Trump’s Immigration Push Has Largely Spared Farms. Idaho Dairymen Worry It Won’t Last.

The floor-to-ceiling windows in Rick Naerebout’s office afford a sweeping view of the stunning 500-foot-deep, quarter-mile-wide Snake River Canyon. Squint and you can still see what’s left of stunt motorcycle rider Evel Knievel’s ramp from his failed 1974 attempt to jump the canyon with a steam-powered rocket on his back.

That put Twin Falls on the map in the 1970s. But these days, Twin, as locals call it, and its surrounding fertile river plain are better known as a national agricultural powerhouse, owing largely to the state’s multi-billion-dollar dairy industry.

Today it’s also an open secret — even in deeply Republican Idaho — that local farms rely heavily on undocumented immigrant labor. Naerebout estimates some 90% of the workers at the state’s some 350 dairies may not have legal status.

“We’re not taking jobs from Americans,” Naerebout, the CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association says. “The jobs are physical in nature and you’re out in the elements. They just don’t appeal to Americans.”

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Like a lot of rural and Republican-controlled states, Idaho has not seen the level of immigration enforcement as some of its blue state neighbors, according to interviews with attorneys and immigrant advocates.

Still, twice a week, an ICE deportation plane lands at the tiny Twin Falls airport, in a rural area south of the small city surrounded by farm fields a half-hour drive from Interstate 84. {snip}

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These weekly flights are pretty small. This is no Operation Metro Surge Minneapolis or the MacArthur Park immigration enforcement in Los Angeles. But the sweeps are still casting a chill across this rural farming region that has relied heavily on immigrant labor since the 1950s.

And in nearby Burley, home to milk processing and fertilizer plants, Susan Rios’ world has been upended by ICE’s crackdown. The 65-year-old farmworker activist and grandmother moved from Arizona to the area as a little girl to pick potatoes. Her daughter and son-in-law, fearing ICE, recently moved to Mexico. The husband is undocumented, so the family decided to self-deport.

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But since they left, Rios says things have actually been pretty quiet. Nationwide, there have only been a handful of large raids at agricultural facilities in the nearly two years since Trump’s sweeps began. {snip}

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{snip} Last year, Idaho advertised 7,500 jobs through the temporary farm worker visa program known as H2A.

Only four local residents applied.

Rick Naerebout says that’s despite the fact that dairy jobs pay more than most service jobs in small-town America.

The labor crisis is even more pronounced in Idaho’s dairy industry — the state is now the fourth-largest milk producer in the U.S. — because the work is year-round, not seasonal. So the industry is not eligible for those coveted temporary H2A visas and has to rely on migrant labor.

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There’s only been one known large ICE raid in Idaho since Trump returned to office. It was part of an alleged illegal gambling bust last fall at a horse racing track popular with farmworkers. There haven’t been any known large farm or workplace raids here since.

Nampa-based immigration attorney Brandy Perez attributes this to the dairy industry’s political clout in deep-red states like Idaho.

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