Tens of thousands of undocumented farmworkers in South Jersey are laying low and ‘scared to death’ of potential ICE raids

As President Donald Trump’s administration pursues mass deportations across the country, Antonio, an undocumented farmworker in Cumberland County, faces a decision:

Which of his children should he and his wife choose to never see again?

“There’s rumors that ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is coming to our doors,” said Antonio, 48, a farmer from Mexico who migrated to South Jersey with his wife 21 years ago. “Right now, I must get the children ready if we’re deported.”

Antonio’s four children, ages 20, 16, 15, and 13, are U.S. citizens, born in New Jersey. Speaking Spanish through a translator, he asked that only his first name be used to protect himself from being expelled from the country.

While no undocumented New Jersey farmworkers are known to have been detained by ICE, videos of raids taking place in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and other cities are triggering anxiety among South Jersey field hands, many of whom have lived in the area without legal status for decades. The prospect of deportations of undocumented farmworkers is also disconcerting to farmers, who worry that a smaller labor force could wreck the growing season, generating economic catastrophe.

Right now, though, picking vegetables isn’t on Antonio’s mind.

“We want to get paperwork ready so the older ones can stay,” he said, possibly with another family, and make lives for themselves here. But, he added, should ICE come knocking, he and his wife believe they will take their 13-year-old back to Mexico with them.

“I came to make a better life for my family,” Antonio said, adding that he never thought that journey would end with him potentially saying “goodbye to three of my of children.”

When Trump accepted the Republican nomination last year, he promised to launch “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” And the first weeks of his presidency have been marked by aggressive immigration enforcement.

Many Americans appear to be on board with the policy. A January poll by Ipsos and the New York Times showed that 63% support removing undocumented immigrants who entered the country during the last four years, and 55% said they favor deporting all those who have no legal permission to be here.

Throughout communities of “panicked” undocumented farmworkers, however, “people are jittery — talking so fast, crying, losing sleep, and keeping kids out of school,” said Meghan Hurley, policy and advocacy organizer for CATA, a nonprofit helping farmworkers and the Latino immigrant community in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

Some immigrant farmworkers are getting their children passports. Others are securing power of attorney documents so friends or relatives here can raise their kids after the parents are removed from the country, said Adam Solow, a Collingswood immigration attorney.

“There’s also been an uptick in marriages” between undocumented immigrants and New Jersey citizens, a green card being the prize, he added.

“People are guarding the lives they built to keep them from being destroyed,” Solow concluded.

David, an 80-year-old farmworker who works the fields picking beets, cabbage, and zucchini in Camden County during the summer, tries to keep a low profile to avoid ICE. That’s why he requested, through a Spanish-language translator, that his last name not be used.

To stay safe, David, who has lived alone in New Jersey after leaving a teaching job in Mexico 30 years ago, minimizes his movements.

“Before Trump took office, I would run errands, go to the post office or the dollar store,” he said. But now he tries to go out only at night.

“The first time, Trump wasn’t as bad. But this is the worst it’s been. I live in fear because it would be very hard to return to Mexico, which I don’t know anymore. And I’d be sad to have to leave my friends. They’re my family.”

Lori Talbot, a retired family-practice doctor in Bridgeton, Cumberland County, who has treated undocumented farmworkers in South Jersey for 35 years, said that because they are so “woven into local farming, the economy down here can’t survive without them. And harvest would be a mess of unpicked crops.”

“Farmers have to stand up to this deportation idiocy, or they’ll be in deep trouble.”

Around 495,000 undocumented immigrants live in New Jersey, according to research done for The Inquirer earlier this month by the Center for Migration Studies, a think tank in New York.

Most undocumented immigrants in New Jersey come from Mexico and Central America, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. The majority live in the region year-round, advocates said.

Throughout the United States, around 42% of the estimated 2.4 million people working on farms are “unauthorized immigrants,” according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Economic Policy Institute.

Local advocates said that figure is too low. As many as 70% of farmworkers in South Jersey are undocumented, according to Hurley of CATA.

All told, undocumented immigrants in New Jersey paid $1.3 billion in state and local taxes in 2022, the latest figures available, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington.

Many of the undocumented people who work in New Jersey agriculture live on farms during the growing season, and others travel to work from the city of Camden, said Gabily Gonzalez, founder of Cerrando La Brecha (Bridging the Gap), a South Jersey nonprofit that helps migrants and refugees.

But these days, many Camden commuter-farmers are staying home. “Everyone’s afraid to go to farms to work,” Gonzalez said.

Other South Jersey undocumented farmworkers have year-round jobs in greenhouses at wholesale (also called commercial) nurseries, advocates said.

Cumberland County has several large facilities producing the “lion’s share” of the state’s plants and flowers sold in big box stores, said Timothy Waller, agriculture and natural resources county agent at the Rutgers University Cooperative Extension of Cumberland County.

When the Vegetable Growers Association of New Jersey met at a convention in Atlantic City earlier this month, much of the conversation centered on corn tar spot, and disease control in eggplants.

But in quiet corners, farmers shared worries about deportation.

“There’s genuine concern over this,” said Bruce Phillips, food safety manager at a cranberry operation in Pemberton, Burlington County.

Without enough hands to work the cranberry bogs, the harvesting season will become too long, he said, creating “a looming possibility of spoilage.”

Though a labor vacuum might develop, don’t expect U.S.-born kids to step in, said Harvey Ort, a vegetable farmer from Long Valley, Morris County, adding that there has never been any worry on farms that immigrants were taking American jobs.

“U.S. kids do not want to sweat in a tomato field,” he said. “Ever.”

A Salem County farmer, who asked for anonymity to protect the four undocumented farm managers who have worked for him for 20 years, praised their dedication. “They work year-round and are so good at everything.”

But, he added, more than work binds them: “My kids went to school with their kids. If something happened to my wife, she’d call one of those men’s wife to watch our children before anyone else.”

The farmer pays his inexperienced workers $17.92 an hour; the managers earn $23. “They make life-changing money,” he said. “Where they’re from, they got $12 a day.”

The deportations rile everyone.

“One of the guys came back scared to death because ICE agents were at the Wawa.”

It’s unfair, the farmer argued. “These men do what I do — pay taxes, keep their noses clean, contribute to society. It’s a shame there’s not a way for them to just live and be OK.”