Last month, Ian Chandler was ready to start the cherry harvest at his farm. Usually he’d start the season with about 100 workers, many of them Latino or Hispanic migrant workers who live in California. Some are from Oregon and Washington too.

But this year, fewer than half showed up.

“People have been trickling in,” Chandler said. “But in the beginning we had a lot of people who were scared to come up.”

Chandler, who owns and runs a 300-acre cherry and pear orchard with his wife in Wasco County, said the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement efforts are keeping many migrants who usually follow the harvest from making their way north to Oregon and Washington. And it’s not just Chandler. Farmers across the Pacific Northwest are sounding the alarm on a tight labor pool that could put some out of business and leave fruit rotting in the fields.

In June, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents targeted workers picking blueberries and packing produce in California – which has alarmed people.

“And what happens is if our workforce comes from the area where that’s happening, it affects us because we rely on migrant and seasonal farmworkers,” Chandler said.

Some people are taking that risk anyway, said Miguel, a worker who declined to share his last name out of fear he’d be targeted by federal enforcement agents.

Many crews traveled the long distance from central and southern California late at night because it felt safer that way.

“We were nervous we’d get pulled over,” Miguel said in Spanish. “It’s a struggle to find work, so we have to find it wherever we can.”

He’s planning to stay until the end of the harvest season, and will move on to harvest pears. But there’s no telling whether it will be any safer when he heads back south to California.

“Who knows, it depends how things will go down in California,” Miguel said.

Chandler said he’s now up to about 80 workers. But the cherry harvest season is brief, and it has a short shelf life, so cherries need to be picked quickly.

Although he’s got more workers now, Chandler’s behind schedule, and is already at risk of losing 300 tons of cherries that were meant to be turned into brine. Workers were not able to get to that part of the harvest in time, he said, and those cherries are now too sweet.

“It’s no longer viable, so we have to find a secondary market and if we can’t find that secondary market, it’s gonna stay on the tree and it’s gonna be a loss,” Chandler said.

But it’s not just domestic migrant workers from California who are not showing up. Some farmers say seasonal foreign farmworkers they obtained visas for under the federal H-2A agricultural program are getting held up at the border in Mexico too.

That program allows agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to hire temporary foreign farmworkers. Last year, about 4,200 workers obtained H-2A visas to work at Oregon sites, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Ryan Ogburn, the visa services director at the Washington-based Worker and Farmer Labor Association – a group that provides visa application and HR services to farms – said some workers should already be in Oregon or Washington, but they aren’t, because of delays.

“It’s certainly happening,” Ogburn said. “And there’s a ton of different reasons that that can happen.”

He said one reason might be staffing shortages in the U.S. consulate in Tijuana. Usually, Ogburn said, once the federal government goes through an application, they need to schedule an interview with the worker at the consulate office, and they can normally schedule it within a week.

“But recently we’ve had to wait almost three, sometimes even four weeks in the worst case scenarios for employers to be able to schedule their workers for those appointments,” Ogburn said.

Another reason, he said, is visa applications are getting put through what’s called “administrative processing,” which means the federal government needs more information before it can either approve or deny the application.

Ogburn said while the frequency of applications getting flagged doesn’t seem higher compared to other years, some workers who’d normally get visas are now having issues getting approved by the consulate.

“The only thing that we can think of is there’s potentially more scrutiny by the consulates, overall, looking at workers’ applications and previous histories,” he said.

The Trump administration has sent mixed signals on enforcement in industries like agriculture and hospitality. The president ordered a pause on workplace raids in farms and the hospitality industry in June, but very quickly walked back on that order.

Chandler said that’s disruptive to orchards like his, and perhaps not fair.

“It would be pretty hypocritical just to be like, ‘OK we’re good, our farm workers are safe while other people are still getting picked up,’” he said. “What we are living through right now is a result of a failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform. For years, both political parties have said they’re going to do something, and nothing ever happens.”

He said farmers and workers could continue to struggle if nothing changes.

“On a personal level, I’m starting to look for an off-farm job just so I can make sure I can feed my own children,” he said. “I don’t think anybody is against criminals being picked up, but when you see regular people or the little old lady who’s selling tamales out in front of Home Depot getting snatched up, that’s hard to stomach because those are members of our community, and they’re regular people just like us.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/07/08/cherry-harvest-farm-workers-ice-immigration-enforcement-oregon-labor/