In May, Homeland Security announced a crackdown on “willful failure to depart.”
The dairy owners started sleeping with their phones next to the bed.
Back in 2007, Drumgoon Dairy testified before Congress. They said what South Dakota farmers are still saying: local labor doesn’t exist. Fifteen of their twenty-two employees were Hispanic immigrants. Some had green cards. Some didn’t. All showed up to work every day.
“Extremely difficult to find locals,” they said.
Nothing has changed—except the threat.
At Hilltop Dairy, Olga Reuvekamp keeps a spreadsheet: workers, dates, visa attempts, legal fees. It reads like a slow-motion train wreck. A two-and-a-half-year wait for conditional permits. $60,000 in legal bills. No guarantee of approval.
“We’re farmers, not lawyers,” she says. “And the laws aren’t made for us.”
“The system forces us into this gray area.”
That gray area is now the frontline. The H-2A visa doesn’t cover year-round work. Milking doesn’t stop in the winter. The cows don’t know it’s a weekend. So the farmers hire who they can. They do what they must. And when DHS raids a farm, it’s not just a worker that disappears—it’s 2,500 gallons of milk a day. Gone.
In Sheldon, Vermont, fifth-generation farmer Dustin Machia put it simply:
“All the dairy farmers who voted for Trump were under the impression they weren’t going to come on farms and take our guys.”
They were wrong.
Stephanie Mickelsen knows both ends of a milking machine. She also knows what happens when you speak up. The Idaho State Rep defended her workers in public. She said the quiet part out loud:
“If you think you haven’t been touched by an undocumented immigrant’s hands somewhere along the supply chain, you’re kidding yourself.”
A week later, ICE raided her farm.
“I didn’t want to put a target on my family’s back.”
Noem insists the crackdown is about violent criminals. But in practice, it isn’t. In Sackets Harbor, New York, ICE agents arrested three farmworkers and their children, including a third grader. In Wisconsin, they entered a barn without a warrant. In Mississippi, they caused such fear that the state’s ag extension flagged farmer suicides as a growing concern.