FARMWORKER YOUTH STEP UP TO DEFEND THEIR PARENTS
BY David Bacon (words and photos)
Civil Eats, 5/28/25
In Santa Maria, CA, farmworker youth are protesting deportation threats to their immigrant families. Meanwhile, competition from grower use of the H-2A visa program adds to the pressures on this community.
At a protest against immigration detentions in Santa Maria, CA, a young woman holds a sign honoring the work her parents have done as farmworkers.
This story was co-published and supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. This is the second of two articles about the strawberry workers of Santa Maria. Read the first story here.
Santa Maria's city center, with its gritty mix of old Western-wear stores and chain mall outlets, is the place where the valley's farmworker marches always start or end. A grassy knoll in a small park, at the intersection of Broadway and Main, provides a natural stage for people to talk to a crowd stretching into the parking lot and streets beyond.
This March 30, the day before Cesar Chavez' birthday, a high school student, Cesar Vasquez, walked up the rise, surrounded by other young protesters, all from farmworker families. He turned to face the several hundred marchers who'd paused there, and began reciting a stream of consciousness poem, fierce gestures punctuating his emotion-filled words. The noisy crowd before him grew silent.
"We're meant to work in the fields," he cried out, "[and told,] don't be too loud because then you're seen as just the angry brown kid . . . The system has pushed us onto our knees into the rows of dirt where the berries lie. We are tired of being called essential workers but not even treated as essential humans . . . We are going to do something about it . . . We can no longer be suffocated. It is our time to breathe, our time to rise, our time to fight!"
Brave words, given that he'd helped organize the day's march to counter pervasive fear in Santa Maria of immigration raids and detentions and worry over how growers were hiring more and more workers from the H-2A labor program. As he spoke, the strawberry season was just getting underway-the time of year when people depend on going back to work after months of winter and unemployment. Instead of relief, however, most farmworkers this year have found themselves swinging between fear of being picked up by the migra on their way to work and anger that wages haven't gone up despite the sharp rise in rents and grocery bills.
Cesar Vasquez shouts out his poem to the crowd of marchers on March 30.
Two young women listen to Vasquez speak at the march.
At the march, a boy from a Mixteco farmworker family with a hand-drawn portrait of Cesar Chavez.
Normally, that anger would have resulted in work stoppages. Groups of strawberry pickers often withhold their labor at the beginning of the season to negotiate better piece rates with the Santa Maria Valley's big growers. So far this year, however, there have been no strikes or slowdowns. The number of workers participating in marches like the one on March 30 for Chavez' birthday, and a second on May Day, has dropped from previous years.
Hazel Davalos, co-executive director of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), says her organization has collected reports of about 40 immigrant farmworkers detained in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties since President Trump took office. Of any city, "Santa Maria has been hit the hardest," she says. "Because of our know-your-rights work, it's hard for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents to catch people at home, so they concentrate enforcement in public spaces." After the know-your-rights training, people understood they didn't have to open their doors to ICE agents, so now the agents wait for people to leave home. "And while they have warrants for specific people, they often go beyond those names. In a recent case, when they couldn't find one man, they took his brother. The impact is a day-to-day fear in the community. Schools report children are afraid to come to class."
At the beginning of the march, a volunteer passes out "red cards" - part of a know-your-rights campaign to help immigrants facing immigration enforcement agents.
Francisco Lozano, a longtime activist in the community of Mixteco (Indigenous Mexican) farmworkers here, says, "They follow the cars of individuals they're looking for, but if they don't find the person they'll take some else. They wait outside homes and stop people when they leave to go to work." (ICE has not responded to requests for information on detentions in Santa Maria.)
According to Fernando Martinez, an organizer for the Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project, as the strawberry picking starts, "our people are having to risk going to work, to pay their rent and for their basic needs. But they go with the fear of not coming back home to their kids." That fear can make workers more reluctant to demand higher wages and better conditions. "It especially affects them when employers threaten to call immigration if they start organizing. It's a big fear. No one wants to get sent back to the country they left for a better future. A lot of people have kids and they've been here for 15 or 20 years. This is what people consider home."
