On September 20, 2023, Rosa Sanchez went to work picking carrots at Grimmway Farms, one of the largest producers of carrots in the world, located in the Bakersfield, California, area of the United States. Unfortunately, she would not last the day. She was fatally struck by a truck in the field. She was 58 years old.
Fellow farm worker Alejandra Montoya saw the accident happen. Montoya said she was told to keep picking carrots as her colleague Sanchez’s lifeless body lay there. For her, that was a reckoning moment.
“I felt a very profound lack of respect for Rosa Sanchez, who had just been killed. They had everyone else literally work around the body. That really emphasised how they really care more about the product than about the workers,” Montoya told Al Jazeera via a translator.
Originally, Montoya was afraid to speak up. She told Al Jazeera that her supervisors would often subtly threaten to turn them into immigration officials if they tried to push for better working conditions.
“They really instil fear in anyone who speaks up. Anyone who doesn’t agree with the way things are, who says things to be better, they’ll tell them like, ‘Hey, you know, you’re undocumented, you shouldn’t say anything’. They’ll just straight up fire them, or people will quit on their own accord because they don’t want any trouble,” she continued.
Over the years, Montoya has worked for Grimmway through various labour contractors, a common practice in the agricultural sector. She was working for Esparza Enterprises at the time of the accident.
Grimmway told Al Jazeera in a statement that “the allegation that Grimmway supervisors and its subcontractors threatened employees based on immigration status is false, and Grimmway has a strict policy prohibiting retaliation against any employee or contract employee that reports suspected issues about working conditions. We are shocked to learn about these false allegations for the first time.”
Esparza Enterprises did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
United Farm Workers (UFW), the organisation that Montoya turned to to see the options she had to speak out about her concerns without risking her livelihood, told Al Jazeera that being on the receiving side of these threats was commonplace for migrant workers.
“It’s the simple fact that a workforce that’s scared of getting deported is one that won’t speak up for higher wages. It’s going to be less willing to unionise. It’s going to be one that might stay quiet when accidents happen,” UFW’s communications director, Antonio De Loera-Brust, told Al Jazeera.
Montoya is now protected from deportation through a programme put in place last year by the Department of Homeland Security for undocumented immigrants who are victims or witnesses of workplace exploitation and allows them to apply for deferred action.
“Employers who abuse their workers often say if you report me, ‘I’ll report you, and you’re the one who will be deported.’ What do we say to that? Not on our watch,” Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, told a crowd at the United Farm Workers annual meeting in Bakersfield, California last month.
“When workers report abuses, their immigration status cannot be weaponised against them,” Su added.
The programme, called Deferred Action Labor Enforcement or DALE, is what keeps Montoya safe from deportation and unafraid to speak up about the poor working conditions.
However, this could be short-lived. The looming potential of a second administration of Republican nominee Donald Trump has raised concerns about the future welfare of immigrant workers in the US.
“There is a sense of fear and terror that I and other workers feel when we hear talks of mass deportations and so on,” Montoya said.
Not only does Trump want to scrap the key migration measures that protect Montoya, but he and his hardline immigration advisers want to bring back policies fostering exploitative workplace practices that disproportionately affect migrant workers.
“It will be increasingly difficult for them to kind of stand up for themselves and speak up out of fear,” Nan Wu, research director for the American Immigration Council, told Al Jazeera.
Return of workplace raids
Trump and his hardline immigration ally Stephen Miller, largely considered the architect of Trump’s nativist immigration policy during his 2017- 2021 term, have said that roundups of migrants at workplaces and other public areas would return.
Some of the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in years took place during Trump’s presidency. In 2019, immigration officials raided seven chicken processing facilities across Mississippi in the largest workplace raid in a decade and arrested 680 people at the meat processing community in Mississippi. Of those, 300 were ultimately released but Trump still touted this as a win. He said it served as “a very good deterrent”.
The Mississippi raid was one of the fourteen workplace ICE raids during Trump’s administration.
Two years later, when Joe Biden became president, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report referred to the practice of workforce raids as a way exploitative employers have used to suppress collective action for better working conditions. DHS then ended their use.
“Bringing back those ICE raids is really draconian. It just has a chilling effect on all kinds of aspects of our society. When we think about things like public safety and healthcare, migrants are less likely to seek help out of fear that their immigration status will be at risk. This is the similar impact,” David Chincanchan, policy director at the Workers Defense Action Fund, told Al Jazeera.
According to reporting from the outlet The Counter, managers at Koch Foods – one of the plants at the centre of the 2019 Mississippi raid – allegedly threatened several female employees at the plant with firing and deportation.
The threats came alongside sexual harassment and racial discrimination allegations against Koch Foods. The plant settled a lawsuit for $3.75m, only a year before the Mississippi raid. At the time, Koch said it did not knowingly hire undocumented workers, which reporting from The Counter disputes.
