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Dozens of picketers lined the street outside a Hannaford supermarket in Williston on a recent Friday afternoon, holding handmade signs urging shoppers to spend their money elsewhere.
The vibe was part protest, part block party. Dairy farmworkers from across the state took a break from milking duties to join in the daylong picket. Lively cumbia music blared from a speaker. Under a pop-up tent, someone served warm tamales and empanadas.
Along busy Marshall Avenue, the picketers had strung up a makeshift clothesline, and hoodies, T-shirts and jeans — the farmworker uniform — blew ghostlike in the wind. Rubber muck boots, still smeared with cow manure, stood in neat pairs in the grass.
Nearby, a large banner declared: “Hannaford Fails Farmworkers.”
The May Day picket has become a familiar annual event for Migrant Justice, a Burlington nonprofit that advocates for better living and working conditions for the roughly 1,000 migrant workers who labor in Vermont’s dairy industry, most of them undocumented. Organizers capped the event by leading hundreds of protesters on foot to a building nearby that serves as a national intelligence hub for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
As the sun dipped, a former dairy worker from Mexico named Cristian grabbed a bullhorn. Behind him, the ICE building was cordoned off with yellow police tape.
“During these difficult times of attacks from ICE, we’ve demonstrated that as a migrant community, as a working class and as Vermonters, we can resist ICE’s attacks and liberate our detained community members,” he said in Spanish.
The crowd roared, banging on drums and ringing cowbells.
The pivot to the ICE facility reflected Migrant Justice’s latest front: The group has quickly become the public face of resistance in Vermont to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Formed in 2010, Migrant Justice has taken up the mantle with zeal, building a statewide rapid-response network to summon demonstrators quickly to the scenes of ICE enforcement actions, as well as leading rallies and protests to oppose the federal government’s hard-line approach.
Migrant Justice’s leaders say their new, high-profile role is in keeping with their long history of representing migrant workers. But they’ve been buoyed by left-leaning Vermonters hungry for a way to translate their outrage over Trump’s immigration policies into action.
Migrant Justice’s campaigns on behalf of dairy workers have succeeded in turning a once largely invisible workforce into an adept political mover.
In March, the group’s power to mobilize was on full display when ICE agents surrounded a South Burlington home seeking to arrest a man they said had rammed a vehicle into theirs while fleeing capture. After receiving a report on its emergency hotline, Migrant Justice sent out a text blast that helped draw hundreds of supporters to the scene. The chaotic, daylong confrontation was the most high-profile clash so far between federal agents and protesters in Vermont and burnished Migrant Justice’s credentials as a political force.
The group’s recent initiatives are its latest attempts to adapt to shifting circumstances. During the first Trump administration, Migrant Justice sued ICE for targeting its members. The immigration agency agreed in a 2020 settlement to back off, dropping deportation cases against three members and paying them and the organization $100,000.
Its campaigns on behalf of dairy workers have succeeded in turning a once largely invisible workforce into an adept political mover that has helped shape Vermont’s law enforcement policies and brought measurable improvements to the lives of many workers. Yet one reality remains unchanged: Without legal status, these farmworkers are vulnerable to the enforcement priorities of the federal government.
Navigating the latest immigration crackdown and its high-wire stakes could prove as tricky as anything Migrant Justice has confronted in its 16-year history and help define how Vermonters see it during a time freighted with uncertainty. The group will attempt to do so while maintaining its long-standing history of less visible advocacy efforts in the isolated barns and pastures of Vermont’s milk industry.
“What they’re called to do right now is above and beyond anything that we faced,” said Brendan O’Neill, one of Migrant Justice’s founders. “But we faced a lot.”
Born From Tragedy
O’Neill was teaching English to migrant workers on a Charlotte dairy farm in late 2009 when one of his students got a call. On the other end of the line, someone was screaming.
A fellow dairy worker starting his shift had just found the body of José Obeth Santiz Cruz. The 20-year-old from Chiapas, Mexico, had gotten his clothing stuck in a gutter cleaner, a chain-driven machine that scrapes manure from the barn floor, and been strangled to death.
