On a Quiet Southern Border, Empty Farms and Frightened Workers

Alexandra, a 55-year-old undocumented immigrant, was on her way to work at a watermelon farm in the border city of Edinburg, Texas, recently when her oldest son stopped her before she stepped out of her aging trailer.

“Please don’t go. You are going to get deported,” he told Alexandra, who asked that her last name not be used because she did not want to attract attention from federal immigration agents. Her son then showed her graphic videos of federal agents chasing and handcuffing migrants seemingly all over the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. “That could be you,” he said.

President Trump’s conflicting orders to exempt, then target, then again exempt farm workers from his aggressive immigration sweeps of work sites have caused havoc in agricultural industries across the country, where about 42 percent of farm workers are undocumented, according to the Agriculture Department.

But perhaps nowhere is fear among farm workers more palpable than on the farms and ranches along the southwestern U.S.-Mexico border, where for centuries workers have considered the frontier as being more porous than prohibitive.

Administration officials have vowed to make good on a once-popular campaign promise from Mr. Trump to deport millions of undocumented workers, in what he has said will be the largest mass deportation in U.S. history.

As workplace raids have eroded that popularity and sparked angry protests across the country, the border region has been eerily quiet.

The Trump administration has effective shut down crossings by those on the Mexican side seeking asylum or just illegal work in plain sight in the fields. On the American side, where undocumented immigrants still make up much of the work force, many of those workers are afraid to show up.

“Right now, I have zero workers,” said Nick Billman, who owns Red River Farms, a farm-to-table operation in Donna, Texas. He wonders whether to plant if he has no one to maintain the fields and harvest them. “We need to figure out what we’re doing, you know?”

It is difficult to estimate how many workers have stopped going to work. But Elizabeth Rodriguez, an activist with the National Farm Worker Ministry, says she is seeing fewer and fewer workers at the farms she frequents as the watermelon season is about to end.

“The majority of workers here are longtime residents who for some reason or another don’t have legal status,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “And now, they are terrified to go to work. The fields are nearly empty.”

Undocumented workers have long been the lifeline of farms along the border region. In the most recent survey published by the National Center for Farmworker Health, about 80 percent of surveyed workers in Hidalgo County said they were undocumented. And the county, the largest in the Valley, as the region is known, has more than 2,400 farms.

Legal farm workers with H-2A visas, which allow mostly Mexican nationals to work and live while they labor on farms, make up only a small percentage of the work force, according to the same study.

“Clearly these farmers need these workers,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “How are Americans going to get the food they eat?”

The peak harvesting season came before the sweeps by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents sent waves of panic through the Rio Grande Valley. But as the current watermelon season nears its end, many farmers are questioning what to do as they look forward to the next season, said Jed Murray, a director of government relations with the Texas International Produce Association, an advocacy group for the produce industry.

“From our industry standpoint, the farm workers that may have document issues, they’ve worked with their growers for 10, 15 years. There is a good relationship there,” Mr. Murray said.

“But in this current environment,” he added, “a lot of growers are looking into hiring more H-2A visa workers.”

Many farmers fear that speaking up will make them a target of the government. Conservative Republicans in Texas, who control every branch of state government, have made aggressive immigration laws a priority and have vowed to assist the Trump administration in its crackdown.

But Texas lawmakers have overlooked one telling detail: They have failed to require most private employers to use E-Verify, a federal program that verifies workers’ legal status, an oversight not lost on farmers on the border. That means most employers in Texas aren't explicitly required to confirm the immigration status of hires.

Mr. Billman said new employees fill out their own paperwork, and it is up to the government to check their status. His job is to find capable hands willing to do unforgiving work, and he is already struggling to find workers to prepare his fields to plant pumpkin seeds and help him clean debris caused by recent storms.

He estimates that he could lose about $100,000 to $150,000 in profit at his farm if he doesn’t go ahead with his harvest plans.

“It’s huge for us,” he said.

Mr. Trump’s mixed signals are not helping. In late May, one of his senior advisers, Stephen Miller, said ICE would set a goal of a “minimum” of 3,000 arrests a day, starting a visible crackdown that rocked cities and farms across the country. Then on June 13, at the president’s behest, immigration sweeps were paused at agricultural sites, hotels and restaurants. Just days later they resumed, only to have the president say last Friday that relief was coming to farmers.

“We’re looking at doing something where, in the case of good, reputable farmers, they can take responsibility for the people that they hire,” Mr. Trump told reporters on his way to his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., adding, “we can’t put the farms out of business.”

For farm workers in the scorching Rio Grande Valley, the president’s latest pronouncement was cold comfort.

“At first he said he was not going to come after us. Then he did,” Alexandra said in an interview. “You can’t trust what he says.”

Alexandra said she was at risk of losing even more than the farmers for whom she works. The old trailer where she lives, which she has kept standing with patches of duct tape and pieces of plywood, cost her only $800. But her five children have to chip in to help her come up with the $450 she needs every month to cover her grocery and electric bills.

“I’m desperate,” she said. “If I leave the house, they’ll get me. If I stay here, how am I going to eat?”

She has thought about self-deporting to end her uncertainty, but she said she worried about drug cartel violence in her native Mexico. “It’s worse over there,” she said.

So common are the reports of ICE agents showing up at the farms where she works that she says she is ready to try a new form of employment.

She reached out to a friend working at one of the many popular drive-through convenience shops in the area who told her about a possible shift. But then her phone began exploding with videos of an ICE raid on a business called El Tocayo Drive Thru in Edinburg. Locals were transfixed on WhatsApp group chats and social media posts tracking every moment of an eight-hour standoff between plain-clothed agents and a 25-year-worker who hid in a kitchen until the agents presented her with a judge’s warrant.

Elda Garza, who owns El Tocayo Drive Thru, said the agents did not provide her with any information other than to say that they needed to detain her worker, who had been there for year, because she had “a record,” Ms. Garza said.

“They told us that they were looking just for her and nobody else,” Ms. Garza said. “But the incident has left all of us rattled.”

Fear on the border has spread far beyond agriculture.

Rosy, a 57-year-old resident of McAllen, Texas, said she had stopped going to her cleaning job for the last three weeks because she was convinced that immigration agents were lurking everywhere. She finds herself hiding behind her windows every time a stranger knocks on her door. She asked that her last name not be published because she has been living in the United States illegally for nearly 25 years.

What’s worse, she said, is that her American-born daughter quit nursing school to work as a medical assistant to support her.

“I know that sometimes it feels like I’m being paranoid,” Rosy said, drying tears from her eyes. “Even when I walk my dogs, I rush them when I feel like every car driving by me belongs to immigration agents. I can’t live like this.”

Her fear is not simply being sent back to Mexico. She said she was more terrified of being snatched by masked agents who might sent her to a third country that she has no connection to. That policy was validated on Monday by the Supreme Court.

“I have family in Mexico, I can stay with them,” she said, pondering leaving on her own. “but I don’t want to leave my daughter behind.”

Alma, another farmworker who also declined to give her last name because she was also undocumented, said she didn’t know when she would be able to return to work in the coriander fields she has known for the last 15 years. Like the others, she is not sure that the $200 she could earn in a week is worth risking deportation and leaving her legal family members behind.

“I need to make money, but I also don’t want to be separated from my family,” she said. “They are putting us in a no-win situation.”