As word spread last week that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents had arrested eight migrant workers at Vermont’s largest dairy farm, Maribel’s first reaction was fear that she could be next.
The Mexico City native has worked for three years in a Franklin County milking parlor not far from Pleasant Valley Farms, the Berkshire dairy where border patrol arrested farmworkers on April 21.
“The same thing could happen to us.” Maribel
The arrests did not appear to be part of a broader crackdown, state officials said, but came as federal agents acted on a tip that two men looked out of place in the border community.
Now, Maribel said, many farmworkers are afraid to go out in public, worried that someone might call immigration officials and upend their lives. (Seven Days is not using Maribel’s last name or identifying the dairy where she works because she is undocumented.)
“If somebody sees us and thinks that we’re not somewhere where we’re supposed to be, the same thing could happen to us,” she said through an interpreter last Thursday on Burlington’s Church Street. Despite her anxiety, she found the courage to participate in a protest organized by the advocacy group Migrant Justice.
The arrests have rattled Vermont’s $5.4 billion dairy industry, which relies on about 850 migrant workers to perform some of the most critical and difficult jobs on the state’s 440 remaining dairy farms. An estimated 94 percent of dairies hire migrant workers, according to the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets.
Farm owners facing an acute labor shortage worry that migrant workers spooked by the arrests will either be too afraid to show up for work or will seek jobs in other industries.
Some are too terrified to leave home even to buy food, Maribel said, and are relying on grocery deliveries from friends and supportive community members.
But others, like her, have refused to be forced into hiding. Last Thursday, about 300 migrant farmworkers and supporters took to the streets, demanding they be treated with dignity and calling for the men in custody to be released and returned to their families.
“These arrests motivate us to keep fighting for our rights,” Maribel said.
Her friend Luisa, who is also undocumented, has worked at a large dairy in Franklin County for more than a decade. She remembers the fear that permeated the migrant farmworker community during Trump’s first term. But she refuses to allow the crackdown to force her or her family back into the shadows.
Instead, she donned a black Migrant Justice sweatshirt and marched with hundreds of others in one of the largest protests the group has held in the Queen City.
“We aren’t going to go back to the way things were when we couldn’t leave our homes,” Luisa said through an interpreter.
The marchers called out the names of the farmworkers to make the point that they are not alone. The protest also tapped into outrage over the high-profile detentions of student activists Mohsen Mahdawi and Rumeysa Ozturk, whose detention cases are currently being heard in federal court in Burlington.
One of the marchers, Tunbridge resident Jenn Hayslett, said U.S. immigration laws are being used to instill fear, whether the targets are farmworkers or foreign students.
“I’m here because it’s scary,” Hayslett said. “Everyone deserves due process.”
State officials said they were still trying to understand exactly what triggered the arrests at Pleasant Valley Farms, which is located less than three miles from the U.S.-Canada border. It is owned by Mark and Amanda St. Pierre. Their son Jamie is part of the team that helps manage it alongside his wife, Olympic runner Elle St. Pierre. The 10,000-acre farm is permitted to milk up to 6,500 cows and last year was milking 4,500 head, according to state records. The farm also manages a 150,000-tap sugar bush.
Migrant Justice identified Pleasant Valley’s detained workers as: Jesus Mendez Hernandez, 25; Juan Javier Rodriguez-Gomez, 41; Luis Enrique Gomez-Aguilar, 28; Urillas Sargento, 32; Diblaim Maximo Sargento-Morales, 30; Adrian Zunun-Joachin, 22; Jose Edilberto Molina-Aguilar, 37; and Dani Alvarez-Perez, 22.
The men were being held at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans. They are being represented by Brett Stokes, the director of the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law & Graduate School, who has met with them twice since their arrests.
Soon after the arrests, Gov. Phil Scott put out a statement strongly supportive of the farmworkers, saying: “I have long been clear: migrant workers are an essential part of our communities. They are our neighbors and friends, have kids in our schools, shop at our businesses, and play an important role in our economy and workforce.”
He called on Congress to enact immigration reforms, such as an expansion of the nation’s guest worker program.
But he was also quick to defend the actions of the border patrol agents, arguing that they did nothing wrong. The agents were acting on a tip that two men wearing backpacks had emerged from a wooded area, appearing as if they might have crossed the border illegally, Scott said.
