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food system
ICE Raids Against Farmworkers Expose the Pretense of Border Security
When the state hunts its most essential—and most exploited—workers to meet deportation quotas, the myth of border security collapses.
Dec 14, 2025
The targeting of farmworkers by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement lays bare the true intent and interests motivating the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy agenda. It also exposes the fundamental contradictions that shape the US political economy. The nature of the state’s abductions, caging, and deportations of those doing the backbreaking work of harvesting fields, is not only revealed by the fact that those detained are not “criminals.” It is the paradox, in which farm sustainers—pillars of the food system whose livelihoods feed communities within and beyond our borders—are being systematically expelled.
While ICE raids rage on in neighborhoods across the country, they are also notably taking place in the very heart of the food system: in labor camps and homes, fields and orchards, packing sheds, outside of schools and labor centers, and across small towns whose economies depend entirely on the people the state targets. ICE is taking advantage of the fact that farmworker communities are often rural and structurally marginalized.
A state that capitalizes against workers it labels as essential in times of crisis yet simultaneously categorizes as “illegal”—especially the moment deportation quotas prove profitable—shows how racial capitalism depends on legal precarity to function. In the agrifood system in particular, the precarity of farmworkers has underpinned how corporations and landowners increase their margins, while keeping the cost of food artificially low.
As activist and award-winning author, Harsha Walia, argues in Border and Rule, borders function not merely to exclude, but to produce a workforce that can be exploited precisely because its existence has been criminalized. The US government, whose imperialist record of consequential trade policies and debt agreements, exporting dumping under in the name of trade or "aid," imposition of sanctions, and military interventions in or with foreign nations, has made significant contributions to producing crises of migration. At the same time, the state determines the rights and protections those same migrants might have—migrants it requires as a key labor force. For migrant farmworkers in particular, this vulnerability and legal precarity is even more stark given the historical double standards within agriculture. Farmworkers are routinely carved out of basic labor protections, including being denied overtime rights and robust health and safety regulations. Their disposability is not accidental; it is legislated and maintained with the underlying political and economic assumption that those who are forced to look for work across borders can, or even should, remain unprotected and exploited.
To criminalize those who feed you is more than a contradiction. It is an indictment, revealing a society willing to squeeze labor while kidnapping and expelling the people who provide it.
So, even as US farmworkers are those whose skill and sweat stabilizes and maintains US agriculture—a foundation of public health and our economy—under President Donald Trump’s deportation siege, they find themselves under regular threat because of their supposed legal status.
According to US Department of Agriculture data, over 40% of US farmworkers are undocumented migrants. In California, that percentage is even higher, with estimates ranging from nearly half to upwards of 70%. This means that the state that grows approximately half of the US vegetables and over 75% of the country’s fruits and nuts is an easy target for ICE raids. Residents of Kern County, which has the highest concentration of agricultural workers in the state, recently witnessed the opening of California’s newest and largest migrant detention facility this fall. This facility is another signal to farmworkers that the state’s surveillance and criminalization of their community is becoming an inescapable part of daily life.
Additionally, in early October, the Department of Labor announced a new rule that slashes the wages of H-2A workers between $5 to $7 per hour, thereby transferring $2.46 billion dollars in wages from workers to employers each year. Crucially, US agriculture has become increasingly dependent on the H-2A program to address chronic labor shortages, as it permits eligible employers to recruit foreign workers for temporary agricultural jobs. The administration’s decision therefore not only undermines the wage protections intended to make the H-2A program a lawful and regulated alternative to undocumented labor, but also exposes its willingness to undercut the very workforce the program is purported to support. A coalition of California attorneys general led a letter noting the various consequences of the new rule, which they claim “abandons reliable farm-specific data,” and exacerbates "the roots of farmworker poverty for both H-2A workers and domestic farmworkers alike." United Farm Workers (UFW) has also launched a lawsuit intended to reverse the administration’s decision, which they claim reflects, “one of the largest wealth transfers from workers to employers in US agricultural history.”
