by domestic workers. In 2013, according to a 2024 U.C. Davis report, President Obama’s Department of Labor granted growers and labor contractors certifications to hire 4,505 H-2A farmworkers in California. Trump expanded the H-2A program during his first term, even signing an agreement with Guatemala to increase H-2A visa approvals while restricting asylum applications. By 2023, there were 40,758 H-2A workers in California and about 378,000 nationwide, according to U.C. Davis, and by 2024, workers hired under H-2A accounted for fifteen percent of U.S. crop farm employees. Because H-2A permits are tied to individual employers — who must provide workers with housing, food, and transportation — conditions are ripe for abuse. In documented cases, bosses have threatened to have workers deported or blacklisted.

In June, Trump rolled back narrow Biden-era reforms to the H-2A system. In early October, his Department of Labor instituted new regulatory changes that, according to the UFW, will reduce wages for H-2A workers by between five and seven dollars an hour. Employers will now be allowed to charge workers for the housing they are required to provide for them. With these moves, De Loera-Brust said, Trump is “making it easier for big agricultural businesses to import even cheaper, even more vulnerable, even more exploitable guest workers.”

The H-2A program builds on the Bracero system, which began in 1942 — amid a push for higher agricultural output during World War II — and lasted until 1964. Over 4.5 million workers migrated legally through the program to the U.S., while many who came to the country otherwise were prosecuted and jailed. By helping to harden the divide between “legal” and “illegal” immigrant farmworkers, Bracero enforcement was a key component in the development of the machinery of immigration restrictions. Though the arrangement was initially intended for the wartime period, agricultural employers pushed for its extension for almost two decades, until pressure from unions and the Department of Labor finally led to its demise.

Agribusiness today is still constrained by the need for the cheap labor that makes its profit possible; before Trump’s second inauguration, many thought that agribusiness bosses could potentially form a bulwark against the president’s threatened mass deportations. But almost a year into his return, Trump has proved willing to subject employers across all sectors to a mix of extortion ploys and strong-armed bullying tactics designed to bring them to heel.

While the head honchos of major educational and legal institutions, along with national leaders in construction unions, publicly wring their hands about how much lower to stoop to Trump’s demands, farmworkers bend over California fields, picking fruit. Their aching hands are sore from long working hours, their eyes sting with sweat under the scorching sun, and their necks are streaked gray with dust and dirt.

Farmworker unions have little choice but to stand up for their members: they are filing class action lawsuits over Border Patrol’s “lawless sweeps, indiscriminate arrests, and coercive expulsions”; holding know-your-rights trainings to defend members against ICE; and organizing demonstrations and rallies. When I spoke with De Loera-Brust, it was around the anniversary of the largest farmworker work stoppage in U.S. history — the Salinas strike of August 23, 1970 — during which between five thousand and ten thousand farmworkers, led by the UFW, won the right to collectively bargain with their employer. “When workers act collectively, they can exercise the massive power that they have within the agricultural economy,” De Loera-Brust said, and “extract their fair share of the bounty that their hands are harvesting.”