Idaho dairies avoid ICE raids, but farmers see no lasting reprieve

H2A program drew four local applicants to 7,500 Idaho farm jobs

TWIN FALLS, Idaho — The floor-to-ceiling windows in Rick Naerebout’s office afford a sweeping view of the Snake River Canyon, the quarter-mile-wide, 500-foot-deep gorge that stunt motorcycle rider Evel Knievel tried to leap in 1974 on a steam-powered rocket. That put Twin Falls on the map in the 1970s. These days, the surrounding fertile river plain anchors a more durable economic engine: Idaho’s multi-billion-dollar dairy industry, which has lifted the state to the rank of fourth-largest milk producer in the country.

From his office, Naerebout can describe the labor foundation of that engine with unusual precision. He estimates that roughly 90 percent of workers at the state’s approximately 350 dairies may not have legal status. “We’re not taking jobs from Americans,” Naerebout, a registered Republican, said. “The jobs are physical in nature and you’re out in the elements. They just don’t appeal to Americans.”

American farmers have largely escaped President Trump’s ongoing, aggressive immigration crackdown. As the ICE sweeps continue, however, farmers here and across the heartland are growing increasingly uneasy because many could not find enough workers even before the recent wave of detentions and deportations. “If we had a concerted effort to have enforcement activities within agriculture, you could really harm our ability to produce food to feed ourselves,” Naerebout said.

In Idaho, immigrants describe a lighter ICE presence than in some blue-state neighbors. 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 NPR conducted with attorneys and immigrant advocates. That partial exemption is visible from the Twin Falls airport.

Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays around noon, 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. On those afternoons, Heather Muth and a small group of immigration-rights activists unfurl a banner facing the tarmac that reads “Human Rights, Not Shuffle Flights.” “The whole purpose of [these flights] is for them to move around so that their attorneys and their families can’t find them,” Muth said.

Using a telescope one afternoon, she counted more than two dozen Idaho detainees, in shackles, being loaded from vans onto an ICE-contracted plane headed to unknown federal detention centers. “It really makes you wonder, what’s going on here and what is this doing to our community,” Muth said.

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 a rural farming region that has relied heavily on immigrant labor since the 1950s.

In nearby Burley, home to milk processing and fertilizer plants, Susan Rios’s 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. Her son-in-law is undocumented, and the family decided to self-deport rather than risk having their two young daughters watch their father detained by federal agents. “They were seeing how people were being detained and they did not want to take that risk,” Rios said. She added that the couple did not want their two young daughters to potentially see their father taken away by federal agents.

But since they left, Rios said, 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 the Trump administration’s sweeps began. But, Rios said, local farms already cannot find enough workers, and the labor shortage is getting worse because of the immigration crackdown. “I tell everyone, this is your opportunity, for all those that say Latinos are taking your jobs, right now, go to a dairy, go to a farm,” Rios said. “I’m sure that you will be hired immediately.”

The data backs her up. Last year, Idaho advertised 7,500 jobs through the temporary farm worker visa program known as H2A. Only four local residents applied. Naerebout said that is despite the fact that dairy jobs in the state pay more than most service jobs in small-town America.

The labor crisis is even more pronounced in dairy because the work is year-round, not seasonal. The H2A program covers seasonal labor only, so the industry is not eligible for those visas and has to rely on migrant labor. “The uneasiness continues to grow,” Naerebout said. “The [workers] see all this activity around them, and it’s not conducive to having your workforce feel welcomed or comfortable.”

Idaho has gone big for Trump in three presidential elections. Naerebout said that for years, multiple administrations — including the current one — have mostly looked the other way when it comes to the dairy business’s mostly migrant workforce. “Where we’re at now is realizing, OK, the federal government understands the world we live in, but the average Republican voter doesn’t,” he said.

There has been only 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. No known large farm or workplace raids have followed.

Nampa-based immigration attorney Brandy Perez attributed that absence to the dairy industry’s political clout in deep-red states like Idaho. “They have the ear of some of our legislators, our governor, and I think it’s because of that that we’ve been able to keep the enforcement at a different level than we’ve seen in some of the other states,” Perez said.

More than a year ago, Trump promised action for farmers and their undocumented workers. “We’re going to have a system of signing them up so they don’t have to go,” Trump pledged in July 2025.

For now, Naerebout said, he is taking the president at his word. “But as quickly as we got into this favorable position with the administration, we could fall out of favor,” he said. “It’s not the most secure place to be.”

Farmers are still waiting for the promised fix from Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress, which is now in recess until after the midterm elections. A GOP-backed bill with bipartisan support that would remove the seasonal requirement for key agricultural visas has gone nowhere.

And yet cows still have to be milked, every day, all year.