In Santa Maria, California, where 80 percent of the resident farm workforce is undocumented, deportation threats are a daily reality. Growers, and the Trump administration, are focused on hiring temporary, H-2A guest workers, which means there are fewer jobs, too.
June 3, 2025
At a protest against immigration detentions in Santa Maria, California, a young woman holds a sign honoring the work of her farmworker parents.
This story was co-published and supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
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This is the second of two articles about the strawberry workers of Santa Maria. Read the first story here. All photos by David Bacon.
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’s birthday, a high school student named Cesar Vasquez walked up the rise. He was surrounded by other young protesters, all from Santa Maria farmworker families, 80 percent of whom are undocumented. 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.
“If we don’t work hard, the supervisors say we will be replaced, they will send in the H-2As.”
“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 are hiring more and more temporary guest workers from the H-2A visa program.
Concepcion Chavez, who went on strike briefly in 2024, described that impact. “The company always keeps them [the H-2 workers] separate from us. If we don’t work hard, the supervisors say we will be replaced, they will send in the H-2As.”
Top: Cesar Vasquez shouts out his poem to the crowd of marchers on March 30. Center: Two young women listen to Vasquez speak at the march. Bottom: At the march, a boy from a Mixteco (Mexican Indigenous) farmworker family with a hand-drawn portrait of Cesar Chavez.
As Vasquez 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 “la migra” on their way to work and anger that wages haven’t gone up despite the sharp rise in rents and grocery bills.
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’s 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 undocumented 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,” she said. “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 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 from Civil Eats 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,” he said. “But they go with the fear of not coming back home to their kids.”
“A lot of people have kids and they’ve been here for 15 or 20 years. This is what people consider home.”
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,” he said. “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 documented to protest on behalf of their undocumented 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 2024 march in Santa Maria, demanding a living wage. One sign reads, “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. These longterm, experienced workers are the lifeblood of agriculture in the Santa Maria Valley.
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 guest 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 (DOL) 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 U.S. is about 2 million, and today, almost a fifth are temporary workers on H-2A visas.
H-2A workers, almost all of whom are young men, are often not treated fairly. They must 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.
An H-2A worker hoists a load of flowers in a field in Lompoc, near Santa Maria.
In some states, the number of H-2A workers now exceeds the number of local workers. In Florida, with its 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 movements within farm groups—who strongly backed Trump’s election—to make it easier for growers to use the H-2A system, including by lowering wages and softening housing requirements. 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 at the time.
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].”
“There is a growing competition between the new migrants (the H-2A) and the old (the settled Mexican families).”
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, for H2-A housing, funds that had been earmarked for year-round farmworker housing.
He also 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 USDA.
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 U.C. 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.
“The H-2A program grows where the strawberry industry is growing,” Lopez says. While the H-2A wage is higher than the state’s minimum wage ($19.97 per hour versus $16.50), 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.
As growers bring in the H-2A workers, Santa Maria farmworkers are feeling the impact–in terms of less work, rising rents, and inadequate wages.
Many local Santa Maria farmworkers, themselves immigrants (the majority undocumented) 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.” That is how the H-2A program is likely to play out in Santa Maria as well, according to Martinez and others.
A worker 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 [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.”
A strawberry picker, her son, 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 $3,000,” explains Francisco Lozano, “but the grower can pay $4,000 or $5,000 and put four people in each bedroom and the living room.”
In 2019, Santa Maria passed an ordinance requiring growers to obtain permits to house H-2A workers in neighborhoods with single-family homes. According to earlier reporting by the Santa Maria Sun, Jason Sharrett, representing the California Strawberry Commission in a city council meeting, called the ordinance unnecessary and “based on erroneous findings.”
Alexandra Allen, another grower, told the Sun she would have to use two units to house 12 workers instead of one, incurring greater costs. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (under the Trump administration) threatened to sue the city for discrimination, and, according to reporting from the Santa Maria Times, the city withdrew the ordinance.
The rising number of H-2A workers means growers don’t have to raise wages to attract workers. 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.”
Last December, according to the Santa Maria Times, MICOP and CAUSE asked Santa Barbara County to consider an ordinance that would set a $26 per hour minimum wage, and increase piece rates per box enough to guarantee that minimum. In response, the Times reported, Claire Wineman, president of Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, told supervisors, “The economic realities do not support any local minimum wage increase, much less $26 per hour.”
“Without fair wages, the farmworkers will remain trapped in a cycle of poverty,” farmworker Reynaldo Marino said at the same hearing. “The real solution is an increase of wages.”
Cesar Vasquez sees workers walking and riding bikes from one of the big H-2A housing complexes a 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,” he says. “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 where many live. Right: the housing complex.
In 2017, the city of Santa Maria filed suit against a local landlord, 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. According to Noozhawk, a Santa Barbara County newspaper, 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 (CRLA) 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.”
The Department of Labor (DOL) 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. However, in 2019, out of 11,472 employers using the H-2A program, the DOL only filed cases of violations against 431 employers, and of them, 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.
In response to an investigation by CalMatters, department spokesperson Pablo Espinoza blamed budget shortfalls for lack of staffing. Nevertheless, he said, “the system seems to be working . . . Nothing is ever perfect.”
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.
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. “Some never spoke to a politician before, but now they’re losing their fear.”
At the March 30 farmworker march in Santa Maria.
July 30, 2025
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