One purpose of the marches, therefore, is to push back against panic. This year, the key to their success has been the willingness of children who are not undocumented to protest on behalf of their parents.
On February 18, Vasquez and his friends organized a walkout of 400 students in three high schools, three middle schools and the local Hancock Community College to protest the threat of immigration raids. They demanded a two-mile safe zone around every high school, and even teachers participated. "Some kids marched five miles, for over two hours," he says.
According to Vasquez, over three quarters of the students at Santa Maria High School come from immigrant families, and half have worked in the fields themselves. They were motivated not just by deportation threats, but also by the unrecognized sacrifice of their parents. "For my whole life my mom and dad would leave home at 3 a.m. and get back at 7 p.m.," he says. "They're always working to make ends meet and always stressed out at the end of the month trying to meet the rent."
A farmworker family at a march in Santa Maria in 2025 demanding a living wage. One sign says, "Rent very high. Pay very cheap."
This year there's fresh urgency motivating these young protesters: Those long, exhausting workdays are harder to get. "Many of us have no work, or only get four or five hours before we're sent home," Lozano says. When workers go out to a field to ask a foreman or a labor contractor for a job, he says, they're often turned away. Increasingly, people fear being displaced from jobs they've depended on for years.
Three farmworkers living in Santa Maria walk out of a field, after having been told by the foreman of a crew picking strawberries that there was no work for them.
At the same time, rents are rising and there are fewer available places to live. Both work and housing pressures, say local labor organizers, can be traced to an important element of the administration's immigration policy: increasing the numbers of H-2A workers.
The Rise in H-2A Workers
The number of seasonal workers recruited from Mexico to labor in Santa Maria Valley fields, on temporary H-2A visas, has been growing every year. That increase is part of a national trend. Twenty years ago, the Department of Labor issued 48,336 certifications to growers for workers brought to the United States with H-2A work visas. In 2017, Trump's first year in office, growers received 200,049 certifications, and in Biden's last year, 2024, they received 384,900. The total number of farmworkers in the United States is about 2 million, so today almost a fifth are temporary workers on H-2A visas.
H-2A workers sign contracts for a maximum of 10 months per year, after which they have to return home, usually to Mexico. They can only work for the grower who recruits them, and can be fired for protesting, organizing, or simply working too slowly. Fired workers lose their visas and must leave the country, and then are usually blacklisted by recruiters. This makes them very vulnerable to pressure and illegal conditions. The wages of H-2A workers are set a little above the hourly minimum, in California currently $19.97. 
Farm workers from Mexico transfer broccoli seedlings from a tractor-pulled machine into tubes, which the machine automatically plants into the soil below. A DoL job order for H-2A workers, by labor contractor Cal South Harvesting, says workers "manually load trays of product onto the transplanting machine. While seated at the waist the employees working on the platform manually pull the transplant from their tray. Then one by one the product is placed into a tube to be inserted automatically by the machine into the soil." 
An H-2A worker hoists a load of flowers in a field in Lompoc, near Santa Maria. A DoL job order for H-2A workers, by labor contractor Fresh Harvest, covers workers called " Flower Harvester (Stock and Larkspur flower types)."
In some states, the number of H-2A workers now exceeds the number of local workers. In Florida, with its draconian anti-immigrant and anti-farmworker laws, growers' 47,416 H-2A certifications last year covered over half of the 80,821 people employed on its farms. Georgia's 43,436 certifications were for over three-quarters of its 55,990 farm laborers.
In Santa Barbara County, where Santa Maria is located, and in neighboring San Luis Obispo County, the total number of farmworkers is close to 25,000. The Employer Data Hub of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which verifies employers' visa applications for H-2A workers, lists 29 growers and labor contractors employing a total of 8,140 workers, or at least a quarter of all the farmworkers in the two-county area. This is the highest concentration of H-2A workers in California.
The threats from the Trump administration of increased immigration enforcement have been accompanied by offers to make it easier for growers to use the H-2A system. Even in 2020, in Trump's first term in office, then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue emphasized the government's support for more H-2A workers. "That's what agriculture needs, and that's what we want," he said. In her nomination hearing, Trump's current secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told Congress that she'd modernize the H-2A program to "make sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by immigration enforcement]."