In essence, the administration’s pursuit of farmworker communities serves no legitimate economic or social goal. Instead, it enacts government scapegoating: the creation of a rhetorical problem (“illegal workers”) and the violent pursuit of that manufactured threat in order to justify the ever-expanding profitability of the border-security apparatus. It is an exercise of racialized state theater, and a manifestation of a food system left to the logic of deregulation and cheap, disposable labor—labor the border itself ensures under the guise of protecting national security or state sovereignty. Reports from the federal Department of Labor indicate that ICE’s siege is already contributing to labor shortages and supply consequences, as farmworkers are too afraid to leave their homes. Farmer organizations have also expressed solidarity with farmworkers, noting their importance in keeping the food economy afloat.
The fear and suffering imposed on farmworkers should neither be reduced to the specter of a labor shortage. It is a fear that fractures community life, determines whether someone seeks medical care, and dictates whether a child goes to school. In the aftermath of raids, it leaves mothers, fathers, children, and their families terrorized and often unaccounted for. It also compounds the daily struggles of working in systems that maintain unsafe labor conditions and unfair wages, such as mounting food insecurity and chronic health issues.
These communities are not peripheral cogs in some vast, anonymous agricultural machine. They are the harvesters of our food. To criminalize those who feed you is more than a contradiction. It is an indictment, revealing a society willing to squeeze labor while kidnapping and expelling the people who provide it. It does not reflect lawfulness or the interests of "public safety."
While the going after farmworker communities in such a concentrated manner might be relatively new to the Trump administration, farmworkers’ long-standing legal precarity and fight for basic protections—while holding up such a huge portion of the food economy—is not. If targeting workers whose status is defined not by the role they play in feeding the nation or sustaining the economy, but by their documentation, does not underscore the structural flaws inherent in our entire economic system, it at least reveals the insincerity of Trump’s war on im/migrants and the choreography of the militarized border project. As ICE raids against farmworkers continue nationwide, the entire pretense of border security reveals itself as utterly transparent.
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How Do We Truly Care for Each Other in the Trump Era?
What are the systems that we need to build to replace the distinctly broken and shattered ones in this world of ours?
Dec 06, 2025
Do you have a silver card? I do. I live in New London, Connecticut, and while I don’t get EBT, or Electronic Benefit Transfers, anymore, I still carry the card as a talisman. It’s nestled in my wallet right behind my driver’s license. It reminds me that there was a time when I needed help and was able to get it. It’s the kind of reminder we all need—and one that’s in ever shorter supply these days.
When I was poorer, that card filled every month with money I could spend on food—fruits and vegetables, oil, spices, and cheese at the grocery store. I marshalled my resources carefully then, never taking them for granted.
When Congress and the Trump White House shut the government down recently, they hit 42 million Americans right in their wallets. They took that stability away. They hit mine too, after a fashion, because suddenly my neighbors and friends had empty cards and wallets. People rushed in to help. The little libraries in our neighborhood were suddenly filled with canned goods and jars of peanut butter and jelly. All the downtown businesses started offering discounts or free things if you showed your silver card. A teenager gave out free hot dogs in a local park, and our food co-op started a drive to pay for $20 gift cards to offer struggling shoppers.
After about a week and in response to calls, emails, and letters—a clamor from so many in the Nutmeg State—Connecticut did the right thing. Hartford used its “rainy day fund” to fully fund cards for residents. Our millionaire governor, who recently announced that he’s running for a third term, insisted that he’d bill the federal government for the cost of the stolen benefits.
Of course, I want to do more than just volunteer. I want the whole system to change.
And the goodwill is still going strong. This was shaping up to be a bountiful Thanksgiving for food pantries and soup kitchens in our area, and I’m already planning my outfit for directing traffic at our local food pantry next Friday. I’ll be head-to-toe in high viz.
This is all beautiful. It’s heartening—and we need more of it. It’s an all-too-human response to the Trump administration’s assault on what was left of good government. His graft machine came into power promising to make the government small enough to drown in a toilet. He unleashed Elon Musk and his army of young bros to smash and trash the bureaucracy. In the first weeks of his new administration, a century—whoops, I mean months—ago, more than 200,000 federal employees were pink-slipped, shown the door, or simply locked out. Foreign aid to the globally needy was left to moulder. Contraception bound for the Global South was incinerated. Effective, long-standing programs were shuttered without warning.
