Idaho dairy industry relies on undocumented immigrant labor amid ICE enforcement concerns

TWIN FALLS, Idaho — The floor-to-ceiling windows in Rick Naerebout's office afford a sweeping view of the stunning 500-foot-deep, quarter-mile-wide Snake River Canyon. Squint and you can still see what's left of stunt motorcycle rider Evel Knievel's ramp from his failed 1974 attempt to jump the canyon with a steam-powered rocket on his back.

That put Twin Falls on the map in the 1970s. But these days, Twin, as locals call it, and its surrounding fertile river plain are better known as a national agricultural powerhouse, owing largely to the state's multi-billion-dollar dairy industry.

Today it's also an open secret — even in deeply Republican Idaho — that local farms rely heavily on undocumented immigrant labor. Naerebout estimates some 90% of the workers at the state's some 350 dairies may not have legal status.

"We're not taking jobs from Americans," Naerebout, the CEO of the Idaho Dairymen's Association says.. "The jobs are physical in nature and you're out in the elements. They just don't appeal to Americans."

American farmers have largely escaped President Trump's ongoing, aggressive immigration crackdown. As the ICE sweeps continue, however, farmers here and across the heartland are growing increasingly uneasy because many couldn't find enough workers even before the recent wave of detentions and deportations.

"If we had a concerted effort to have enforcement activities within agriculture, you could really harm our ability to produce food to feed ourselves," Naerebout says.

In Idaho, immigrants describe a lighter ICE presence

Like a lot of rural and Republican-controlled states, Idaho has not seen the level of immigration enforcement as some of its blue state neighbors, according to interviews with attorneys and immigrant advocates.

Still, twice a week, an ICE deportation plane lands at the tiny Twin Falls airport, in a rural area south of the small city surrounded by farm fields a half-hour drive from Interstate 84. On Tuesdays and Thursdays around noon, Heather Muth and a small group of immigration-rights activists unfurl a banner facing the tarmac that reads "Human Rights, Not Shuffle Flights."

"The whole purpose of [these flights] is for them to move around so that their attorneys and their families can't find them," Muth says.

One afternoon, using a telescope, she counted more than two dozen Idaho detainees, in shackles, being loaded from vans onto an ICE-contracted plane, headed to unknown federal detention centers.

"It really makes you wonder, what's going on here and what is this doing to our community," Muth says.

These weekly flights are pretty small. This is no Operation Metro Surge Minneapolis or the MacArthur Park immigration enforcement in Los Angeles. But the sweeps are still casting a chill across this rural farming region that has relied heavily on immigrant labor since the 1950s.

And in nearby Burley, home to milk processing and fertilizer plants, Susan Rios' world has been upended by ICE's crackdown. The 65-year-old farmworker activist and grandmother moved from Arizona to the area as a little girl to pick potatoes. Her daughter and son-in-law, fearing ICE, recently moved to Mexico. The husband is undocumented, so the family decided to self-deport.

"They were seeing how people were being detained and they did not want to take that risk," Rios says. She adds that the couple didn't want their two young daughters to potentially see their father taken away by federal agents.

But since they left, Rios says things have actually been pretty quiet. Nationwide, there have only been a handful of large raids at agricultural facilities in the nearly two years since Trump's sweeps began. Rios says local farms already can't find enough workers, and it's getting worse due to the immigration crackdown.

"I tell everyone, this is your opportunity, for all those that say Latinos are taking your jobs, right now, go to a dairy, go to a farm," Rios says. "I'm sure that you will be hired immediately."

Farmers try but can't find any locals to hire

The data backs that up. Last year, Idaho advertised 7,500 jobs through the temporary farm worker visa program known as H2A.

Only four local residents applied.

Rick Naerebout says that's despite the fact that dairy jobs pay more than most service jobs in small-town America.

The labor crisis is even more pronounced in Idaho's dairy industry — the state is now the fourth-largest milk producer in the U.S. — because the work is year-round, not seasonal. So the industry is not eligible for those coveted temporary H2A visas and has to rely on migrant labor.

"The uneasiness continues to grow," Naerebout says. "The [workers] see all this activity around them, and it's not conducive to having your workforce feel welcomed or comfortable."

Idaho has also gone big for Trump in three presidential elections. Naerebout, a registered Republican, says that for years, multiple administrations — including this one — have mostly looked the other way when it comes to the dairy business's mostly migrant workforce.

"Where we're at now is realizing, OK, the federal government understands the world we live in, but the average Republican voter doesn't," he says.

The dairy industry is flexing its economic muscle, for now

There's only been one known large ICE raid in Idaho since Trump returned to office. It was part of an alleged illegal gambling bust last fall at a horse racing track popular with farmworkers. There haven't been any known large farm or workplace raids here since.

Nampa-based immigration attorney Brandy Perez attributes this to the dairy industry's political clout in deep-red states like Idaho.

"They have the ear of some of our legislators, our governor, and I think it's because of that that we've been able to keep the enforcement at a different level than we've seen in some of the other states," Perez says.

More than a year ago, Trump promised action for farmers and their undocumented workers. "We're going to have a system of signing them up so they don't have to go," Trump pledged in July of 2025.

For now, Naerebout is taking the president at his word.

"But as quickly as we got into this favorable position with the administration, we could fall out of favor," he says. "It's not the most secure place to be."

And they're still waiting for that promised fix from the President and Republican-controlled Congress, which is now in recess until after the midterm elections. A GOP-backed bill with bipartisan support that would remove the seasonal requirement for key agricultural visas has gone nowhere.