‘I don’t go out’: Vermont’s undocumented dairy workers live in fear after immigration raids | Vermont

Last spring, José Edilberto Molina-Aguilar was resting in his bedroom when a co-worker burst through the front door. Out his window, Molina-Aguilar, a 37-year-old dairy worker from Chiapas, Mexico, caught sight of the olive green uniforms of immigration enforcement officials who later claimed they had pursued a worker on to the farm property.

A farm manager told Molina-Aguilar and five of his co-workers at Pleasant Valley Farms, Vermont’s largest dairy, in Berkshire, about three miles from the Canadian border, to come outside.

“They said we should walk out, that there wouldn’t be a problem, but we should leave the house,” Molina-Aguilar said this summer through an interpreter for Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based immigrant rights group led by farm workers.

Officials from US Customs and Border Protection asked if they were legal residents of the country. In his hand, Molina-Aguilar held the immigration paperwork showing he’d applied for asylum when crossing the southern border over a year earlier. His paperwork was confiscated and the men were handcuffed, put into federal vehicles and driven off the farm.

Molina-Aguilar was eventually released on a $10,000 bond after more than a month of detention in Vermont and Texas. Six of his co-workers were deported. The detainment has been described by advocates as the largest single immigration arrest of farm workers in recent Vermont history. A day later, the state’s governor, Phil Scott, said “migrant workers are an essential part of our communities”, calling them “neighbors and friends”. Pleasant Valley Farms declined to comment for this story.

Immigration enforcement has reshaped daily life for Vermont’s undocumented dairy laborers, turning farms into sites of both employment and confinement. As federal arrests have surged under the Trump administration, workers along the Vermont-Canada border describe a climate of fear that keeps them isolated on farms and can make even brief trips off property for medical appointments or groceries feel dangerous.

Molina-Aguilar is one of hundreds of dairy workers in Vermont whose lives have grown precarious under the second Trump administration. Immigration detentions in Vermont have soared: at least 107 immigrants were detained within the state in 2025, a more than tenfold increase in the number of detentions of Vermont’s immigrant community compared with 2024, according to a tally kept by Migrant Justice. That number does not include people who illegally crossed the northern border or were arrested for a crime.

Hilton Beckham, assistant commissioner for Customs and Border Protection, claimed in a May statement that the April action was not a raid. She said the agency was responding to a call by a concerned citizen.

“This was not a special operation or a worksite enforcement operation, however, when agents encounter individuals who are in the country illegally, they will take them into custody and determine their immigration disposition, including potentially turning those individuals over to other agencies,” Beckham wrote.

Teresa Mares, a University of Vermont anthropologist who works with immigrant farm workers, said this summer that the April incident at Pleasant Valley was nothing short of a raid.

“When you go on a farm and pick up as many people as you can, I don’t know what else to call it,” Mares said.

Fear and living in Vermont

Vermont is part of a north-east pressure cooker: half of New England’s six states were included on a justice department list of places that impede immigration enforcement. Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont were included, as well as Boston and counties that offer sanctuary. More than 1,400 people were arrested in neighboring Massachusetts during a September crackdown and more than 200 during January’s “Operation Catch of the Day” in Maine. In March, three people were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) outside Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, in an hours-long showdown that drew hundreds of local protesters.

While these were more urban enforcement actions, at least 50 raids have occurred on farms, food production facilities and restaurants across the US since last June, including in California, Florida, New York and Vermont, according to a tally kept by Civil Eats, an agriculture-focused publication.

“They play an essential role in the dairy industry,” Vermont’s agriculture secretary, Anson Tebbetts, said of farm workers without permanent legal status. “There’s tremendous pressure, labor shortages and the demands on the industry.” Vermont has lost hundreds of dairy farms while scaling up production over the last decade.

For many dairy workers along the border, the escalating risk of detention has kept them confined to their farms. When cooking in his kitchen, one Franklin county farm worker, who asked not to be named due to fear for his safety, often sees immigration enforcement vehicles as they patrol near the concrete pillar marking the US-Canada border.

“Before Trump, I left and visited friends, the store, and then things got harder, and I don’t go out,” the farm worker said through a Migrant Justice interpreter last summer.

Until November, the worker hadn’t left the Franklin county farm for nearly two years, fearing detention by immigration officials. A toothache finally forced him to visit the dentist, passing a border patrol vehicle on the way.

“I was nervous,” he said. “But that’s just how it is. You feel scared.”

This farm worker got his job through an uncle, who wired him money for a $20,000 coyote debt, the price some people pay to cross the US border outside a legal port of entry. To get to Vermont, he spent three days walking and four nights sleeping under trees and bushes. He arrived in Houston with a small group, and they were loaded into the back of a truck.

They drove to the north-east stacked on top of each other, the farm worker said. It took him a year to pay off the debt, but in the three years since, he saved enough to buy land in Mexico. He chats with his youngest daughter, who was born after he left for the US, between shifts.

The Franklin county worker is employed by a Milk With Dignity farm, part of a program created by Migrant Justice in which farms are paid a premium for their milk from corporations such as Ben & Jerry’s in exchange for improved living and working conditions for staff. While his bedroom is tiny, he and his co-workers each have their own private space. The six share a single bathroom, but Vermont’s farm worker standards only require one bathroom for every 10 people. He’s been able to help friends and family move on to the farm. Employment at Milk With Dignity farms is highly sought after, according to farm workers, and it’s difficult to get a job at one without a familial tie.