“You could hear the agony and grief coming through the phone,” O’Neill said.
A former Peace Corps volunteer who learned Spanish in Honduras, O’Neill had spent several years teaching English to migrant workers on farms across Vermont and was familiar with many of the hardships they faced.
Workers told him about the isolation, the punishing hours, the debt they still owed to smugglers who helped them cross the southern border.
Migrants from Mexico began arriving to work in Vermont’s dairy industry in noteworthy numbers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, filling a local labor shortage while fleeing economic challenges back home. When O’Neill began meeting them around kitchen tables in bare-bones trailers, most Vermonters knew little about their lives or working conditions.
The death of Santiz Cruz would change that.
In the weeks that followed the fatal accident, O’Neill helped raise money to escort the young man’s remains back to his family in a small village in southern Mexico called San Isidro. There, O’Neill and two activists who joined him discovered a community that had been reshaped by its migratory ties to Vermont.
San Isidro was once a village of coffee farmers, but its main source of income had suffered a severe blow after the 1994 free-trade agreement among the U.S., Mexico and Canada sent coffee prices plummeting. Young people began migrating north in search of better opportunities. In time, money sent home from relatives in Vermont became the villagers’ primary earnings.
O’Neill and his companions used their visit to produce a short documentary called “Silenced Voices,” which they later screened around Vermont to raise awareness about the workers who sustained its dairy industry. At these screenings, they’d pass around a sign-up sheet for people who wanted to get involved.
By the end of the tour, they had a list of nearly 1,000 names, O’Neill said.
“We were building an infrastructure,” he said, “but we didn’t know what we were going to do with it.”
Meanwhile, it became clear that farmworkers needed a way to gather and discuss their shared experiences and challenges — a prospect that hadn’t been possible because they lacked driver’s licenses or cars in which to leave the farm.
O’Neill enlisted a charismatic farmworker named Danilo Lopez and a graduate student from Colombia, Natalia Fajardo, who joined him in visiting farms and inviting workers to attend an asamblea, or assembly, where they could talk with fellow workers over a meal. To transport workers to the gatherings, organizers turned to the list of people who had signed up to help.
These early asambleas, and the conversations they sparked, became the foundation of what would grow into Migrant Justice.
Early Wins
A week after the May Day picket at Hannaford, Enrique Balcazar headed out from his home in Essex to visit some dairy farms.
Balcazar, a Migrant Justice organizer, was dressed in skinny jeans and a black hoodie bearing the org’s logo — an illustration of workers marching against the backdrop of a dairy farm in the mountains. His black hair was neatly slicked back.
Migrant Justice divides the state into regions — such as Addison and Franklin counties, the Northeast Kingdom — and assigns organizers to each. On this day, Balcazar was heading to several farms in Washington County.
“Our job is to build trust,” Balcazar said in Spanish as he drove to the first stop of the day. Like many of Migrant Justice’s leaders, he once worked on dairy farms.
Migrant Justice, which started in a closet at the Vermont Workers’ Center, is now a registered nonprofit with nine employees, five of whom are former farmworkers. It operates out of a cluttered office in downtown Burlington adorned with posters and relics from its many campaigns over the years. Its board of directors includes state legislators, immigration lawyers and university professors, who say their role is mostly symbolic.
The true heart of the organization is its farmworker coordinating committee — or “coco,” for short — a group of about eight current and former farmworkers who meet several times a month to shape the org’s work.
“The staff is responsible for putting into place the vision that comes from the base itself,” said Will Lambek, a Migrant Justice spokesperson who’s been with the organization since 2016 and often interprets for his Spanish-speaking colleagues during rallies and legislative hearings.
Balcazar is one of Migrant Justice’s longest-serving leaders. His life in Vermont began at age 17, when, in 2011, he left his village in Tabasco, a state in southern Mexico, to join his father milking cows in Addison County.
“That was never my dream,” Balcazar said. He wanted to study at a Mexican university and passed his entrance exams. But when it became clear he couldn’t afford the living expenses, his dad invited him to come to Vermont. The teen planned to stay for a year or two, save some money, and then return home.
