Farmworkers Continue to Organize in Face of Chilling ICE Raids

ICE raids on farmworkers across the U.S. are having a chilling effect on workers who need to speak out about dangerous working conditions and abuses on the job.

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By Joe Maniscalco

Imagine you’re a farmworker in 2025. You make the food on tables across the United States possible. Five years ago because of the pandemic, people even began acknowledging the essential work you do. It felt good for a second, even hopeful, after decades of being left out of the conversation around worker rights. 

Today, however, you labor under increasingly rapacious corporate bosses who hold your entire fate in their tightly-clenched fists, higher temperatures fueled by climate change that can send 25-year-olds to their graves—and the constant threat of roided-out rage monsters given legal authority to destroy you and your entire family.

Whether you’re here in the U.S. on an H-2A work visa or undocumented, those masked goons hired under the Trump administration to hunt you down like modern day slave catchers have only made you more reluctant to speak out about the constant attacks on your inalienable rights as a worker.

“We know that all this emboldens the employers to commit more wage theft, subject workers to bad housing, discrimination, and harassment,” Fabiola Ortiz Valdez, director of Organizing for the Food Chain Workers Alliance [FCWA], recently told Work-Bites. “That was an uphill battle already, and now we are seeing folks more fearful than before about what will happen if they speak out.”

“Whether you’re here in the U.S. on an H-2A work visa or undocumented, those masked goons hired under the Trump administration to hunt you down like modern day slave catchers have only made you more reluctant to speak out about the constant attacks on your inalienable rights as a worker. ”

— Quote Source

Soaring summer temperatures threaten more than 69 million workers across the United States with heat-related illnesses each year, according to the National Committee on Occupational Safety and Health [COSH]. In 2023, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 14 heat-injury deaths in Texas alone. But farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat-related stress than workers in other dangerous industries.

In June, however, representatives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Businesses both forcefully argued against a proposed federal heat-safety rule requiring employers to start giving workers 15-minute rest breaks with water and shade every two hours when the heat index exceeds 90-degrees.

That modest proposed rule, they insisted, would disrupt the work flow and just be too onerous on businesses.

One of the first things Donald Trump did when he returned to the White House earlier this year, was to issue an executive order on Jan. 20 suspending consideration of all pending regulations—including federal heat safety rules.

“These are attacks on working class folks,” Ortiz Valdez continued. “A lot of people started thinking about where their food comes from [five years ago], but that same sort of position so many people had is not the same [today].”

The FCWA currently represents more than 375,000 workers responsible for planting, processing, harvesting, packing, transporting, preparing, serving, and selling food up and down the entire food chain in both the U.S. and Canada.

According to Ortiz Valdez, the organization’s job is to support hard-pressed workers where they are and help them use the power they actually have to change their working conditions.

Tired of living in fear, many members of the FCWA’s 33-member coalition have begun organizing “ICE watches” in workplaces across the country in preparation for future raids like the one in Ventura County, California this past July which resulted in farmworker Jaime Alanís García’s death.

“Everybody can play a part in this,” Ortiz Valdez said. “If you are able, you need to put your body between the agent and person [being targeted by ICE],” “That’s where we’re at.”

Despite the ICE raids being gleefully unleashed under Trump 2.0—Ortiz Valdez says farmworkers do not feel Democrats fully have their backs either.

For instances, she characterizes the Farmworkers Modernization Act—billed in 2019 during the previous Biden administration as immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship—as really being “anti-labor” and “exclusionary.”

Barack Obama and Joe Biden also both famously deported millions of immigrants during their time in office.

“It was going to be a version if this [crackdown on immigrants] even if the Democrats had won,” Ortiz Valdez said.