Koch Foods’s former parent company BC Rogers actively recruited Central American and Caribbean migrants to work in their facilities. The initiative was dubbed “The Hispanic Project”.
The company did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Koch Foods is far from alone. Employers far and wide have used threats of reports to immigration officials to prevent pushes for better working conditions. This includes a construction company in Boston, Massachusetts in 2019 – a move which ultimately led to a lawsuit that forced the company to pay $650,000 in damages.
In another case, a restaurant owner in upstate New York allegedly tipped off immigration officials about the immigration status of a former worker, Xue Hui Zhang. ICE arrested him in the middle of a deposition in which he claimed that the very same employer owed him $200,000 in back wages.
“This kind of a negative pathway of scaring certain populations into taking less is already happening and it would get much, much worse for sure if there were workplace raids,” Saru Jayaraman, founder of One Fair Wage, an advocacy group pushing to raise US wages, told Al Jazeera.
“All the gains that workers, both immigrant and nonimmigrant, have been gaining over the last couple of years, you know, could be lost through this kind of activity,” Jayaraman continued.
While the raids under the Trump administration were some of the biggest in US history, the strategy was not isolated to his time in office.
In 2012, a group of undocumented migrants raised concerns about workplace safety issues and pay discrimination at All Dry Water Damage Experts, a Louisiana company tasked with cleaning up water damage after hurricanes that hit the gulf coast. The company then allegedly reported its own workers to immigration authorities.
Allegations of exploitative, misleading or low pay are a common problem, with 76 percent of immigrant workers in some past surveys reporting that they have been the victims of wage theft and 37 percent reporting earning less than minimum wage.
“All of this just gets so much worse if workers are afraid to speak up,” Jayaraman added.
Trump’s team said it would expedite the deportation process under an outdated law called the Alien Enemies Act which expands the ability to expel foreign nationals from a country that the US is at war with. This would essentially allow the Trump administration to deport people without due process.
The same law was invoked during World War II to imprison Japanese Americans in internment camps.
Trump has previously floated the idea of war in Mexico targeting drug cartels. UFW suggests that even the threat of such policies is enough to suppress workers.
“It is enough to scare a lot of workers into silence, into accepting bad working conditions and accepting unsafe working conditions and lower wages,” UFW’s De Loera-Brust said.
Trump allies cut key worker safeguards
Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill barring cities from crafting their own mandates. The move has been largely seen as political. Texas’s major cities are mostly Democratic and in favour of regulation – a stark contrast to its far-right conservative state government.
The law negated local workplace safety mandates like water breaks that cities like Dallas and Austin required, especially in sectors like construction that have an immigrant-heavy workforce.
Such policies put workers in unsafe conditions. Opponents of the laws say that they further elevate the need for workers to advocate for better working conditions.
“It raises the stakes because people are dying because of dangerous working conditions in Texas,” Chincanchan added.
Yet, the return of ICE raids will make it more risky for immigrant workers to push back against these new measures.
Migrant workers account for a staggering 40 percent of the construction sector’s workforce in the Lone Star State. While the law is in effect, it is being challenged in court on constitutional grounds.
Texas is also one of the most migrant-heavy states in the country. Its undocumented population is estimated at 1.7 million people, 85 percent of whom hail from Mexico and Central America.
This is at a time when Texas leads the country in new home construction and sees record heatwaves regularly. Last year was the second hottest summer on record there and killed more than 300 people.
Chincanchan says harsh immigration policies have deterred people from speaking out.
“They’re staying silent because of the fear of the highest consequences you can think of – being separated from your family and losing your livelihood,” Chincanchan continued.
Abbott’s representatives did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Texas is not alone. In Florida, far-right Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a comparable bill into law which took effect in July and which prevents cities from enacting heat safety regulations.
This year, Florida clocked in its hottest summer on record.
The state did not have any of its own heat regulations on the books, which has shielded businesses from state-level repercussions for heat-related illnesses or deaths on their watch.
In Florida, non-citizen immigrant workers make up 22 percent of the outdoor workforce. That is almost twice as much of the demographic group’s overall share of the workforce.
DeSantis’s office did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
McNeill Labor Management, which provides agricultural workers to clients across Florida, was fined by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) after a migrant worker died from a heatstroke in 2023 but was not subject to any repercussions on the state level. The company has said it would contest the federal fine.
The Department of Labor did not provide Al Jazeera with a statement.
McNeill Labor Management did not respond to a request for comment.
In July, OSHA proposed new rules that would mandate water and rest breaks. If the rule moves forward, it will go into effect in 2025.
If Trump is elected, it is not clear if the rule would stay in place or be enforced. During his term, Trump scaled back workplace safety inspections even as there were more workplace deaths.
“This combination of factors will create situations that will be extremely difficult for the workers to find to seek better working conditions for themselves,” American Immigration Council’s Wu added.
The Trump campaign did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