It turned out that the men were “farmworkers who were working in the sugar woods,” Scott said. When agents approached the men, one of them ran toward the farm, which Scott called “the biggest mistake.” Agents gave chase and discovered undocumented workers on the farm, he said.
“At that point they had no choice but to apprehend them,” Scott said. “I think it was unfortunate how it all turned out.”
Scott stressed he had no information about the arrests beyond news accounts but said the agents’ actions seemed consistent with past practice.
“If this had happened four years ago, under the Biden administration, it would have been the same,” Scott said.
Will Lambek, an organizer with Migrant Justice, disagreed. He said he doesn’t doubt the agents were tipped off by what border patrol officials called a “concerned citizen.”
“There are a lot of people in this country right now who have a lot of anti-immigration animus,” Lambek said. “There’s a lot of bigotry and xenophobia out there, and it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if someone driving by saw a couple of brown-skinned people walking down the road or walking across a field and called CBP, making an assumption about their immigration status.”
The bigger problem, according to Lambek, is that agents used the tip as a “legal loophole” to conduct a broader search, turning what may have started as a legitimate investigation into something very different.
The agents chased workers through barns, stormed into their homes, knocked over furniture and dragged them out, Lambek said. That clearly goes well beyond the bounds of what was needed to investigate the tip, he asserted.
“It changes over the course of the action to something that is clearly targeted at rounding up and detaining farmworkers,” he said.
“It seems convenient that a tip about one person becomes eight people involved in a warrantless arrest.” Brett Stokes
Stokes, the Vermont Law School lawyer, said he is eager to get the border patrol’s action reports to better understand how one man running away became a raid on a private business.
“It seems convenient that a tip about one person becomes eight people involved in a warrantless arrest,” Stokes said.
The detained men may have been “collateral damage” in the incident, but that appears to be “straight out of the playbook” of an immigration enforcement strategy designed to sow fear and push legal boundaries, Stokes said.
There has been a surge in cases around the country in which immigration agents use the investigation of a crime as a pretext to conduct “collateral arrests,” he said. Trump’s “border czar” Thomas D. Homan has acknowledged such arrests are part of a broader enforcement strategy in places where local law enforcement refuses to assist in migrant arrests.
Whether the arrests represent a crackdown or not, Stokes said, the detentions clearly differ from the way the men would have been treated in past years.
“What has happened here really is indicative of an escalation in enforcement,” Stokes said.
Before Trump, if border patrol agents arrested farmworkers like these, with no criminal histories or immigration enforcement actions, they probably would have been taken to St. Albans, processed and released, Stokes said.
Instead, they’ve now been jailed for more than a week, with no end in sight, Stokes said. He met with four of the men briefly last Friday. While they seemed happy to be together, Stokes said, he couldn’t give them any firm sense of when they’d be able to return to their farms and their families.
“The best-case scenario for getting them out as soon as possible is two weeks,” Stokes said. “It could be two months.”
In an email to Seven Days, Amanda St. Pierre said the farm was complying with immigration authorities but had not been told why its workers were detained.
“Our employees were hired following the federal and state employment requirements,” she wrote. “We remain supportive of our employees and appreciative of the valuable role they play in our community performing essential work on our farm. We hope this matter is resolved quickly.”
In a recent industry podcast, Jamie St. Pierre said the farm had about 90 employees, roughly 40 percent of who had been “born in other countries.”
State Rep. Richard Nelson (R-Derby) also owns a large northern Vermont dairy farm dependent on undocumented workers. He admires the St. Pierre family and believes they could not have accomplished all they have without great employees, he said.
Nelson agrees with Scott that federal immigration reform is needed but doesn’t see it happening anytime soon.
The people who milk the cows, pick the vegetables and work in the slaughterhouses are essential to the nation’s food system, and anyone who thinks they should be rounded up and sent home is nuts, he said.
“If you think tariffs raised hell with the stock market, when they run out of food in New York City, shit’s gonna hit the fan,” Nelson said.
He considers the undocumented workers on his 2,200-head farm to be family. For now, they all continue to work hard, but many are reluctant to go to the store or even play soccer outdoors, he said.
“The thing that really bothers me is that some of our employees can’t enjoy the life they’ve enjoyed the last four years,” he said.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Sowing Fear | The arrest of migrant workers at Vermont’s largest dairy brings anxiety to a sector already facing an acute labor shortage”
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This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2025.
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