Thirteen years ago, Thelma followed her father to Vermont from Tabasco, Mexico.
Family members were already in the Green Mountain State working on dairy farms when he’d moved there five years before that, Thelma said.
Since joining him on a farm, she’s been helping others who don’t have legal authorization to be in the United States fight for protections and rights. Now, like many in Vermont’s migrant community, Thelma is worried about her ability to stay in the place she’s long called home.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to ramp up deportations of immigrants who don’t have authorization to live in the United States. Last week, Trump confirmed plans to declare a national emergency and use the military to pursue a mass deportation program, according to the New York Times.
About 11 million people were believed to be undocumented in 2022, the most recent year available, according to the Pew Research Center. It’s hard to know exactly how many people without legal status are living in Vermont, though experts at the University of Vermont and Vermont Law and Graduate School estimate it’s between 500 and 1,500 people, including around 300 in Chittenden County.
“Looking at the possibility that we’re going to see changes in policies, it puts us on alert, because all of the work that we’ve done in the past several years to advance protections for our community could be put at risk,” Thelma said, speaking in Spanish. Will Lambeck, a spokesperson for the Burlington-based advocacy organization Migrant Justice, translated the interview. VTDigger granted Thelma’s request to use only her first name, given her fears of deportation.
Trump’s policy proposals don’t only pose a threat to individual immigrants in Vermont. The state’s food system, and particularly dairy farms, would take a serious blow if the incoming president followed through with his plans, experts say.
“These threats to deport masses of people are going to reveal just how dependent our food system is on immigrant labor,” said Teresa Mares, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont and the author of the 2019 book Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont.
In Vermont, dairy farms that have weathered the last few decades of consolidation and industry decline are typically larger ones that “have tended to survive because of immigrant labor,” Mares said.
“If there was mass deportation of dairy farm workers, our dairy farms will close at an even faster rate than they have been,” Mares said.
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Mismatched policies
In the United States, Mares sees a landscape of immigration policies and agriculture policies that don’t align.
“So many farm workers are from outside of the country, and many do not have documentation, right?” Mares said. “So many people within food processing — whether we’re looking at chicken or meat or other kinds of food processing — are coming from outside of this country.”
Taking those people away would produce a tremendous labor gap in the agriculture industry.
People who are “concerned about grocery prices now” may need to prepare for grocery bills to “go through the roof” if workers were deported in large numbers, Mares said.
“It impacts us economically, but I think we also need to think about the basic humanitarian impacts that it has when you’re striking fear into a large group of people,” she said.
While immigrants without legal authorization to live in the U.S. have, over time, formed the backbone of the country’s food system, those same people lack protections, making them more susceptible to political changes.
Mares sees an intentional connection between workers’ lack of rights and their role in agriculture.
“The fear that these kinds of policies generate means that people are less likely to complain about poor working conditions and less likely to report violations because doing so could potentially put them into this mass deportation machine,” she said.
As a result, workers from outside the country often can’t “do more than just work,” she said.
According to Mares, people started migrating from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America to Vermont in the late 1990s.
And while state leaders have attempted to enact some protections for unauthorized immigrants, they’re hamstrung by a major policy problem: There’s no straightforward legal pathway for immigrants who want to work in the dairy industry. While the H2A visa program allows immigrants legal opportunities to work in produce industries, for example, there’s no equivalent for dairy.
“And what that means is that most of the workers in dairy in Vermont, in Wisconsin, in California and Idaho are not documented if they are coming from outside of the country,” Mares said.
Mares has qualms with the H2A program, which she said is “not a great model for workers.” But without any legal pathway, those who come to work on Vermont’s dairies — and on whom the state’s dairy farms depend — are left vulnerable.
A broad sweep?
Vermont officials have questioned whether Trump’s large-scale plans would actually materialize on the ground due to the logistically challenging and resource-intensive process of finding, detaining and removing people from the country.
The president-elect’s proposals could also prove to be unpopular with some Republicans, given that farming is a major economic driver in many red states, and those farmers also rely on people who don’t have legal permission to live in the U.S.
At a recent press conference, Gov. Phil Scott said he supported efforts to “protect our border” but called Trump’s plans to deport all immigrants in the country who did not come legally “unrealistic.”
“It’s not as though this is unreasonable, to say that we need to do something about those who are here illegally. It’s just how we do it,” Scott said. “Who is it, and is there a path forward for them to be here? I think that’s something Congress needs to act on, almost immediately.”