Things didn’t turn out that way. Balcazar found dairy work grueling. On one farm, he milked cows for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. He lost weight and was sleep-deprived. He had no sense of the world beyond the farm.
“I saw my dreams being cut short,” he said. “I realized that one year wouldn’t be enough. We still had debts from the border crossing. Nothing turned out the way we envisioned.”
Several months into this new reality, a Migrant Justice organizer came by the farm where he worked and invited Balcazar to one of the earliest farmworker assemblies, at Middlebury College.
His father warned that leaving the farm could be dangerous, but Balcazar went anyway. When he walked into the meeting room, he recognized two friends from his hometown in Mexico. Unbeknownst to him, they, too, were working on dairy farms in Vermont.
“It opened my eyes to the fact that there were other workers facing similar challenges, not just me,” said Balcazar, now 33.
At the time, Migrant Justice was working on its first major campaign, for driver’s privilege cards that would allow undocumented workers to drive legally in Vermont. The migrants framed it as a human rights issue: They deserved freedom of movement. Balcazar dove in.
In 2012, he and his peers began to testify at the Statehouse. Migrant farmworkers filled committee rooms to share their experiences, bringing lawmakers face-to-face with this mostly unseen workforce for the first time.
So many people showed up to testify one day that the hearing was moved to a bigger room, O’Neill remembered.
“In that room, you have the stench of the dairy farm, the reality of folks coming in with muddy boots between shifts, and they’re taking time to share their story,” he said.
Farm owners also testified on their workers’ behalf, at times unexpectedly.
“You’d have somebody who, judging just on the way the person looked, you would think, Maybe this guy is not going to be pro-undocumented labor,” recalled Sen. Phil Baruth (D/P-Chittenden-Central), who sponsored the driver bill. “Those farmers would give these short but impassioned speeches about how their farm would go under if they didn’t have this workforce.”
Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in 2013 to create the driver’s privilege card program. It was Balcazar’s first taste of successful organizing, and he was hooked.
Another major victory came in 2014, when the legislature passed a bill directing all Vermont law enforcement agencies to adopt a policy by 2016 that bars them from collaborating with federal immigration agents in most cases. Migrant Justice organizers were heavily involved in drafting the so-called Fair and Impartial Policing Policy that exists today.
That campaign followed the 2011 detention of Lopez, Migrant Justice’s first prominent farmworker leader, who had been a passenger in a vehicle that was pulled over by Vermont State Police for speeding. When Lopez couldn’t produce identification showing he was in the country legally, troopers turned him over to U.S. Border Patrol. He was released hours later following protests outside the Richford Border Patrol station.
‘I Was Scared for a Long Time’
In March 2017, a couple of months after Trump assumed the presidency for the first time, Balcazar was driving home from the Migrant Justice office in Burlington when he noticed he was being followed.
Federal immigration agents surrounded his car and ordered him out. He was detained, along with his partner at the time, Zully Palacios, a migrant from Peru.
The Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles had shared with ICE Balcazar’s license plate number and application for a driver’s privilege card — using the same program he had helped create to aid in his detention.
The arrests of the two prominent Migrant Justice activists sparked protests across the state. After 11 days, an immigration judge released them on bond pending deportation proceedings.
The following year, Migrant Justice and three of its members, including Balcazar, sued the federal government, alleging that ICE had targeted them for their activism in violation of the First Amendment. They also sued the Vermont DMV for illegally sharing information with ICE.
With representation from the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, they alleged a yearslong campaign of retaliation starting under the Obama administration in 2016 that led to the detentions of 20 of the group’s active members, most of whom were ultimately deported.
I was scared to go to farms. I felt like I was being followed.
Enrique Balcazar
ICE and Migrant Justice settled in 2020, and while the feds did not admit wrongdoing, they paid the plaintiffs $100,000 and agreed to delay deportation proceedings against Balcazar and the two others for five years.
“I was scared for a long time,” Balcazar said. “I was scared to go to farms. I felt like I was being followed.”
