Cricket Jacquier was somewhere between Orlando and upstate New York, probably thinking about the conversations he’d just had at the National Milk Producers Federation annual meeting, when his phone rang.
It was another dairy farmer. Someone who hadn’t made the trip to Florida. Someone who was calling because he didn’t know what else to do.
“I’m pulling into my farm, and there’s ICE activity happening right now,” the farmer said, his voice tight with panic. “What do I even do? I don’t know what to do.”
Jacquier, a third-generation New York dairy farmer who chairs NMPF’s immigration task force, felt his stomach drop. He was hundreds of miles away. There was no playbook for this moment. No script. No easy answer.
All he could do was connect the farmer with resources from NMPF. Legal guidance. Crisis management. The bare minimum support available when federal agents show up unannounced at your operation.
That phone call was a year ago. Jacquier still thinks about it.
Because that farmer’s panic — that moment of helplessness — is playing out across dairy country right now. And it’s getting worse.
The Fear That Never Leaves
“This stuff injects fear in communities, everywhere,” Jacquier told a room full of dairy producers at this year’s joint annual meeting in Orlando. “People are afraid to move, do anything, go to the stores.”
He wasn’t exaggerating.
In the northeast, where Jacquier farms, there haven’t been recent raids on dairy operations specifically. But that doesn’t mean the threat isn’t real. Just last weekend, 75 people were taken from a single town in one sweep — not from farms, but from the community where dairy workers live, shop and raise their families.
The ripple effect is immediate and devastating.
Workers who’ve been on the same dairy for 10, 15, 20 years — who know every cow, every system, every quirk of the operation — suddenly won’t leave the farm property. They won’t go to the grocery store. They won’t take their kids to school. They won’t go to church.
They live in a constant state of terror that one wrong turn, one traffic stop, one case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time will tear them away from their families and the farms that depend on them.
And the farmers? They’re living in fear too.
Fear that they’ll lose the workforce that makes their operation possible. Fear that they’ll be blamed for a situation they didn’t create and can’t control. Fear that all the work they’ve put into building a sustainable, humane, productive dairy will collapse because of a policy problem they have no power to fix.
When Enforcement Comes to Town
What happened in southwest Kansas this summer is a preview of what’s coming to more dairy regions.
ICE agents showed up at meatpacking plants. At feedlots. On dairies.
The strategy is clear: don’t raid the farms directly. Set up outside them. Wait for workers to leave. Create what one panelist at the NMPF meeting called “a very chilling effect” on entire towns.
In Florida, the enforcement tactics have evolved even further.
Jamie Fussell, director of labor relations for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, described a new approach that’s as effective as it is troubling: racial profiling at gas stations.
“They’ll show up at a gas station where farm workers will meet in the morning,” Jamie explained. “They’ll identify them by race. They’ll hear that they’re speaking Spanish. They’ll see that they’re getting on a bus to go to a field somewhere, and they’ll just take all these elements to combine and say it is likely these folks are here without legal status. And so they’ll pull the bus over.”
Sometimes it happens in farmworker communities. Sometimes in more urban areas. The landscaping and green industry has been hit particularly hard.
Here’s the kicker: even H-2A workers — people who are in the United States legally, with valid work visas — have been detained and deported.
Why? Because local law enforcement doesn’t recognize their documentation.
“A lot of that is educating the law enforcement — it’s like, ‘This is what these documents look like,’” Fussell said. “And they want to just see a simple document with a single name. And if they don’t see that, they’re going to pick them up and let someone else sort it out later.”
In Idaho, the situation is more contained — for now.
Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, credits the Trump administration with being “true to their word that they’re leaving ag employers alone. They’re not coming and doing worksite activity.”
But the strategy of sitting outside ag worksites? That’s happening in Idaho too. And in Utah. And spreading.
And there’s another threat looming: 287(g) agreements.
These agreements essentially deputize local law enforcement to carry out federal immigration enforcement. The Trump administration has made pushing states to adopt mandatory 287(g) agreements a key priority.
In Idaho, the White House directly pressured state House and Senate leadership during the last legislative session to pass a bill mandating these agreements.
“Our House and Senate leadership was not — I mean, they didn’t hold back,” Naerebout said. “They said, ‘Hey, we’re getting pressure from the White House. Give us a reason why we shouldn’t do this. We need to do this for the White House.’”
The bill nearly passed. It only failed because Idaho’s sheriffs — understanding the reality of their rural communities — stood united in opposition.
In Florida, every single county already has a 287(g) agreement in place.
“Florida voted for immigration reform and for the Trump policies,” Fussell noted. The state also passed mandatory E-Verify three years ago, adding another layer of enforcement pressure.
The result? A patchwork of enforcement activity that’s unpredictable, often misguided and creating chaos for an agricultural workforce that has nowhere else to go.
The Impossible Position
Here’s what makes this situation so excruciating for farmers like Jacquier. They want to follow the law. They want legal workers. They want a system that works.
But that system doesn’t exist for dairy.
The H-2A temporary agricultural worker visa program — the legal pathway that exists for seasonal agriculture — has never been available to dairy farms because dairy work isn’t seasonal. Cows need to be milked 365 days a year. Calves need to be fed every day. There’s no “off season” where you can send workers home and bring them back when you need them again.