Small Ways to Be Useful
I struggled through all of that, feeling small and far from the power centers where good people were being shown the door. I tried to keep my eyes focused on what my own community needed most and did indeed find a modest way to be useful.
On Mondays and Wednesday mornings, I bundle up, don a high-viz vest, and head out to a nearby corner. For an hour, I walk that intersection, accompanying middle schoolers across the street and standing with little kids waiting for buses. I chat with parents and wave at cars, the trucks of contractors, and city buses. People toot their horns or shout my name from open car windows, waving good morning as they head to work.
I give speeders the stink eye and, when there are lulls, I pick up garbage and think about the day ahead. And then I see more kids coming and plan to casually help without letting them break stride. I greet them with warm respect. It hasn’t taken me long to recognize them all.
You may wonder: How did I get here? Let me back up and tell you the story because it connects to how our community is bulking up its care response network in the age of Trump.
During the last budget session, our town was in a fiscal crisis. Inflation, health insurance increases, and rising costs made for major belt tightening. The People’s Budget Coalition, a network of organizations and individuals I work with, turned out scores of people to fill City Council chambers through the budget season. We signed up dozens of people to speak to the City Council and wrote emails to or button-holed councilors at public events. We had marches and rallies. We met one-on-one with school board members and city councilors. We went to Hartford and demanded more money from the state. We worked so hard!
Sometimes, my two kids, 11 and 13, came with me to those City Council meetings, drawing, reading, and shifting around constantly in those uncomfortable seats as their teachers spoke passionately about the work they did. Again and again, people made the point that it isn’t just a school budget, it’s a community budget. After all, the schools provide breakfasts and lunches, before and after care, health and special-ed services, as well as support for more than a dozen languages. And if that isn’t enough to deal with, there are 300 to 400 kids in our school system who are homeless on any given night, and our schools have to contend with the disruptions such instability wreaks on families and so the ability of their kids to learn.
We went back and forth on this for months, but sadly the upshot was that the City Council flat-funded the schools, while the Board of Education had to cut positions and shave costs. One cut was to eliminate all but one crossing guard position, pushing five guards out of their jobs. Amid the massive disruptions at the federal level, this may seem like small potatoes. But it was an obvious and impactful cut, visible evidence of the whole system under attack.
We live between two schools, and I’ve always admired crossing guards for being steady and stalwart in the heat and the cold. I was ready to help out and the People’s Budget Coalition stepped in to organize us into a volunteer crossing-guard cadre.
But It Isn’t Enough! Tax the Weapons Contractors!
Of course, I want to do more than just volunteer. I want the whole system to change. While the school board shaved positions, the city offered early retirement to people in key jobs, and everyone was called on to economize, there is a gold-plated example of a tax scofflaw right in our neighborhood. General Dynamics is the fourth-largest weapons manufacturer in the United States, with a huge complex in New London. In 2024, it reported profits of $3.8 billion, up 14.1% from 2023. Its CEO, Phebe Novakovic, made more than $23 million in 2024 (with all her stocks and options). However, the company shortchanges its workers, even as it rakes in record profits.
In 2021, General Dynamics-Electric Boat took the city of New London to court to contest its tax bill, according to documents uncovered by the War Resisters League. The city had assessed its New London office park at $78 million, but the company wanted it lower. They eventually settled in court on an assessment of $57 million. That big break saved the company $563,000 a year in local taxes! Add that up for the five years since that decision was made, and you get $2.8 million!
If our tax system were fair, New London would get $6 million more in taxes.
It could have been even more. As local Patch news site reported, General Dynamics bought the complex for $55 million in July 2010—a fire sale price, given that the previous owner, pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer, had spent $300 million to build it less than 10 years earlier. When General Dynamics moved in, the fair market value for the property was $309 million, putting the tax assessment on the property at something like $216 million. So, the company’s fair tax burden to the City of New London should be nearly $6 million a year! How different life would be for New Londoners if General Dynamics were paying that annually.
After laying that out before the City Council, I concluded (all in less than three minutes) by saying: “I offer for your consideration that you stop cutting positions, stop threatening to flat-fund the schools and our kids, and that you tax General Dynamics with the same resolve that you tax the citizens. They can afford it, a lot more than we can.” There was some applause for that last line, even though many people are afraid to criticize General Dynamics, fearing that (no matter the real finances) the goose could stop laying what still passes for a golden egg.