In his last term, Trump froze the wages of H-2A workers for two years, in effect lowering them because Federal regulations would have required increasing them annually. The administration estimated that the move saved growers $170 million each year. In addition, Trump allowed growers to access federal funds earmarked for farmworker housing. He even allowed growers to use, for H-2A workers, the federal labor camps started in the 1930s for housing farmworker families at affordable rents financed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
This December, before Trump took office, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (currently running for governor) asked the president-elect to discard the federal rule that set the minimum wage for H-2A workers in the state. That wage, the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, is set by the Federal government on a state-by-state basis. It is intended to keep the use of the H-2A program from undermining local wages, but they're only slightly above the minimum wage. California's AEWR is $19.97 in 2025, while the state minimum wage is $16.50 per hour. The lowest state AEWR is $14.83, in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana.
Impact on Local Workers
In Santa Maria, the increase in H-2A employment is connected to the growth of the strawberry industry. According to a report by Marcos Lopez, a staff member at the UC Davis Community and Labor Center, over half of the H-2A certifications in California come from the five counties that are the heart of the state's strawberry industry, which produces 84 percent of all strawberries in the country. Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties account for 40 percent of the state's land planted with this crop. After the winter harvest in Mexico winds down, strawberries start coming from the central coast of California, and increasingly from Santa Maria. "It's cheaper to grow there than areas like Oxnard or Watsonville, where there's greater urban wage competition. The H-2A program grows where the strawberry industry is growing," Lopez says.
While the H2-A wage is slightly higher than the state's minimum wage, the productivity of H-2A workers is higher because growers recruit young men, and then require them to work at a fast rate in order to keep their jobs. This is particularly important in strawberries because it is a highly labor-intensive crop.
Martinez thinks that deportations and displacement of longtime local workers are connected to the increase in H-2A workers. "We're concerned that employers will look for ways to replace the workers who are being picked up. Santa Maria is already one of the cities with the highest concentrations of H-2A workers," he says. "They [the Trump administration] plan to relax the restrictions on the use of H-2A workers, and we know their labor rights are violated, whether it's being denied overtime or having to live in bad housing." The loosening of restrictions, Martinez suggests, could make H-2A workers even more attractive to growers.
As growers bring in the H-2A workers, Santa Maria farmworkers are feeling the impact on the amount of work they get, the rising rent they pay, and their inadequate wages. Many local Santa Maria farmworkers, themselves immigrants but who have been living and working in the valley for years, say they are often sent home after working only four or five hours, and that they can't get steady work every day. Since they rely on the strawberry season to save enough to get through the leaner months of winter, the loss of hours can reverberate through the rest of the year.
In a study of the social impact of the H-2A program in Salinas, demographer Rick Mines predicted that "the older settled workers will be getting less work as their younger co-nationals (the H-2A) replace them in the fields." 
Hieronyma Hernandez picks strawberries in a field near Santa Maria.
Mines also looked at housing conditions in Salinas. "There is a growing competition between the new migrants (the H-2A) and the old (the settled Mexican families). This competition affects the availability of housing as the older migrants face higher prices and increased crowding in the apartments where most live."
Sabina Cayetano, a strawberry picker, and her son Aron and other members of her family sleep in one room in their Santa Maria apartment.
Similar pressures exist in Santa Maria. Growers are obligated to provide housing to H-2A workers, and in Santa Maria, in addition to housing those workers in complexes, the growers also rent houses in working-class neighborhoods. That has led to steep rises in rents, as growers outbid residents for leases. "I rent my house for $3000," explains Francisco Lozano, "but the grower can pay $4000 or $5000 and put four people in each bedroom and the living room."
In 2019, when Santa Maria passed an ordinance requiring growers to get permits to house H-2A workers in neighborhoods with single-family homes, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (under the Trump administration) threatened to sue the city for discrimination, and the city withdrew the ordinance.
This house in a Santa Maria neighborhood of family homes was listed as the housing for H-2A farmworkers by La Fuente Farming, Inc. The vans to transport the workers to the fields are parked in front.
