Undocumented Migrants in Rural New York Grapple With Trump’s Mass Deportation: ‘I Feel Outraged’

The Trump administration is continuing to harden its stance on immigration, increasing its mass deportation efforts as they seek to oust at least 1 million migrants this year. As migrants, and the country as a whole, grapple with the effects of the sweeping policies, farmlands of northern New York wait to see what comes next.

Many undocumented migrants in northern New York have reported not leaving their homes for weeks except to go to work, saying they feel tormented by the constant news of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and the “cruel and chaotic” deportation efforts aimed at their community, according to a new report by The New York Times.

“I feel outraged by what is happening,” Luis Enrique Gomez Garcia, a lumber mill worker from Guatemala, said in Spanish. Eleven days after his wife crashed into a deer on Jan. 24, Gomez Garcia was arrested on his way to his job and held at a detention center with his two young daughters despite having a work permit.

“The way they took me— I was furious because I was 100 percent sure that I was doing things correctly,” he said. “But they took me.”

Likewise, one woman, an apple picker, said that even though she is a naturalized citizen, she avoids leaving her trailer home because she is afraid of being racially profiled. Her husband was deported to Mexico in 2017, and her youngest daughter said that she now barely remembers him.

New York’s countryside produces more apples than any other state except for Washington, supplying the nation with one of its most-consumed fruits. According to a Labor Department report, almost 68% of crop workers employed in the U.S. during the 2021-22 fiscal year were foreign-born. About 42% of farmworkers are not legally authorized to work in the country, providing an easy target for immigration officials searching for people to deport.

Adding to the issue is the fact that employers in the area say they have to continue relying on work from undocumented migrants, because they say they cannot find U.S. citizens to reliably perform jobs that are “physically demanding, dirty and socially denigrate work,” according to research conducted by Mary Jo Dudley at the Cornell Farmworker Program, which advocates for the rights of agricultural workers in New York and studies their impact on the state.

“We have not made the effort in this country to develop farm work as a respected vocation that’s properly compensated with health insurance and retirement and workers’ compensation and all the things that you should have if you’re working for somebody else,” said Elizabeth Henderson, a retired fruit and vegetable farmer near Rochester.

Interestingly, however, U.S. farm owners voted overwhelmingly for Trump, as did the electorate across rural parts of New York, despite their industries being disproportionately impacted by the administration’s deportation efforts. That was the case of Robert J. Colby, whose family has run Colby Homestead Farms for seven generations. A Republican, he says that he supports the detention of immigrants who have arrest warrants, and that the federal government should work to expedite the process for other migrants to become lawful residents.

“If people are concerned about ICE’s activities, the solution is for the Congress and Senate to get to work and get an immigration program together,” said Colby, who said that he does not employ undocumented workers. He added: “we should be able to vet people’s backgrounds and process them within six months in order for them to be able to come and become citizens.”

While the president continues to crack down on immigration, it seems that he has seen the potential impacts that a blow to farmworkers would have on the rest of the country. Back in April, he hinted at a potential plan for undocumented migrants working on farms and in hotels to leave the country and return as legal workers if their employers vouched for them.

“We have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to need people,” he said. No further details have been released since then.