Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Before sunrise in northwestern Oregon in early August, seven farmworkers filed into an aging Ford Econoline van. As they headed toward one of the state’s economic engines, a berry farm, the driver noticed lights flash in his rearview mirror. The passengers murmured their confusion: They weren’t speeding, so why were the cops here?
The driver stopped on the side of the two-lane road near rectangular farm plots. Shouting men surrounded the van. As realization dawned on the passengers, glass sprayed.
After smashing his window, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulled the driver out and to the ground. In a later report, used in part to establish probable cause for an arrest, the agents said their unit was searching for the owner of a 2006 Econoline. Whether the driver was that man, or if the van made an illegal maneuver, the agents didn’t say. Attorneys would later argue the stop was unlawful.
To briefly detain an individual, ICE agents must have a reasonable suspicion based on “specific articulable facts” that a person is engaged in criminal activity or their presence is illegal, according to immigration law. Generally, then, a warrant is required to make an arrest. In the field, agents can access records showing whether detainees have criminal history or pending immigration cases.
ICE saw that one passenger had requested asylum. Identified by his initials LJPL in court records, he had fled the men in Guatemala who killed his brother. In early 2024, just across the border in Arizona, he and his 6-year-old daughter had surrendered to Border Patrol, which then released them. As their case wound through immigration court, they had appeared at every scheduled ICE check-in.
The agents handcuffed LJPL. His partner, who was also in the van, asked the only officer who spoke Spanish what was happening. The officer told her he was being detained to check his criminal history, she later told attorneys. If he had none, he’d be released, she said the officer conveyed.
But the agents already knew what she knew: LJPL had no criminal record.
Still, ICE did not free him.
Since returning to office last year, the Trump administration has pursued mass deportations across the country, claiming its focus is on hardened criminals. But a review of court records, U.S. Department of Homeland Security documents and interviews show the federal immigration effort has swept up many agricultural workers with no criminal record, often deploying tactics that advocates, lawyers and judges say push the limits of probable cause and due process.
The raids and deportations have not only separated families, many from Latin America, but also further strained farms and meatpacking plants. As the crackdown continues, employers are scrambling to find suitable replacements.
In Oregon, the situation is so desperate that a farm labor contractor recently solicited assistance from an unlikely — and often opposing — source: a farmworker union named Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, or PCUN.
“The subject line was, ‘Help,’” union president Reyna Lopez said.
The deportation policy has left farmers without a well-trained, knowledgeable workforce. In Wisconsin, dairy farms have employed undocumented immigrants for years because they cannot use short-term visa labor. The continuity leads to better production, said Darin Von Ruden, president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union.
“Cows are animals of habit,” he said. “If you’re replacing employees on a weekly or even daily basis, it impacts how they produce.”
Recently, after its workers didn’t show up, a Wisconsin dairy leaned on family members. They took a few days off from their other jobs, which producers are increasingly relying on to stay afloat financially. It quickly proved untenable.
“It really became a stressful situation for the whole family,” Von Ruden said. “How do they help make sure the farm stays viable, but also keep their off-farm jobs that they would much rather be doing?”
The administration also canceled humanitarian parole programs, a move that created more undocumented immigrants and spawned labor shortages at meatpacking plants. Still, neither the administration nor the Republican-controlled Congress have presented a long-term agricultural labor solution.
Trump has heralded the H-2A visa program, which brings foreign workers to the U.S. temporarily, but many farmers, including dairy producers, are not eligible. Since Trump took office, lawmakers have not debated or passed legislation allowing more visa workers into the country.
While data shows otherwise, Trump administration claims to target criminals
Trump and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have repeatedly said DHS is targeting the “worst of the worst.” In January, as polls showed more Americans souring on the department’s actions, Trump again tried to sell the public on mass deportation.
In a Truth Social post, he said DHS “must start talking about the murderers and other criminals that they are capturing … Show the Numbers, Names, and Faces of the violent criminals, and show them NOW.”
But immigration violations are civil matters, and criminal allegations do not determine outcomes in immigration court.
“It’s not out of the ordinary for DHS to allege things and then never bring forward charges,” said Veronica Cardenas, a former DHS counsel between 2010 and 2023 who now runs her own law firm defending immigrants in New Jersey. “In immigration court, the rules of evidence don’t apply.”
DHS’s own data shows that about three-quarters of current detainees have no criminal record.
“If they’re taking more workers who have no allegations against them, then what are they really there for?” said Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Madison-based Community Immigration Law Center. “What is their real intent? I think really it’s to create a spectacle and an example.”
Max Morales, a Vermont farmworker, experienced the cognitive dissonance firsthand.
