Across New York, immigrants are being torn from their cars, workplaces and homes. Families are being separated as parents and children are disappeared into detention centers with poor conditions and little transparency. These violent, seemingly indiscriminate arrests are morally indefensible and often illegal. To stop this, our communities need to stand together, and that includes farmers and the New York Farm Bureau.
In January, Delmy Rendón hit a deer while driving in a snowstorm. When she sought help from a neighbor, they called authorities and she was arrested and detained, despite having been paroled into the country legally and having no criminal record. After six months in detention in Louisiana, Delmy accepted a voluntary departure, separating her from her husband and daughters who remain in Northern New York.
Since then, arrests of farmworkers and their families in our rural communities have only increased. In March, ICE raided a dairy farm in Sackets Harbor for a targeted criminal arrest of a legal immigrant from South Africa. They grabbed seven others seemingly at random, including a mother and three children who were detained for 10 days before being released without explanation.
Similarly, ICE detained dozens of workers at a chick hatchery in Watertown without explanation. Nor did they provide reasoning for detaining six of eight workers at a farm in Lisbon where Mexican worker Flor Lopez died in 2024.
ICE is not acting alone either. Oswego County locals say the sheriff’s patrol is stopping Latino drivers for minor or unprovable violations, then handing them over to Border Patrol.
We’re spending obscene amounts of money to fuel racism and terrorize immigrants who do essential work that we depend on. With the allocation of an additional $75 billion for ICE, these incidents will increase. And as free speech is limited and due process denied, all of our rights are degraded.
Farmworkers deserve better. As an organizer at the Workers’ Center of Central New York, for three years I’ve conducted outreach to farmworkers and helped them organize for health and safety protections, better wages, and pro-worker, pro-immigrant state policy. Now, my work has shifted to rapid response and tracking down members abducted by ICE.
Growing up in the farmworker community, it’s been devastating to see such hardworking people treated as less than human. For decades, our elected representatives have failed to create a legal pathway for these workers, despite increasing need and ongoing public support. We cannot abandon them now.
Last month, the Workers’ Center and Alianza Agrícola published an open letter to the New York Farm Bureau, asking them to call for comprehensive immigration reform that respects labor rights; deny ICE access to private property without a judicial warrant; create worker safety plans; and support the New York for All Act, limiting collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.
In their response, NYFB claimed to support “everyone who works in the agricultural community,” but suggested we take our concerns to Congress and “implore[d]” us “to follow the law.” We’re unsure what law they believe we’re breaking, but it’s ironic given that NYFB has members who are flagrantly violating state law by refusing to honor union contracts.
NYFB also said they “condemn harassing, threatening, or marginalizing employees,” but they’ve failed to make any commitment to defending workers. Immigrant workers don’t just hold up our state’s agricultural industry — they do so at great personal cost. Working in agriculture means 60-80 hours of labor a week in exchange for some of the lowest wages in the country. It means risking injuries from livestock and machinery and exposure to harmful chemicals, extreme weather conditions, and infectious diseases. These conditions are hardly negotiable when speaking up can lead to retaliation or loss of employment, which is often tied to housing.
Agricultural employers hold most of the cards in New York, and the NYFB’s record on workers’ rights is not strong. They opposed key tenets of the landmark Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act and lowering the overtime threshold for agricultural workers; and recently they employed racist tropes to oppose the Temperature Extreme Mitigation Act.
Despite this, we’re calling on NYFB and the agricultural industry to call for nothing short of amnesty and immigration reform that is not based on labor exploitation. It is the most practical, economical, and moral solution. If the industry keeps pushing for half measures like temporary visas, we will continue to be plagued by labor abuses and shortages.
Please stand with us by calling on the New York Farm Bureau to support farmworkers.
Aguilar is a campaign organizer for the Workers Center of Central New York.
