Name: Meet the farmworkers in hiding as crops rot
Uploaded: 2025-08-14T03:51:44.000Z
Duration: 8 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Really, this climate here is best served for cherries.

Are any of them still salvageable or not?

Modal verbs - A2

No, there's not really anything you can do with them at this point.

You've got more than 30 acres of this farm with rotting fruit.

I mean, these are cherries that at one point were pretty appetizing, but right now are more than two weeks past their prime.

It's about a quarter of a million to $300,000 worth of revenue.

Which is one thing, but it's also lost revenue for the workers that would have been able to pick them had they been here.

Oregon farmer Ian Chandler says about half his usual crew didn't show up this season, leaving him scrambling to backfill dozens of positions.

You're calling them, I assume, individually and saying, what's going on?

Well, in the beginning of the season, it coincided, unfortunately, with a lot of really strong immigration enforcement down in Southern California, where our workforce comes from.

And that kind of had a chilling effect on people wanting to move.

While Ian says his workers are hired with what seemed to be a valid ID and work papers, fear of ice raids kept many of them from traveling north this year.

To understand why, we head south to Central California.

So we're hoping that one of those farm working families will actually talk to us here and give us a sense of what life is like in hiding.

I think you're good, no names or anything there.

Behind closed doors, making dinner with her mom, we meet Lisa.

Like every single summer, we will go up there, my parents or myself, we will pick cherries.

But this year, we decided to stay home just to be safe.

Because you're living essentially as though you're going to be targeted at any moment.

Lisa's here under DACA, a program that gives temporary protection to people brought to the U.S. as children.

You can tell they get kind of bored, like cooped up inside, spending hours in front of the TV and on their phones, tossing a Frisbee with himself.

She's afraid of getting picked up by immigration while out, and the family getting separated.

She's even thinking about homeschooling this fall, just to keep them close.

Up there in Oregon, we used to like go to the waterfalls, all those beautiful places that they have.

It was so much fun for our kids and for ourselves too.

Since they're not physically active, my middle child, she was diagnosed with high cholesterol, vitamin D deficiency.

Her husband and dad, undocumented but working to keep money coming in, as they're out.

Every alert from her phone sparks a brief panic.

But it's her mom she thinks about most, still picking crops in her 60s.

Back in 2020 when the whole pandemic happened, my parents were being considered essential workers and now they have to hide.

Those essential workers, they have to stay at home for their safety.

Have you put in your mind that, okay, if I can't leave, or at least I don't feel safe leaving my home, you're rushing to the grocery store just to get back as quickly as you can.

Your kids, you don't feel comfortable leaving.

I mean, they're all in a room watching TV in the middle of the day.

Has there been a point in your mind where you're going to turn to your partner and your parents and say, this is not living.

I told my mom that, and she feels that this is just a phase.

That if we just got to hang in there, be hopeful, and it's going to pass.

Back north in Oregon, farm manager Manuel Nava also noticed several no-shows this year.

Last year, we probably had five families coming from California to do the picking, and this year we missed them.

It's interesting to see how some folks operate differently within that fear.

One woman, 75 years old, and determined to keep working even once the hour has stopped, asking, can I just collect two more buckets?

She says she doesn't find the work too difficult compared to jobs she had in Guatemala.

Workers here earn about $5 a bucket and average anywhere from $15 to $35 an hour.

I think there's a perception that it's under the table, that you've got a big box of cash somewhere and you're paying them.

We hire them just like any other employee.

We have an I-9 and W-4 filled out for every employee.

And we run payroll every week, and they get checks or direct deposit.

All of that is taken out of their checks.

While some may be using false IDs, others here have legal status.

Katie started to post more and more signs making it clear this is private property, this one even requesting that anybody who comes onto property, visitors and vendors, must go through the office here to sign in.

She's done this as a way to reinforce to her workforce that they're in a safe space, to try to protect them and to be a barrier of anyone who might come in and target them.

Manuel spends most mornings on his phone fact-checking rumors of ice raids and calming fears.

He says WhatsApp is just one piece of a growing underground network that many migrant workers rely on.

Hay un post que anda corriendo a través de las redes sociales en el área de Beaverton.

Francisco Aguirre is one of the voices behind those warnings.

And you use this space here to broadcast out for the radio?