Sandwiches, Not Submarines
The People’s Budget Coalition has begun looking into how we can take this issue on, especially because so much of our housing boom and the gentrification that goes with it (and pushes poorer people out of our area) is related to the US Navy’s massive contract (a whopping $132 billion) with General Dynamics-Electric Boat for a new class of nuclear-powered, nuclear-capable submarines. I mention all of this because it’s the kind of thing I think about while waiting for the next cluster of middle schoolers to arrive at my intersection.
At the end of the school year, as they cut school positions, proud parents put up lawn signs advertising where their kids were headed to college. One common sign was for Electric Boat, not a college. But most of the positions they’re filling with new grads aren’t actually high-paying, fast-advancing ones that will provide future stability for those young people. A recent report by the War Resisters League found that entry-level wages at Electric Boat, even after signing bonuses, were low enough that workers also often qualified for state healthcare and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits!
Imagine that, if our tax system were fair, New London would get $6 million more in taxes. Of course, then there’s the question of what it would be like if we Americans weren’t investing $132 billion for those 12 new nuclear-armed submarines capable all alone of destroying the world. Why is there money for those submarines but not for sandwiches (and other food), housing, and medicine for people who truly need it?
How can companies like General Dynamics-Electric Boat make insane profits with plenty of money left over for stock buybacks and CEO bonuses, while people in my world are digging through their pantries to find cans of food to share with their neighbors?
Planting Figs on the Strangest Planet Around
Only recently, when SNAP ran out of its federal funding during the government shutdown and the Trump crew decided to force millions of low-income people to reapply for their food stamps (supposedly in an effort to stop “fraud”), my social media filled up with images of World War II victory gardens and videos of how to replace such federal support with your own labor and ingenuity. And yes, it made a certain sense to me on one level, though it also couldn’t have been more tone deaf or unrealistic on another.
Here’s what I mean: I grow food in my yard. I devote three or four hours a week to watering, weeding, reseeding, and harvesting. Right there I’m way ahead of the curve, since I’ve got the space and time, two significant privileges. I had a great garlic harvest this year. My blueberry bushes and strawberry patch were both prolific. I lost all my hazelnuts to the squirrels during an ill-timed road trip. Our mushroom patch never came up. My care for the fig tree paid off—finally—and I got a tidy little fig harvest for a week or two in September. An asparagus patch I’ve been developing for a few years took off and, for a few weeks, we ate so much asparagus that we all got a little sick of it.
I can barely share a handful of figs with my neighbors and can’t solve anyone’s food crisis by my occasional neighborly drop-offs of a dozen backyard eggs.
Parsley, basil, collards, kale, and lettuces all did great, and we ate pesto and salads and slaws from May to October, almost turning green in the process. Last year’s jack-o’-lanterns took off in spiky abundance, and I let them take over a whole part of the yard. Eventually, I found five beautiful feral pumpkins that we carved up again, roasting the seeds with tamari and garlic powder for a messy and delicious treat. I grew corn but didn’t water it enough for it to be anything but chicken food. And yes, we have enough chickens to meet our egg needs, but we’re far from being self-sufficient.
You see what I’m getting at, I hope. Gardening is a lot of time and work, while the outcomes are anything but guaranteed. A handful of missed days, a few missteps, and all your work is for nothing. Still, this summer, there were weeks when my family could skip buying vegetables and fruit. That felt good and was nice for our bottom line, but even that depended on my having some free daytime, a luxury all too many of us don’t have.
Our true food system is all about commandeered water and stolen land, subsidized fertilizer and exploited labor, shipping and storage. Every little way I opt out from all of that is undoubtedly a good thing, but I can barely share a handful of figs with my neighbors and can’t solve anyone’s food crisis by my occasional neighborly drop-offs of a dozen backyard eggs.
Maybe it’s different in places where more people grow more food and aren’t dabblers or amateurs like me. But as I think about how to contend with the acute crisis and widening fissures in our whole international food system, with its Trumpian tariffs, excise taxes, and systemic abuses, I wonder how long this can go on.
