May 30, 2025
In the vast farmlands of northern New York, where horse-drawn buggies and tractors wind through miles of apple orchards and raspberry bushes and flocks of grazing sheep, workers wait. And watch.
They have seen federal agents sweep away a mother and her three children from their home on a dairy in the village of Sackets Harbor, N.Y. And they have heard about the food vendor arrested by the immigration police after she hit a deer in a snowstorm and sought help from a neighbor who reported her to the authorities. Officers then took her husband from work and their daughters, 6 and 9 years old, from school.
As the nation’s battle lines sharpen on immigration, tension engulfs farmworkers who, in many respects, embody the fraught, sometimes contradictory nature of the debate.
The business owners who depend on migrant work — many of them supporters of President Trump — feel anxious about the prospect of losing a crucial labor force. In the surrounding communities, there is palpable acrimony between those who think migrants should be allowed to stay in the country and those who want them to go.
Afraid of being next amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, some laborers have not left their homes for weeks except to go to work, canceling dance parties and quinceañeras. Two longtime housemates said that they ended their weekend ritual of going shopping at the mall. One woman decided not to go to church with her family over Easter. A teenage girl burst into tears at the kitchen table as her mother explained that she was afraid to go out for ice cream.
More than a dozen laborers and their children shared their stories with The New York Times, saying they feel tormented by what they described as cruel and chaotic deportation efforts aimed at their community. In rural New York, some immigrants have been briefly detained and then released, while others with legal papers languish in custody, leaving many confused about who is being forced out of the country and who gets to remain.
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