The rising number of H-2A workers means growers don't have to compete with each other to attract workers by raising wages as an inducement. As Martinez points out, "The price they're paying per box of berries this year is too low-$2.30, the same as last year and the year before. But the cost of living has gone up a lot, so in effect, wages have gone down."
A Lack of Protections for H2-A Workers
Cesar Vasquez sees workers walking and riding bikes from one of the big H-2A housing complexes at 1318/1324 North Broadway, near his home. He says they've told him that three or four workers sleep in each bedroom, and that the food provided is often bad. "But they're not going to march or protest with us because they know they can be sent back to Mexico any time. I think the companies are just testing how low they can go."
A bus for transporting H-2A guest workers to the fields, in front of the housing complex at 1316/1318 Broadway where many of them live.
The housing complex.
In 2017, the city of Santa Maria filed suit against a local slumlord, Dario Pini, over extreme violations of health and housing codes in hundreds of apartments in eight complexes. One of them was the North Broadway complex. City inspectors cited Pini for "deteriorated concrete walkways, accumulated trash, abandoned inoperable vehicles, plumbing leaks, unpermitted construction work, bedbug infestation, cockroach infestation, lack of hot water, faulty and hazardous electrical systems and broken windows and missing window screens."
The violations of H-2A workers' rights continue. One case, State of California vs. Alco Harvest, claims that thousands of workers were not legally paid. Alco is the largest H-2A employer in the two-county area. (Alco did not respond to requests for comment.)
Corrie Meals, an attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance in Santa Maria, a party to the Alco case, believes that the state's enforcement of the labor rights of H-2A workers is weak. "We try to avoid the Department of Labor," she says, describing CRLA's efforts on behalf of workers, "and there is little effective enforcement from the state housing and employment departments as well."
Weak Federal Support for Local Farmworkers, Too
The Department of Labor is also responsible for enforcing the requirement that growers and contractors try to hire local residents before recruiting H-2A workers, and that they pay local workers at least as much as the imported laborers. But DoL enforcement is ineffective: In 2019, out of 11,472 employers using the H-2A program, the Department of Labor only filed cases of violations against 431, and of them, only 26 were barred from recruiting for three years, with an average fine of $109,098. The state Employment Development Department and DoL are jointly responsible for verifying that employers have made a good-faith effort to recruit local workers, but attorney Meals says they are allowed to simply post jobs on a website.
That lack of enforcement is likely to get worse. Over 2,700 DoL employees, or 20 percent of its workforce, have left the department in the wake of Trump executive orders and job cutting by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. "God only knows how much smaller it will be when the RIFs [reductions in force] are announced," one anonymous agency worker told The Guardian. DoL's new chief of staff, Jihum Han, has threatened criminal charges against any department worker who speaks to the press.
Meanwhile, the California Department of Housing and Community Development has only three inspectors for all employer-provided housing in the state, including that for H-2A workers. In 2022 it failed to issue a single citation for illegal conditions, and issued permits without making inspections.
Karen Ross, Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, was the keynote speaker at the Santa Maria Strawberry Industry Recognition Dinner this year, held at the Fairpark in April and sponsored by the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce. Driscolls, the largest strawberry company in the world, received the Industry Partner of the Year.
Ross expressed concern about federal immigration enforcement policies, and told the grower audience, "We're very hopeful that there will be bipartisan efforts to really focus on making the H-2A program work better."
A 2024 march for higher wages passed in front of the Santa Maria Fairpark, where the strawberry festival was organized by growers to celebrate the beginning of the picking season.
An older indigenous farmworker walks outside the fence around the Fairpark, where the strawberry festival was being celebrated.
In many ways, Santa Maria's farmworkers, both local and H-2A, seem to be on their own. Yet despite the fear generated by immigration detentions, the labor violations, and, for local workers, the lack of work, Martinez believes that this spring's marches have had an impact.
"They're the way to empower our community and make people feel they're not alone," he explains. "We have to encourage them, wherever they are, to continue organizing, to take collective action to protect each other and to stand together. That's how changes are made. It is the only way."
Vasquez also thinks the community's young people are ready. "A lot more kids are rising up to the occasion," he says hopefully. "Some never spoke to a politician before, but now they're losing their fear."
At the March 30 farmworker march in Santa Maria.