For 40 years, dairy has operated in a legal gray zone: not because farmers want to break the law, but because the law doesn’t provide a viable option.
And now, enforcement is intensifying while the legal pathway remains closed.
“What we have is not what we need. What we have is not what we want,” Jacquier said, his frustration evident. “We do not have the tools to operate. So it’s just fear.”
He paused, then added something that cuts to the heart of why this issue causes him so much pain:
“I ask myself: if we let off on the throttle, are we opening up the door for more scrutiny on our own farm? Because what we have is not what we need.”
Think about that for a moment.
Jacquier is asking whether advocating loudly for reform — doing media interviews, testifying before Congress, speaking at industry meetings — might actually make his own farm more vulnerable to enforcement action.
That’s the impossible calculus dairy farmers are making right now.
Stay quiet and hope you don’t become a target? Or speak up and risk drawing attention to a workforce situation you desperately want to fix but legally can’t?
The Workers Caught in the Middle
It’s easy to talk about this issue in abstract policy terms. Visa programs. Seasonal requirements. Enforcement strategies.
But these are real people with real lives.
The workers on American dairy farms aren’t anonymous faces. Many of them have been on the same operation for years or decades. They’re skilled professionals who understand cow behavior, can spot health issues before they become serious, know how to operate complex equipment and have built relationships with the families they work for.
They’re integrated into their communities. Their kids go to local schools. They shop at local stores. They attend local churches. They’re neighbors, Little League coaches, volunteers.
And now they’re afraid to leave their houses.
Farmers describe workers who won’t go to the grocery store anymore. Who won’t take their kids to the doctor. Who live in constant fear that any interaction with law enforcement — even a routine traffic stop — could end with them being separated from their families and deported.
These aren’t people who came to the United States to break the law. They came because American dairy farms needed them, recruited them, and offered them jobs that American workers overwhelmingly don’t want.
The data backs this up: In 2025, there were 415,000 farm jobs advertised for domestic workers through the H-2A program. Less than 1% of those jobs received applications from American workers. About 100 domestic workers applied for 415,000 positions.
The workforce simply doesn’t exist domestically. And the legal pathway to bring in foreign workers doesn’t exist for year-round agriculture.
The Bill That Could Change Everything
There is a solution on the table.
The Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act (SAWA), introduced by House Agriculture Committee Chairman G.T. Thompson on June 30, 2026, would fundamentally reform the H-2A program for the first time in 40 years.
Most importantly for dairy, it would eliminate the seasonal requirement that has always kept dairy out of the program.
Under SAWA, dairy farmers could bring in workers on contracts up to 350 days long, renewable for up to three years. Workers would have to leave the country for 60 days before being eligible to return, but it would finally provide a legal pathway for year-round agricultural work.
The bill also addresses the current workforce — the workers who are already here, already working on farms, already skilled and integrated into operations.
If their only illegal activity was entering the country to work in agriculture, and if they’ve worked in agriculture at least 180 days out of the last two years, they could apply to transition into the H-2A program.
This isn’t amnesty. It’s not a path to citizenship. It’s not permanent status.
It’s a narrow, tailored way to avoid devastating workforce disruptions while moving everyone into a legal framework with background checks, in-person interviews and full federal vetting.
For farmers like Jacquier, SAWA represents hope. A chance to finally operate within the law. A chance to stop living in fear. A chance to build a stable, legal workforce.
But SAWA is stalled.
It launched with 48 bipartisan co-sponsors. It’s now up to 61. But it’s also lost four co-sponsors who dropped off after opposition groups flooded social media calling it an “amnesty bill.”
There’s no companion bill in the Senate. House members are reluctant to take the political hit if the Senate won’t act. Senate offices say they need more momentum before they’ll move.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The midterm elections are weeks away. Congress will be in session for maybe two months after that before the end of the year.
And every day that passes, more phone calls like the one Jacquier received are happening.
The Question That Haunts Him
Jacquier thinks about that phone call a lot. The farmer pulling into his own property and seeing ICE agents. The panic in his voice. The helplessness of being hundreds of miles away with no good answer to give.
He thinks about the 75 people taken from one town in a single weekend.
He thinks about his own workers, some of whom have been on his farm for years, who are now afraid to go to the store.
He thinks about the next generation of his family and what kind of dairy industry they’ll inherit if this doesn’t get fixed.
And he thinks about the pace of progress in Washington.
“I have to start by saying this as a dairy farmer: the pace in which we’re doing something here causes excruciating pain for me,” Jacquier told the room in Orlando.
He knows the NMPF team is working tirelessly. He knows everyone in the room is contributing. He knows the cooperative members are funding the fight.
But knowing all that doesn’t make the pain go away.
Because somewhere right now, another dairy farmer is pulling into his farm and seeing something that makes his heart stop.
And when that farmer calls Jacquier— or someone like him — asking what to do, the answer is still the same: We’re working on it. We’re fighting for reform. We’re doing everything we can.
But we’re not there yet.
And in the meantime, the fear never leaves.
That’s why Jacquier keeps showing up in Washington. That’s why he chairs the immigration task force. That’s why he tells his story over and over, even when it’s painful.
Because the next phone call could come at any moment.
And until SAWA — or something like it — becomes law, there are still no good answers to give.
Just fear. And hope. And the excruciating pace of change that never comes fast enough.
