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By Zamone Perez
February 19, 2025
President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders meant to jump-start his mass deportation policy but the policy may negatively affect migrant farmworkers in Virginia.
Nationwide, nearly half of agricultural workers are immigrants and more than a quarter of those workers are undocumented. More than 300,000 people work in Virginia’s agricultural sector, many of whom are immigrants. Numbers are not available at the state level for how many workers are undocumented.
Manuel Gago Silcox, co-director of the Virginia-based Worker Justice Program at the Legal Aid Justice Center, said Trump’s policies come during a slow period in agricultural production in the Commonwealth.
“We’re still not seeing a big repercussion of this,” Gago Silcox pointed out. “We will know about this when the season starts, like around May, April. We’ll see how this plan will be affecting farms and crops, especially in the summer, the harvesting season, when it’s more labor-intensive.”
Overall, 42% of farmworkers do not have an authorization to work in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Gago Silcox expects applications for H2-A visas, a program for companies to hire foreign workers for agricultural jobs, to dramatically increase.
Gago Silcox added there is a lot of confusion in migrant farmworker communities about immigration raids potentially happening at workplaces. Many thought the raids were supposed to target criminals, instead of workers.
“It’s at a workplace. They are people that are doing work. They are feeding their families, and they’re feeding other families,” Gago Silcox explained. “So they don’t understand why these raids at the workplace, while people are trying to earn their basic needs, are taking place there. “
Gago Silcox noted groups are currently working to educate migrant workers about their rights and pass out red cards, which detail the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens if they are approached by immigration officers.