During his first presidency, Trump focused more on curbing legal migration to the U.S. — for example, his efforts to prevent refugees from predominantly Muslim countries from resettling in the country — than on deporting undocumented immigrants, according to Pablo Bose, professor of geography and geosciences at the University of Vermont, who researches migration.
“The Trump people always want to make this big stand about undocumented workers,” Bose said. “And yet, when push came to shove, why did they put so much of their emphasis on legal migration?”
The legal pathways to make those changes were easier and clearer than deporting people who aren’t here legally, Bose said.
“It’s often been not in the interests of the federal government, or certainly local and state actors, to actually remove people, because you need these people,” Bose said.
The federal government has authority to remove people who do not have legal permission to be in the United States, Bose said. But there are still some actions Vermont can take to protect immigrants. Federal officials typically rely on local support when conducting deportations, and local officials could opt not to cooperate with that effort.
“You can’t actually do this unless you can identify people, you can find people, all of these kinds of things,” Bose said.
Vermont officials have said, if necessary, they’ll take measures to protect immigrants from the Trump administration’s enforcement.
Some of the protections put in place in response to the previous Trump administration could still help immigrants without legal documentation. For example, Act 5, enacted by Vermont in 2017, prohibits state agencies from sharing personally identifying information about people with federal authorities, and made it so only the governor can enter into contracts to help immigration officers pursue enforcement.
Advocacy groups, including Migrant Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, have encouraged officials to go further by explicitly prohibiting police from sharing information with federal officers related to a person’s immigration or citizenship status, as Vermont Public reported last week.
Asked whether he plans to take preventative measures this time around, the governor referred to his 2017 actions to protect “folks who are here that we need to have as part of our communities.”
He said he didn’t take those actions, however, until his administration and state lawmakers “knew more about what the plan was at that point in time by the president.”
“I’m not sure that we know completely what his plan is, because I don’t see that what he has proposed is realistic,” Scott said. “I would have to think that those who are coming into power with him would understand that.”
Vermont may not be a top priority for the incoming president, due to relatively low numbers of immigrants compared to other states. Still, it’s hard to know how worried migrants without legal standing in the U.S. should be, according to Laurie Beyranevand, director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
“I don’t think any place is not a target,” she said. “The amount of people he’s seeking to deport suggests that he’s going to sweep pretty broadly, which would suggest to me that Vermont wouldn’t be immune from any of that in any way.”
‘Remember the humans’
Abby, a mother and restaurant worker based in Orwell who, like Thelma, migrated to Vermont from Tabasco, Mexico, said she’s scared.
“We put down roots here, and that’s why we’re afraid that we could be taken out of our home,” Abby said, speaking with VTDigger in an interview also translated by Lambeck of Migrant Justice. “We struggled so hard to make it here, and we’re afraid that could be taken away from us.”
Aside from direct policy implications, Thelma said she felt a different kind of impact from Trump’s first presidency as a result of insulting rhetoric aimed at immigrants. This time, that rhetoric is back in force: During this fall’s campaign, Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Ohio, for example, of eating family pets, and a comedian at a Trump rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
“When we think about these changes in policy, there’s also a change in the political environment,” Thelma said. “People are more free to be expressing their racism and discrimination against our community because of the change in our administration.”
Vermonters, in the past, have offered support and solidarity to those who face attacks and larger risks of deportation, Thelma said. The offensive rhetoric and deportation plans are “a negation of many of the values that people in this state have,” she said.
“I know there are many people in this state, because of the years we’ve been here, because of the relationships we’ve built, who are looking out for us and going to have our backs in the coming years,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of people in this state who will need to look inside their hearts and think deeply about why it is that there’s a community of immigrants here.”
It’s out of necessity to protect their families and make a living, she said.
While Vermont’s food system and economy stands to take a blow if mass deportations became a reality here, Thelma urged Vermonters to also recognize the toll on members of her community.
“I want readers to go beyond just thinking about what impact this will have in an economic sense, and remember the humans,” she said. “When people are targeted because of who they are, that has a real impact — emotional, physical. Again, I’ve been here 13 years. I’ve invested so much in this state, and it creates a huge impact to think that that could be taken away.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘We put down roots here:’ Vermont’s immigrant farm workers worry about Trump’s mass deportation plan.