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As the Trump administration's immigration enforcement ramps up, agricultural labor unions say many farmworkers are increasingly afraid to show up to work. Evidence of that is now visible in the sweet cherry orchards of Washington state. Member station KUOW's Monica Nickelsburg talked to cherry-growers and pickers who say halfway through the short season, they don't have enough labor to bring in the harvest.
MONICA NICKELSBURG, BYLINE: Rosa Hernandez is picking Bing cherries at an orchard in Washington's Wenatchee Valley.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHERRIES DROPPING)
NICKELSBURG: She's part of the migrating workforce that follows the cherry season from California to Washington each year, but not this year. Hernandez says many pickers are staying home.
ROSA HERNANDEZ: I noticed that's half of what we usually get. So I noticed that right away.
NICKELSBURG: Cherry-growers have been struggling with a labor shortage for years, but several said this year is unusually bad. They can count on some locals to show up annually, but there aren't enough to bring in all the cherries in the short harvest that runs from June to August. So they rely on workers like Hernandez, and she says that for people who are in the country without legal status...
HERNANDEZ: Traveling is scary, you know, 'cause you can't even drive around without feeling like you're going to get pulled over.
NICKELSBURG: There haven't been high-profile cases of people being detained making the drive north from California to Washington, and no mass arrests have been reported on farms in Washington. But agricultural workers have been spooked by an ICE raid at an Omaha meatpacking plant, another at a New Mexico dairy and reports of farm raids in California.
HERNANDEZ: So yeah, I know a lot. I'm not going to name them, but I know a lot of people that have decided not to come.
NICKELSBURG: The Trump administration has sent mixed messages to farmworkers about whether they'll be the targets of immigration enforcement actions. Last month, the president suggested he might help protect the industry, but soon after that, other members of his administration reaffirmed that anyone without legal status could be arrested and that worksite raids would continue. We reached out to the administration for clarity, and in an emailed statement, the White House said that the president is committed to ensuring farmers have the workforce needed to remain successful, but that there will be no safe harbor for those in the country without documentation.
Meanwhile, in the orchards of Wenatchee, growers say the labor shortage is impacting how many cherries they can harvest.
CARLOS TORRES: We don't know what the outcome is going to be.
NICKELSBURG: Carlos Torres owns PLM Orchards in the Wenatchee Valley. Today, he says he has 35 pickers. Ordinarily, he'd expect to have 60. Torres says the shortage could put him out of business.
TORRES: It would practically cripple the company. All the chemicals are too expensive. Labor is too expensive.
NICKELSBURG: Torres takes out loans each year to cover the costs of maintaining the orchard, and he says he won't be able to pay the bank back if he doesn't get all of his cherries picked.
TORRES: In the past, when we get everything picked, we sometimes break even. Sometimes we have very little profit, but it keeps us going. But if we don't harvest everything, it will put us on the hole.
NICKELSBURG: Torres isn't the only cherry-grower dealing with these problems. Erik Zavala is the director of field staff at Blue Bird. It's a co-op of about 200 fruit-growers throughout the state.
ERIK ZAVALA: Every grower is picking less and less than the normal. One of our biggest workers, he could not pick 100 bins a day when he could have picked 600 bins. I was like, OK, something is wrong here.
NICKELSBURG: Zavala says some of these firms sell to stores like Costco and Walmart and that those retailers set the price of cherries and won't pay more. That means consumers aren't likely to see prices rise, leaving growers to eat the added labor costs. We reached out to the companies to confirm but didn't hear back.
There is a visa program designed to help farmers hire seasonal migrant workers - the H-2A. But growers say rules requiring them to house and transport workers make the program too expensive. Here's Zavala again.
ZAVALA: And it gets to the point that a lot of growers - that's not even an option anymore.
NICKELSBURG: In a statement, the White House said that it has created an Office of Immigration Policy which will help employers access and navigate programs like the H-2A. In Washington, cherry country is also Trump country. Everyone agrees that workers aren't showing up, but a lot of growers don't blame the Trump administration for that. They say it's bad actors on the left creating panic unnecessarily. Here's John Folden. He works with Zavala at the Blue Bird co-op, and he has his own orchard.
JOHN FOLDEN: You see a lot of things in social media - especially social media - about raids here, raids there, coming into orchards, taking people off of ladders, putting them in vans and taking them away. But none of that ever happened.
NICKELSBURG: He acknowledges there may have been a handful of agricultural raids that did happen in other states. But he says for every one of those, there's a hundred examples of a rumor here in Washington that doesn't actually materialize.
FOLDEN: They need to stop with this baloney of ICE is raiding orchards because it's just not happening here in Washington.
NICKELSBURG: While Zavala, Folden and other growers don't blame the Trump administration for the culture of fear keeping their workforces home, they do want something to change. They say they need an affordable program that allows them to bring in the workers they need legally.
For NPR News, I'm Monica Nickelsburg in Wenatchee. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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