After six 12-hour layers of milking cows, José Molina-Aguilar’s lonely day hardly relaxed.
On April 21, he and seven employees were arrested on one Vermont The milk farm in what supporters say was one of the state’s greatest immigration attacks.
“I saw through the window of the house that immigration was already in the farm, and then they arrested us,” he said recently in an interview. “I was in the process of asylum, and even they respected the document that I was still holding in my hands.”
Four of the workers were quickly deported to Mexico. Molina aging, which was released in a Texas Hob Center after a month in a still outstanding asylum case in Texas, is now working on a different farm and speaks out.
“We have to fight as a community so that we all have the rights we have in this country and continue to fight,” he said.
The owner of the targeted farm rejected a statement. But Brett Stokes, a lawyer who represents the imprisoned workers, said the raid sent shock waves through the entire northeastern agricultural industry.
“These strong poor tactics that we see, and this increase in enforcement, whether legal or not, everyone plays a role in fear in the community,” said Stokes, director of the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at the Vermont Law and the graduate school.
This fear remains in view of the mixed messages from the White House. President Donald Trump, who campaigned against a promise last month, illegally deported millions of immigrants in the United States Arrested On farms, restaurants and hotels. But less than a week later, the deputy secretary of the Ministry of Homeland Protection said that the implementation of the jobs would continue.
Such uncertainty causes problems in large conditions as CaliforniaWhere farms produce more than three quarters of the country in the country and more than a third of its vegetables. However, it also affects small conditions such as Vermont, in which dairy products are just as part of the identity of the state as the famous maple syrup.
Almost two thirds of the entire milk production in Neuelfland come from Vermont, where more than half of the arable land in the state of the state of milk and milk cultures are devoted. According to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, which give the annual economic effects of the industry with 5.4 billion US dollars on the annual economic effects of the industry, there are around 113,000 cows and 7,500 goats in 480 farms.
This influence has more than doubled in the past decade, with widespread help of workers in the immigrant. More than 90% of the agricultural businesses surveyed for the latest report employs migrant workers.
Among them is Wuendy Bernardo, who has lived on a dairy in Vermont for more than a decade and has an active application to stop their deportation for humanitarian reasons 2023 letter Signed by dozens of state legislators.
Hundreds of Bernardo’s followers appeared for their last check-in with immigration officers.
“It is really difficult, because every time I come here, I don’t know if I will return to my family or not,” she said after I should return in a month.
Like Molina-Aguilar, Rossy Alfaro also worked 12-hour days with one day off a week on a farm in Vermont. Now, a lawyer of the migrant justice, she said that the dairy industry would collapse with a migration background without an employee.
“Everything would go down,” she said. “There are many people who work for a long time without being able to complain without being able to say:” I don’t want to work. “You just do the job.”