He’s now been in the U.S. about as long as he ever lived in Mexico. And he has continued to visit farms, even after Trump returned to office last year promising mass deportations.
“We keep going, because that’s where our community is,” he said. “They’re the ones who most need us.”
On the Farm
Balcazar pulled into the driveway of a dairy farm near Montpelier and parked outside an A-frame house with wooden shingles. Steps away was a long barn, where hundreds of cows awaited milking.
He stepped out of his car and knocked on the door. No answer. Cracking it open, he called inside; the house was quiet. Another worker in a jumpsuit and boots caked in manure walked by and greeted Balcazar in Spanish.
“He’s probably asleep,” he said of the man Balcazar was looking for. He works the night shift, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. It was early afternoon.
A few minutes later, Enrique Salazar emerged, groggy and apologetic, and welcomed Balcazar inside. They sat at a cluttered kitchen table in the living room.
“I just wanted to check in on how you’re doing after the May 1 march and catch up a little,” Balcazar said.
Salazar, 28, has been involved with Migrant Justice since he migrated here from the southern Mexico state of Chiapas more than three years ago. On May 1, he used his day off to join the march at Hannaford, holding aloft a banner that said “Human Rights” in English and Spanish.
Like most migrant workers, he plans to live in the U.S. only temporarily, until he finishes paying for a house that’s under construction back home and saves enough to live on comfortably. The conditions on this farm aren’t bad, Salazar said — his bosses treat him well and provide decent housing — but the grueling schedule and distance from family make it unsustainable for the long term.
He’s found meaning outside his milking shifts by traveling to the Statehouse to support various causes. Last year, he showed up to urge lawmakers to pass a bill that would make it illegal to discriminate against renters based on their immigration status. The bill was approved and signed into law.
“Maybe no one will remember I was there,” Salazar said. “But I’ll be glad to be back in Mexico and be able to say I was part of that.”
Balcazar was visiting on this day to invite Salazar to take the next leap: How would he feel about speaking at an event? Salazar said he liked being part of the rallies, but public speaking made him nervous. Then Balcazar made his next pitch: Would Salazar be interested in joining the agenda-setting coco?
Salazar said he would, but his night shift schedule conflicted with the evening meetings.
Given all the obstacles, it’s perhaps surprising that farmworkers have managed to organize as effectively as they have in Vermont.
Cows have to be milked around the clock, and that leaves little time or energy for anything outside of work. The language barrier makes communicating the migrants’ experiences difficult, and ever present is a fear of drawing attention that could jeopardize their ability to stay in the U.S.
On top of that, they must believe that the plodding pace of political organizing is worthwhile, even if they may return to Mexico before seeing any benefits themselves.
Balcazar said goodbye and hopped back in his car to drive 45 minutes to the next farm, where he’d heard that a new worker had recently arrived.
He pulled up to a beige trailer in a field that houses five workers and knocked on the door.
A young man peeked out and let him in. The trailer was sparsely furnished, its only decorative flourish a 2025 Migrant Justice calendar on the wall that depicted picketers outside a Hannaford. Boxes of empty Corona bottles were stacked in a corner. The faint smell of manure clung to everything.
Balcazar pulled up a chair in the living room, where another worker named Clemente Cordova Ulloa, 49, sat in a recliner facing a TV.
Cordova Ulloa is known as a huesero, or traditional bone doctor, in the farmworker community. Workers come to him for help with injuries to their backs, hips and knees, often sustained while playing soccer, he said.
Five years into his third stint in Vermont, he told Balcazar, he had just bought his plane ticket to return to Mexico, hopefully for good. He last saw his son, now 6, as a baby and had grown tired of watching the child grow up through his phone screen.
Cordova Ulloa said conditions for migrants felt safer now than when he first came in 2011, a time when he and his housemates kept their shades drawn at all times and avoided even going out on their porch. But the freedom of home beckoned.
“It’s a country of opportunities,” he said of the U.S., “but it comes with consequences. You reach a point where it’s more important to be with your family.”
