Above photo: Benito Lopez, a Familias Unidas por la Justicia union member, at a picket line during a strike at a Tulip farm in Mount Vernon, Washington, in March 2022. Edgar Franks / Familias Unidas por la Justicia.
Organizers from Florida, Vermont and Washington discuss the rising exploitation and rollback of protections ahead.
Donald Trump rode to reelection on a campaign packed with racist rhetoric that promised mass deportations of immigrants. So far, Trump has appointed anti-immigrant extremists like Stephen Miller, Thomas Homan and Kristi Noem to top positions in his administration.
The new Trump regime threatens millions of immigrant workers in the U.S., including farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented. Beyond mass deportations and workplace raids, there’s the prospect of regulatory rollbacks around heat and pesticide protections and the ramping up of hyper-exploitative guestworker programs like the H2A program.
At the same time, farmworkers in the U.S. have a proud and defiant organizing tradition, and the entire U.S. food system rests on their labor. Truthout spoke to representatives from three farmworker organizations across the country to get their initial thoughts on the election, the challenges ahead, how they plan to defend their members and communities, and how they are staying hopeful and determined going forward.
Rossy Alfaro is a former dairy worker in Vermont and organizer with Migrant Justice, which organizes dairy farmworkers in Vermont and oversees the worker-driven Milk with Dignity campaign. Jeannie Economos is the longtime pesticide safety and environmental health project coordinator for the Farmworker Association of Florida, which has organized farmworkers for over four decades. Edgar Franks is the political director of Familias Unidas por la Justicia in Washington State, an independent union of primarily Indigenous Mexican farmworkers that formed a decade ago. All three organizations are members of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, a coalition of worker-based organizations in the U.S. and Canada organizing to improve wages and working conditions for workers along the food chain.
Derek Seidman: What are your initial reactions to Trump’s reelection? How will it impact your members and communities?
Rossy Alfaro: The election will of course impact our community and our work. But at the same time, we’ve faced criminalization and discrimination before. Trump’s not the first president to come after our community. We’ve been organizing a long time in Vermont to try to win protections for our rights as immigrants. We won our “No Más Polimigra” campaign that created “fair and impartial” policing policies in Vermont which ensure that local cops aren’t working hand in hand with ICE and Border Patrol. That will be an important protection in the coming years.
Jeannie Economos: In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has pushed through very harsh anti-immigrant legislation in SB 1718 that has affected the state’s entire agricultural workforce. If somebody leaves a job and they’re undocumented, they can’t get hired somewhere with more than 25 employees unless they go through E-verify. This impacts all undocumented workers in Florida. People are very scared that the election result will make things worse.
Edgar Franks: There was a sense things would not go well for Democrats on election night. When you ignore economic hardships people are facing, no matter what race or gender, people will look for something else. It’s not a huge surprise. When we first formed around a decade ago, Donald Trump was ascending to the presidency, but we were still able to organize and win some victories for farmworkers and immigrants here in Washington. This is a progressive state, but nothing has been given to us. We’ve won overtime rules, heat and smoke rules, and paid rest breaks for farmworkers, but all this was possible only because of strong worker-led organizing and not necessarily because of which party was in power.
Trump has promised mass deportations. He’s trying to stoke fear. How is this impacting farmworkers?
Alfaro: This isn’t the first time that our community has faced the threat of mass deportations. In fact, people are always being deported and separated from their families, and we need to continue fighting to resist that in any form it takes. Bosses know the status of their workers and use that to take advantage of them. Right now, workers sometimes can move to a different farm to find better work if they don’t like the treatment on a certain farm. But the harder that becomes, the more employers will take advantage of workers. In Vermont, this already happens outside of our Milk with Dignity program, but it can get worse.
Economos: We take complaints from workers when there are violations in the workplace. During the last Trump administration, we received almost no complaints from farmworkers because they were so afraid of immigration. They were afraid that an employer would threaten them with deportation if they made a complaint, which did happen. It’s already a huge lift for a farmworker to file a complaint in better times. Someone working in the field is not going to speak up about pesticides or heat when they’re worried about being deported or getting home safely to their children. It’s terrifying.
Franks: It’s easy to brush away mass deportations as nonsense, but they’ve happened before. The immigrant movement is strong in Washington, so I think our community would respond. But we faced retaliation when we were first forming our union. Immigrants faced a harsher environment because of Trump’s rhetoric. Despite that, workers who are well organized can count on each other for protection. Organizing is the way we keep each other safe. When we have unity and solidarity, the community will be emboldened to step up. Fear always exists, but you can’t let it immobilize you. The best way to fight fear is to confront it and push back.
What about the potential for regulatory rollbacks on issues like pesticides and heat protections? Are you worried about this?