How long can we live in the strange world of President Donald Trump and his version of what might be thought of as Defeat Gardens before we figure out a better way—how to truly feed and care for ourselves and one another? What are the systems that we need to build to replace the distinctly broken and shattered ones in this world of ours?
Those are some of the questions I ask myself daily as I wait for those schoolkids to get to my corner. But I can’t ask them alone or answer them by myself. Still, it feels meaningful to at least pose the questions and explore how, in this Trumpian universe of ours, not just I but we can try to answer them together.
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The MAHA Commission Won’t Fix Public Health or Our Food System
RFK Jr. sold out on pesticides, but we can course correct if as a society we reprioritize health and start making decisions that benefit people over corporate greed.
Oct 19, 2025
When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. started talking about pesticides, a lot of people got their hopes up that someone might finally fix the broken food system. But instead he bowed to corporate oligarchy when he listened to Big Ag rather than recommending that we stop exposing ourselves to toxic pesticides. This toxic food system wasn’t always our reality, and it doesn’t have to be our future.
In the United States, it is the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) job to regulate pesticides. Pesticide manufacturers apply for registration of active ingredients by submitting research (often industry funded) claiming they are safe and effective when used as directed. EPA determines its registration decisions based on a risk assessment and other supporting documents, then a public comment period follows. However, EPA relies on industry-funded research for these decisions, when time and again we have seen the pesticide industry hide evidence that its products cause harm.
Take the herbicide paraquat for instance: Paraquat is a highly toxic pesticide; one teaspoon is enough to kill an adult. There is no antidote for paraquat poisoning. This herbicide is commonly used in the United States as weeds become increasingly resistant to glyphosate (the active ingredient in Bayer’s industrial formulation of Roundup™). Paraquat is banned for use in 72 countries. Exposure to paraquat has been increasingly associated with Parkinson’s disease and other chronic conditions like cancer, but Big Ag has successfully pushed back against calls to ban this pesticide in the US for decades.
But this issue is bigger than one chemical; there are hundreds of pesticides in use in this country, and all of them have the potential to cause harm. Be it weeds, bugs, rodents, or fungi, the purpose of these chemicals is to kill what they come in contact with. Our consolidated food system encourages farmers to prioritize quantity over crop diversity—meaning that the largest farms in this country are monoculture operations (farms growing one crop on massive swaths of land). One problem with monoculture is that the pest pressures are significant. It requires high inputs of agrichemicals; you either need a huge amount of labor to pull weeds and hand-pick pests, or you apply increasing quantities of synthetic pesticides to manage pests. Year over year, as farms use more and more pesticides, weeds and pests develop resistance, requiring more frequent application or resorting to stronger, more toxic formulations. This is a vicious cycle that traps farmers by keeping them on a “pesticide treadmill.”
Agorecology is an economically and ecologically viable alternative to our current food system’s foundation of extraction.
This monoculture, ultra-processed food system that relies heavily on toxic chemicals is also making us sick, with microplastics being found in our brains (plastic usage in agriculture is also a growing concern and a major contributor to microplastics in soil); PFAS contaminating our water (many pesticide formulations contain or are themselves PFAS); and children being exposed to pesticides in their backyards, at parks and schools, and in utero. At the same time, farmers are being squeezed by a system that makes it harder for small and medium-sized farms to make a living, with no protections in place except for the corporate players.
It wasn’t one thing that set us on the path to this reality where our food, water, soil, air, and bodies are contaminated with fossil fuel derived agrichemicals and microplastics; there were decisions and policies that over the course of only a few decades cornered us into this reality. The good news is that we can course correct if as a society we reprioritize health and start making decisions that benefit people over corporate greed.
A food system built on agroecology is one that doesn’t rely on agrichemicals to function and is therefore not captured by corporations. An agroecological food system in America looks like thriving and decentralized community food systems, where the people growing and consuming food have control over what goes into and comes out of their food system; grow food without reliance on agrichemical inputs or patented seeds; work with the environment rather than against it; and prioritize health, safety, and collective well-being.
Agorecology is an economically and ecologically viable alternative to our current food system’s foundation of extraction. It is actively practiced around the world, and it existed in what we now call the United States of America long before pesticides were introduced. Our job today is to shift our extractive mindsets to ones that prioritize health, in line with Indigenous wisdom.
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