Pushing for Progress
Before the tumult of the current fight against mass deportations, Migrant Justice’s most visible work aimed to improve conditions on dairy farms by putting public pressure on the companies that buy Vermont milk.
In 2017, it won a major victory when Ben & Jerry’s became the first company to sign on to its Milk With Dignity program, which enforces a set of minimum standards at farms that supply its milk. Adapted from a program developed by tomato pickers in Florida, Milk With Dignity seeks to put the onus on large corporations to pay for improved labor conditions, rather than on the individual farmers.
In exchange for increasing wages and other benefits, Ben & Jerry’s pays farmers a premium for their milk. In return, the thinking goes, participating companies stand to gain a measure of public goodwill.
The program, which is overseen by a separate nonprofit, emerged as a way to get around the legal limitations of regulating farms, which are “treated in effect as small sovereign states,” Sen. Baruth said. In Vermont, there’s no government oversight of housing or workplace injuries or deaths on most dairy farms. And federal labor law exempts agricultural workers from protections such as minimum wage and overtime pay.
As of two years ago, 42 farms employing more than 250 workers in Vermont and New York were part of the program, accounting for about a fifth of Vermont’s dairy production, according to Milk With Dignity’s most recent annual report.
The program guarantees that workers earn the state minimum wage of $14.42, as well as paid vacation and sick days. It regularly inspects farmworker housing and conducts audits of farm policies, issuing corrective plans when standards aren’t met. And a 24-7 hotline for complaints is available to workers and farmers.
But since the initial win with Ben & Jerry’s, expanding the program has proven difficult. Seven years of pressure on Hannaford, another major purchaser of Vermont milk, has not succeeded in bringing the company on board.
And some feel that Migrant Justice’s tactics unfairly disparage farmers and misrepresent conditions on Vermont farms, the majority of which are small, family-owned operations.
One Franklin County farmer who has participated in Milk With Dignity for five years said she finds Migrant Justice’s depictions of inhumane conditions to be insulting and inaccurate. Seven Days agreed not to name the farmer because she signed a legally binding “non-disparagement” agreement as part of the program’s terms.
The farmer acknowledged the benefits she gains from the program: the 32-cent premium she receives per 100 pounds of milk adds an extra $4,000 or so in monthly income that she puts toward paying her 11 workers a competitive wage. Her milkers make $18 an hour, she said, plus housing and utilities.
She also received a grant through the program to help build her workers a new, energy-efficient house.
But she takes issue with the Migrant Justice campaign’s portrayal of dairy farmers as exploitative and said the regular audits and corrective plans feel at times like overreach. Abandoning the initiative, however, would mean losing the premium and giving up the added financial benefits that come with being part of Ben & Jerry’s “Caring Dairy” program.
“To walk away would be to walk away from something that pretty well could be holding your head above water,” she said.
The program is supposed to have a working group in which farmers and workers can voice their concerns about the program, but she said it has yet to meet regularly in the years she’s been involved.
In February, Amelia Rodgers-Jones took over as executive director of the nonprofit Milk With Dignity Standards Council, which oversees the program and is independent from Migrant Justice. Almost the entire five-person staff turned over in the past few years, Rodgers-Jones said, but she’s working to bring back the working group. She is sensitive to farmers’ concerns.
“They are really economically in a tough spot,” she said. “It’s really important to give credit to farmers who comply with some of our standards, which are not small” and for the council to recognize that “the power of our program is the premium farmers get.”
Workers say the program has led to measurable improvements.
When Maribel, who asked to be identified only by her first name, began milking cows on a Franklin County dairy farm in 2022, she earned $11 an hour; then her farm joined Milk With Dignity. When her bosses didn’t raise workers’ salary to the required baseline for months after, workers made a complaint on the program’s hotline and received close to $10,000 in back pay, she said.
Now Maribel, 39, is a member of Migrant Justice’s coordinating committee and is pushing for other farms to sign on.
“The reality is that many farms are not paying even minimum wage,” she said. “The housing conditions, if you visit farm by farm like we have, you’ll discover how people are truly living.”