Economos: We’ve worked for 20 years to win better health and safety protections around pesticides. We’re very afraid of regulatory rollbacks for farmworkers on pesticide exposure. We’re also in the process of sending comments to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) around the need for heat stress protections for farmworkers. We had three farmworkers in Florida die last year from heat stress, and these are just the ones we know about. What’s going to happen to these regulatory efforts under the Trump administration? Some states have stronger regulations, but the Trump administration could try to preempt these.
Franks: We’re also worried about gains around climate protections and pesticides being rolled back. Getting rid of those regulations puts farmworkers at risk. Stacking the Supreme Court even more to the right could also really hurt workers and make it easier to greenlight the kind of anti-labor or anti-immigrant measures in Project 2025.
Alfaro: To be honest, we’re not too concerned about rollback of labor regulations because we don’t have many effective regulations in the dairy industry to begin with. That’s why we’ve had to organize to create our own. In the short-term, we’re more focused on threats against people who have come to the country seeking asylum. We know that that could be a focus of the administration.
Can you talk about the implications for guestworker programs under Trump?
Franks: The biggest thing we’ve been calling out is the growth of guestworker programs like H2A. In our eyes, this is a slave-like program. It’s legalized human trafficking. Mass deportations will open up the door to bring in more guestworkers, which will intensify the exploitation of farmworkers. All this goes hand in hand with anti-immigrant rhetoric. People say they don’t want immigrants here, but that we need their labor. The H2A program provides that. It’s a way to bring immigrants to the U.S. and exploit them with no way of ever becoming a resident or a citizen. They’re just disposable labor.
Economos: If Trump does mass deportations, agriculture is going to be even more dependent on hiring H2A workers. These workers have it really bad. They’re tied to an employer and don’t have a support network in the United States. Many don’t know their rights and are very vulnerable. It’s totally exploitative and it’s very rife with labor trafficking. Under this administration, I’m afraid it’s very likely that the H2A and H2B programs will expand.
How are you preparing to defend your members and communities?
Alfaro: We’ve built up a strong network of allies in Vermont over the years. We’ve developed a rapid response network of people who can respond in cases of arrests and detentions. We also do a lot of work to educate our community about their rights during encounters with immigration. I organize in northern Vermont, near the border, and I’ve had encounters with Border Patrol. I’ve been able to defend my rights and keep myself safe. We’re going to continue these education efforts so that the community knows how to defend its rights. We’re also engaging with different legislative work at the state level.
Some of the protections in Vermont’s “fair and impartial” policing policies were rolled back during the first Trump administration. We’ve spent the last several years organizing to strengthen those policies again and keep police out of the business of deportations. There were a lot of people in our community who were deported during the first Trump administration, but many of us weren’t. We remain here today, and we’re going to continue fighting to remain.
Economos: We’re having strategy meetings and connecting with partners and allies across the state. We’re talking to legal service organizations. We have a rapid response network in place to alert people if, say, there’s a border patrol car in an area. We’re going to work with lawyers to help people defend their rights and to help protect our community as much as possible.
Florida is a very regressive and very racist state, but we learn from farmworker groups in New York and Washington and California. We work with members of Congress and state legislators and bring the voices of farmworkers to them directly. We work in coalitions, and that makes us stronger. That’s how we won better pesticide worker protection standards. We’re doing the same thing on heat stress protections with OSHA. We have to stand up and work together to protect all this.
Franks: We don’t have to go that far back for examples of solidarity. There was a time during the pandemic when everything was basically shut down. We didn’t know if the government was coming to save us. People came together and shared food and medicines and took care of one another. It showed the importance of local community.
This is a difficult moment, but it also opens up the possibility of new organizing strategies and new energies. People’s lives are at risk, and we need to fight even harder on all levels — on the policy front, in the streets and in the workplace. Trump won a lot of the working-class vote, but we know he won’t deliver for workers. We need to push for things like rent control and child care and a higher minimum wage. We shouldn’t be watering down our demands now. We should be even bolder. There are different ways of participating in democracy that go beyond voting, whether that be workplace organizing, marching and protesting, or community assemblies.
Are there things that keep you hopeful?
Franks:When farmworker communities organize together, we are really powerful. We hold a very important place in the food system and the economy. If we organize ourselves and recognize the leverage we have, we can really make progress, no matter who’s the president. We need to recognize that we’re in a position of power, not weakness, because we hold the levers of the food system in this country.
Alfaro: We’ve been fighting for our rights, and we’re going to continue to fight for our rights. This isn’t just a moment about who has papers and who doesn’t. This is about a government that is against human rights. This is a fight that has been going on since long before this election. It needs to involve all of us.
Economos: In spite of the election outcome, we know most people want justice and worker rights. We have a very strong coalition of state and national partners that we’re going to work with. We stand in solidarity and get hope from each other. As we say, what do we do when we’re under attack? We stand up and we fight back. And that’s what we’ll do. Hand in hand, we will go forward and know that we have each other’s backs.
Note: These interviews were conducted separately and edited into a roundtable format afterward. The interview with Alfaro was done with interpretation provided by Migrant Justice.