After Border Patrol raided the dairy farm where he lived and worked last year, DHS shipped him to a Texas detention center. He worried who he might encounter, but as he swapped stories with fellow detainees, he quickly realized most were like him: no criminal record, just trying to make a living.
In paperwork DHS filed in his immigration case, the department listed his criminal history as “none.”
“Very few people I talked to had any run-ins with the law at all,” Morales said through an interpreter. “That’s not who was in that detention center. For all of us, it felt unjust. None had done anything leading up to our detention. We were all just caught up in the system together.”
On a long-ignored farm, a “concerned citizen” cries human trafficking
“Immigration is here!”
As three Border Patrol vehicles drove onto the Vermont dairy farm in April 2025, Morales ran toward a collection of red barns.
The farm was a 10-minute drive from the Canadian border, and Morales regularly saw the agency’s white-and-green trucks on nearby roads. But in eight years working there, he had never seen agents enter the property.
Months into the second Trump presidency, DHS was ramping up enforcement on farms. In the Vermont raid — the state’s largest in recent memory — eight farmworkers with no criminal record were arrested. The operation was ostensibly about human trafficking.
It began with a tip from a “concerned citizen,” according to a summary of the raid filed in the workers’ immigration cases.
Agents wrote that the area “is actively being used to facilitate human smuggling.” Multiple groups had been apprehended in prior weeks.
But the summary does not say when the call was placed.
“They basically used the fact that there was at some point a call about suspicious activity to pull up to this farm that they had passed many, many times before,” said Brett Stokes, director of the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Morales said he was not asked questions during the arrest.
“At no point did they say, you’re being detained for this reason or that reason,” he said.
He was transported to a Border Patrol station and asked where he was from and how long he had lived in the country.
Within 100 miles of the U.S. border, Border Patrol agents can arrest suspects if there is “reasonable suspicion” they just crossed the border — a lower legal standard than probable cause.
“I feel like the reason they stated all this about human smuggling is they needed reasonable suspicion to maybe speak to him,” said Cardenas, the former DHS attorney.
After two weeks in a Vermont prison, Morales was moved to a Texas detention center. A judge later granted him bond, finding he was not a threat to the community or a flight risk.
But several of the other workers were deported within weeks — unusually fast, attorneys said.
Morales eventually returned to dairy work but worries immigration agents could arrest him again.
“It happened once,” he said. “It could happen again.”
Invoking 9/11 to keep meatpacking plant workers in jail
About 60 immigrants lined up outside the county jail in North Platte, Nebraska, waiting to be processed. They were in days-old work clothes, handcuffed with chains across their waists.
ICE had arrested them during a June raid on the Glenn Valley Foods beef processing plant in Omaha.
Many now faced extended detention as the Trump administration tried a new approach: invoking a rarely used policy instituted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The raid also devastated the plant’s production. With few workers remaining, output dropped by nearly two-thirds, according to The New York Times.
Some detainees were deported within days. Others secured release with the help of bond funds.
But on July 8, 2025, the administration changed the rules governing bond for detained immigrants, applying an “automatic stay” policy that allowed ICE to keep detainees imprisoned even after judges granted release.
One detainee, Maria Reynosa Jacinto, had lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. A judge granted her bond of $9,000, which advocates attempted to pay multiple times.
ICE denied the payment each time.
The ACLU of Nebraska sued, and in August, a federal judge ruled her detention unlawful and ordered her released.
Farmworker clients held “incommunicado” in DHS detention system
Hours after LJPL’s arrest in Oregon, his attorney arrived at ICE’s Portland office to see him. A security guard refused her entry.
Access to detained clients has become increasingly difficult, said Tess Hellgren, an attorney at Innovation Law Lab in Portland.
“What is striking now,” Hellgren said, “is the extent to which access is being obstructed by holding clients really effectively incommunicado.”
Two days later, LJPL called his attorney from a detention facility in Washington state.
He said agents had presented him with documents he did not understand. He refused to sign them, worried they were deportation papers.
Over the following weeks, he was transferred across multiple detention facilities, including a massive tent facility at Fort Bliss in Texas.
At one point, guards placed him on a deportation flight to Guatemala. During a stop in El Salvador, officials told him there had been a mistake and returned him to the United States.
The issue stemmed from a clerical error involving two separate immigration identification numbers.
Still, he remained in detention for months.
“I do not understand what is going on and why I am being moved around,” he said in court records. “It is really hard for me to be away from my family.”
Sky Chadde is a senior investigative reporter for the Investigate Midwest. He has covered the agriculture industry for Investigate Midwest since 2019 and spent much of 2020 focused on the crisis of COVID-19 in meatpacking plants, which included collecting and analyzing data on case counts. He also served as the newsroom’s first managing editor and is now a full-time reporter.