To make the case for Milk With Dignity’s impact, Migrant Justice has surveyed workers on farms outside the program. In 2024, nearly nine in 10 of the 212 surveyed workers on those farms were making less than the state’s minimum wage, then $13.67. Median pay was $11.67.
Richard Nelson runs one of the state’s largest dairy farms, with 2,000 cows and about 36 employees, including migrant workers. He grew up on the Irasburg farm, which his father started more than 60 years ago with a herd of eight cows. A state representative for Orleans County since 2025, Nelson identifies as a “Vermont Republican.” (He voted for presidential candidate Nikki Haley.)
In 2024, lawmakers convened a study committee to consider the effects of eliminating labor law exemptions for agricultural workers, which would make them eligible for minimum wage, overtime pay and collective bargaining rights. Migrant Justice advocated in favor. Nelson was “vehemently opposed,” he said.
“Truth be told, we cannot afford to pay overtime,” he said in a recent interview while planting ornamental corn on his farm.
But he disputed the idea that farmworkers commonly earn below minimum wage. His milkers make $16 an hour plus housing, he said. He’s employed some for more than 10 years.
“You don’t get that kind of loyalty and devotion without a partnership going both ways,” he said. “We found out a long time ago that to close the revolving door, you give ’em a great place to work, treat ’em with respect and give ’em housing that they like.”
Nelson said he is not part of Milk With Dignity and doesn’t approve of Migrant Justice’s pressure campaign on Hannaford. But he has turned to the group for help before. When several of his employees were detained during the Obama administration, Migrant Justice rallied for their release. The workers ultimately returned to the farm.
“I don’t want to belittle what they do,” Nelson said of Migrant Justice. “I know that they have really helped a lot of these people. I don’t agree with everything they do, but maybe I’m not as frustrated as they are yet.”
Rapid Response
Far from any dairy farms, in a windowless meeting room at Fletcher Free Library in downtown Burlington, about 40 people gathered recently for a training session on how to respond urgently to reports of ICE activity.
The attendees, an eclectic mix ranging from black-clad college students to silver-haired retirees, sat facing a projector screen at the front of the room. Once all the chairs were occupied, new arrivals sat cross-legged on the floor.
The training session was one of dozens Migrant Justice has hosted over the past year and a half to protect community members who could be in danger of detention and harness the widespread anger over the Trump administration’s policies.
Interest in the effort skyrocketed in January, after federal agents in Minneapolis shot and killed two U.S. citizens during separate immigration operations there. So many people tried to join an online Migrant Justice training a few weeks later that it crashed the organizer’s computer. Three hundred and fifty people attended.
The trainings, which have taken place all over the state, have enabled Migrant Justice to build a vast network of supporters who are primed to show up, when called, to the scene of immigration enforcement and trained to report sightings of immigration agents in their neighborhoods.
About 3,500 people are now signed up for text alerts similar to the one that Migrant Justice sent on March 11 to summon people to the ICE action on South Burlington’s Dorset Street. Although that incident escalated into a violent clash that captured broad media attention, others have ended more quietly.
Two days before the Dorset Street raid, for example, Migrant Justice sent a text blast urging people to show up at an apartment complex in Burlington where ICE agents had been spotted outside. Within minutes, dozens of people arrived, creating a human chain around the building. The federal agents left a short time later, and no one was detained, according to Migrant Justice.
One of those leading the library training was a new recruit, who spent nearly all day on Dorset Street after hearing about the ICE action there. He signed up to volunteer with Migrant Justice after that.
He was joined by another Migrant Justice organizer, Rachel Elliott, who usually leads the training. They gave tips and general information on immigration enforcement, such as the difference between ICE and Border Patrol, while attendees scribbled in notebooks or typed notes on their phones.
“Detentions happen fast,” Elliott said. “Time is of the essence.”
They instructed the group to alert Migrant Justice to any ICE activity through its emergency hotline and warned of the risks of spreading unconfirmed rumors, which can sow panic for weeks.