The Milk With Dignity program has improved his life. He makes $950 a week, hundreds more than other farm workers interviewed for this story. He gets five vacation days a year and a rest day every week. When he had an infected tooth, he used his weekly day off to make the rare off-farm trip to the dentist. Then he took two paid sick days to recover from the procedure.

But he almost never takes the paid days off because it is too difficult to leave the farm. On Thursdays, his day of rest, he cooks for the other workers, talks to his two kids in Mexico and learns songs on the keyboard shoved next to the door of his closet-sized bedroom.

A fateful food delivery

Even visiting the farms can be perilous for immigrant workers.

This summer, Jose Ignacio “Nacho” De La Cruz, a 30-year-old former dairy worker, was delivering Mexican food such as birria and pozole to farms in northern Vermont, including one in Franklin county. While De La Cruz and his 18-year-old stepdaughter, Heidi Perez, were driving home on Route 105 in Richford, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents stopped them, smashed their car window with a baton and handcuffed them both without giving a reason for the arrest, according to De La Cruz and court documents.

“The passengers refused to comply with lawful commands from the agents, which resulted in them being forcibly removed from the vehicle,” a CBP spokesperson said in an email.

“They were here for 15 minutes. We went to get the next group of cows, and I got a notification on my phone” alerting him that De La Cruz was arrested, a Franklin county farm worker said.

The stop amounted to racial profiling because the observations that led to the stop were based on physical observations rather than suspicious behavior, according to Brett Stokes, De La Cruz’s attorney (who also represents Molina-Aguilar). CBP disputed this claim.

“I know there’s a lot of rhetoric out there, but that’s not what they do. They don’t profile, no, they don’t racially profile by any means,” said Paul Allen, a CBP deputy patrol agent, from his office at the agency’s station in Swanton, Vermont, in January.

Both De La Cruz and Perez alleged they were physically harmed and threatened during the stop and processing at CBP’s Richford station. They paid a collective $14,000 bond through the Vermont Freedom Fund, an independent non-profit set up with support from Migrant Justice, and were released on 11 and 12 July, respectively.

For a while, De La Cruz would find Perez crying in her room. She has since gone to college, and the trauma eased for her, De La Cruz said from a couch in Burlington’s Migrant Justice office in November. He was often a lifeline to farm workers, many of whom rarely leave the premises of their farms, not only for Mexican food that reminds them of home, but for connection to the off-farm world. De La Cruz felt guilty about not returning to the farms, but he hasn’t gone back to delivering food.

“It’s hard because people ask, ‘Are you abandoning me?’” De La Cruz said. In March, he was detained by federal agents over allegations of helping people cross the border and producing false documents. He pleaded not guilty and was released on a $5,000 bond. He now faces up to 15 years in prison.

Ankle monitors and muck boots

While he milks cows and delivers calves, the Franklin county farm worker dreams of the house he is building in Mexico with money he sends home. It’s a regal, one-story rancho, or farmhouse, with deep purple walls and arched entryways. Paintings of grape vines climb three white pillars at the front. From thousands of miles away, he coordinated the sowing of almost 4,000 coffee plants around his home so he can manage the small farm when he returns.

Dairy workers often stay longer than they first intend, according to Will Lambek, a Migrant Justice staff member. While they often want to stay just a few years, save money and return home to their families, the wages are hard to abandon. It’s also increasingly difficult to cross the border to get back home, making a once-circular journey far more linear.

“After another year or a year and a half, then I will return to my town,” the farm worker said in October. “This is the plan and the goal that we have, but maybe it will take more time, I don’t know.”

Molina-Aguilar now has fewer options. He’s one of almost 180,000 people across the US wearing an ICE ankle monitor as of February, according to Trac, a Syracuse, New York-based data tracking center. The bulky contraption is uncomfortable and he wears a sneaker on that foot because he can’t fit it in the muck boots he wears for work.

His removal proceedings will continue in the Chelmsford, Massachusetts, immigration court. Next, the court will formally consider his application for asylum, according to Stokes. Asylum is a form of protection people fleeing to the US can apply for if they fear persecution or face danger returning to their home country. Over the last year, the rate at which asylum cases were approved was cut in half.

“The Trump administration has done a lot to make it all the more difficult for people seeking asylum,” Stokes said. In Molina-Aguilar’s case, he said, “It’s a tough road ahead, but it’s certainly worth it.”

Molina-Aguilar fled Chiapas, Mexico, where organized crime was rampant and he feared forced recruitment to join a gang. He had an appointment with the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project to apply for asylum days after he was detained last year.

“I was scared they were going to send me back to my country,” Molina-Aguilar said in July. “I had to leave there, and I didn’t want to go back.”

Molina-Aguilar continues to work at a Franklin county dairy, where he makes $12.50 an hour, as he waits on his court case. He says he misses Mexico, including a 13-year-old daughter who talks to him about math homework and soccer. In his time off, Molina-Aguilar plays soccer with his co-workers on the farm. Recently, they moved the field. They now play far from the main road and well out of sight of immigration agents cruising by.

This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Anna Watts interpreted and contributed reporting.