As snow fell on a recent Sunday evening, Rev. Luis Barrera Hernandez climbed into his Subaru Forester and drove along winding roads to a Franklin County dairy farm.
Barrera Hernandez was dressed in glowing white vestments and had packed the necessities: a chalice, some candles, a silver crucifix and a handful of communion wafers in a plastic food container. A cupholder beside him held a small plastic bottle with “holy water” imprinted in gold across the front.
Barrera Hernandez, 60, arrived in Richford in 2024 with an assignment from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington to serve as priest in four area churches — and to hold Spanish-language masses for the hundreds of Hispanic farmworkers and their families who live in the area. For a short while he drew many congregants to these special masses. But as immigration enforcement ramped up in early 2025 under the Trump administration, he found himself preaching to empty churches.
“People are afraid to leave the farms because you could run into Border Patrol anywhere up here,” Barrera Hernandez said.
He has resorted to bringing the Mass to them, holding services in barns, mechanical shops, workers’ living rooms and kitchens. In doing so, Barrera Hernandez joins a growing network of mobile health care providers, vendors, drivers and personal shoppers who cater to people who are largely confined to the farms where they live and work.
This system isn’t new: Vermont’s dairy farms have increasingly relied on migrant workers, mainly from Mexico, for more than 20 years. The jobs are attractive in part because housing is provided and the work is year-round rather than seasonal. It’s estimated that about 1,000 migrant farmworkers tend to cows and crops in Vermont, and many have brought family members to live with them. As this workforce has grown, so has its list of basic requirements. Nonprofits, entrepreneurs and the priest help the group meet its needs.
Nowhere is this truer than in rural Franklin County, home to 89 dairy farms and the heart of Vermont’s dairy industry. Here, the air often smells sharply of manure, and hillsides at night are dotted with the lights of milking parlors that run 24-7.
But Franklin County borders Canada, meaning U.S. Border Patrol vehicles marked with their distinctive green stripe are a regular sight. While dairy farms have been largely spared from immigration raids so far, undocumented workers risk an encounter with federal immigration officers any time they leave the farm.
On top of that, the work is demanding, with 12-hour shifts six days a week. Few workers have cars, and because they usually intend to live in Vermont for just a few years, they have less incentive to integrate into the community outside the farm.
“It’s a world apart,” Barrera Hernandez said.
Some locals have spotted opportunities in these realities. A handful of people work full time as personal shoppers for the workers, buying groceries, cellphones, clothes, winter boots — anything they need, for a fee. Others make a living as raiteros — hired drivers who transport workers from place to place.
Vendors from nearby states fill vans with tortillas, Mexican breads, sodas and cookies that workers can’t find in local stores, mimicking the mobile street vendors common in Mexico. One vendor also has a system the workers use to transfer money back home.
Even health care comes to the farms.
In 2010, Bridges to Health formed in response to a need for greater access to health care among migrant farmworkers in Franklin County. The project is part of the University of Vermont Extension’s migrant health programs and has since expanded statewide.
Eight community health workers around the state help farmworkers make medical appointments, navigate health insurance paperwork and get rides to meet with their doctors.
The team has seen a surge in the number of families on farms, which historically attracted almost exclusively single men. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of children served by the team jumped from 33 to 141.
Most of the time, farmworkers must leave the farm to see a doctor, but Bridges to Health helps run an annual vaccination drive that visited 15 farms this fall, according to Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland, the program lead.
“When we see that there are collective needs on a farm, that’s when we work a little bit outside of the system to try to bring health care access to the farms,” Wolcott-MacCausland told a Statehouse committee last month. “They often say, ‘Yeah, there’s no way I would have gone off the farm to do this, but I’m glad that I have that protection.’”
In the spirit of these other service providers, Barrera Hernandez, a native of Colombia, has learned to operate as a kind of church on wheels.
After the Border Patrol in April detained eight Franklin County dairy workers near Berkshire, attendance at his Spanish-language masses dropped off, he said. The arrests sparked fears of a broader crackdown, although it turned out to be a one-time event.
“It’s easier and safer to do the masses here. It’s a benefit for us. We don’t have to put ourselves at risk.”
Agustín
Border Patrol agents were responding to a tip about several men with backpacks who looked like they might have just crossed the border illegally. The men were, in fact, migrant laborers from a nearby farm who had been working in a sugar bush near the border. When one of the men fled toward the farm, agents gave chase and entered a home where they discovered and detained more undocumented workers.
Afterward, one of Barrera Hernandez’s regulars, a farmworker named Agustín, stopped attending church. He shared his fears with Barrera Hernandez, and soon the priest began holding regular services at the farm instead.
“For us it’s easier and safer to do the masses here,” said Agustín, who asked that his full name not be used because he is undocumented. “It’s a benefit for us. We don’t have to put ourselves at risk.”
Agustín, 36, has worked on Vermont farms for more than a decade, he said, although he hopes to return eventually to his home in Veracruz, Mexico. In the meantime, he sends money home to his parents and younger brothers, who depend on him.
“We come here just to work,” he said. “I think anyone who has the opportunity to come here does it to help their family get ahead and have a better life.”
For now, he shares a house on the farm with nine other workers and tends to the dairy cows six days a week from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m.
On that snowy Sunday evening, Barrera Hernandez gathered his parishioners in a cramped meeting room next to a milking parlor. He stood at the head of a long wooden table cluttered with papers and binders, clearing a space where he set down his chalice and crucifix.
Eleven men and women filed into the room and sat around the table in a tight circle. Most were farmworkers, though a Puerto Rican couple had driven up from St. Albans with their year-old baby.
The couple, Wilmary González Alvarado and Jorge Rodriguez Maldonado, attended Barrera Hernandez’s Spanish language masses at churches in Highgate and Enosburg Falls earlier this year. They were excited for an opportunity to worship in Spanish but often found themselves alone in the pews.
“We were really worried because the community was not coming,” said González Alvarado, 36, who works as a cook for Head Start in Burlington.
When the priest began ministering on farms, the couple followed him. In these gatherings, they said, they’ve found a greater sense of community.
The worshippers bundled in winter coats took turns standing to read passages of scripture in Spanish. Barrera Hernandez preached a message of solidarity among the working class. Bouncing her baby on her lap, González Alvarado led the group in song, her voice rising over the hum of the milking parlor fans.
Down the road, the church was empty and dark.
Editor’s note: Interviews with Rev. Luis Barrera Hernandez, Agustín and González Alvarado were conducted in Spanish.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Special Deliveries | As migrants hunker down on farms to avoid Border Patrol, helpers bring them food, services and Holy Communion”
This article appears in Dec 3-9 2025.
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