Though it hasn’t always been so formalized, Migrant Justice has been using rapid response as a tactic since its early days. In 2011, after Lopez, the Migrant Justice leader, was detained, the group called supporters to the Vermont State Police barracks, where activists linked arms and stood in front of the Border Patrol vehicle in which he was being held.
Photos from that day evoke the March 11 ICE raid — specifically the moment when protesters linked arms in an attempt to prevent ICE agents from driving away with three detainees.
“One person can’t do a lot,” Elliott told the group, “but 1,000 can do a whole lot more.”
They ended the presentation with a slide of a QR code that linked to an online sign-up sheet. Dozens of phone screens lit up as a new cohort of rapid responders signed on.
Back to the Future
The wave of immigration detentions and the public outrage they’ve sparked across the state have also produced a significant spike in donations to Migrant Justice. The group has been the beneficiary of efforts large and small, from bake sales to fundraising concerts to individuals dropping by the office to hand off a check.
The group would not detail the newest donations except to say that it now gets most of its funding from individual donors, plus some grants. Its most recent tax filing shows that it brought in $739,377 in 2024. Its staff has grown from four to nine employees since 2017, and the team is starting to consider moving to a new office.
“We’re fortunate to have the financial stability to feel like we can look into the future,” said Lambek, a spokesperson for the group. But leaders are aware that donations can fluctuate with political shifts: The first Trump administration produced a bump in giving that faded under president Joe Biden.
The group is also responding to changes in migration to Vermont. During the Biden years, a new population of Latin American asylum seekers settled in Chittenden County. Migrant Justice now has an organizer devoted to the region. And it is looking to expand its organizing efforts to industries beyond dairy, such as roofing and construction, hospitality, and health care.
But that won’t happen overnight. In early 2025, for example, after Vermont Construction Company was cited for housing its migrant roofers in hazardous conditions, Migrant Justice announced an agreement with the company that would adapt the Milk With Dignity model to the construction industry. “Building Dignity,” as it’s called, has been in the works for more than a year but is not yet active.
Without legal status, these farmworkers are vulnerable to the enforcement priorities of the federal government.
Although overall immigration detentions in Vermont have risen significantly, according to a tally by Migrant Justice, there’s no evidence that the group’s members or farmworkers as a whole have been targeted.
But in late March, a longtime Migrant Justice leader, José Ignacio “Nacho” De La Cruz, was arrested by federal agents on his way to work. De La Cruz is charged with helping smuggle migrants into the U.S. for payment, as well as fraudulently procuring driver’s privilege cards for people outside of Vermont. He has pleaded not guilty.
The charges, which allege that De La Cruz exploited a program Migrant Justice helped create, pose a potential risk for how the group is viewed by the public and state leaders.
Lambek has said neither Migrant Justice “nor anybody acting on behalf of the organization” was ever involved in “improperly assisting anybody with obtaining Vermont driver’s privilege cards or facilitating unlawful entry into the country for profit.”
Sen. Baruth, who sponsored the driver bill and has worked with Migrant Justice on other legislation, said he does not know the details of De La Cruz’s case but doubts that the group knew of any illegal activity or would have taken part.
“It would stand to ruin everything they spent their lives building,” he said.
Some of the group’s rituals go on as they always have.
On Saturday night, several dozen farmworkers gathered in St. Albans for one of Migrant Justice’s periodic asambleas. Men and women from across Franklin County filled a community hall, some fresh off 12-hour shifts in the milking parlor. Many were driven there by a team of volunteers.
Sitting at folding tables arranged in a horseshoe, the migrants chatted quietly over ribs, rice and potato tacos, while ranchera music played from a speaker. Children raced around the room, playing tag, and parents bounced babies on their hips.
After their meal, they took turns standing to introduce themselves. Then they closed the door to outsiders and got down to the unglamorous business of organizing for change. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “From Farm to Front Line | Migrant Justice formed to improve conditions for undocumented farmworkers. Now it’s leading Vermont’s resistance to a federal immigration crackdown.”
This article appears in May 27 • 2026.
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