Residents of Sackets Harbor, a small Northern New York town that looks at Canada across Lake Ontario, have been reeling since federal immigration enforcement agents raided a dairy farm there last month. Agents detained three students enrolled in the town’s 400-student K-12 school — a third grader, 10th grader and 11th grader — along with their mother.

The raid “shocked” Jaime Cook, the school principal. Cook grew up in California’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley, where many workers are immigrants and circumstances like this were more familiar, she said. “It’s so shocking that it happened here,” she told New York Focus. “We’re not an immigration hub.”

Sackets Harbor may not be an immigration hub, but it is in farm country — and more specifically, dairy country. More than half of the workers on New York’s dairies are foreign-born, some experts estimate.

The dairy industry is responsible for about half of the state’s agricultural output. Nearly 3,000 farms produce more than 16 billion pounds of milk a year — more than most other states. The industry is largely concentrated in Central, Western, and Northern New York, where it’s a major economic force in rural communities.

The raid there has foregrounded a fragile reality, which is that employers in some of the region’s key industries consider immigrant workers essential to their operations, but many are not legally authorized to work. While immigration enforcement has always loomed large over the industry, some farmers are anticipating a heightened threat to their workforces — and therefore to their businesses.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised “mass deportations” of immigrants. His administration has said it will resume immigration raids on workplaces, which were largely halted under the Biden administration, and it has ramped up immigration enforcement in upstate New York in recent weeks.

After spending more than a week in a Texas detention center, the Sackets Harbor children and their mother were released on April 7 without a clear explanation for why they were detained in the first place. Their detention has rocked a small town and school community in a county that is almost entirely represented by Republicans across all levels of government and voted for Trump by large margins in 2024.

School superintendent Jennifer Gaffney said in a statement after their release, “In the midst of this difficult time, the strength, compassion, and resilience of our community have shone through.”

Sackets Harbor is a town of about 1,300 people in the northernmost part of the state. Boats are parked in a marina on Lake Ontario, and Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar” who grew up in the North Country, recently bought a summer home on the water.

Old McDonald’s Farm, an 8,000-acre operation that produces crops like corn and soybeans, beef cattle, and milk from about 1,500 dairy cows, sits on the edge of town. Large signs on the road into town advertise, “If you like animals, you’ll love Old McDonald’s Farm,” which also boasts seasonal activities including a corn maze, a reindeer Christmas village, and a pig race.

Old McDonald’s employs more than 50 workers, and at least some live on the farm in employer-provided housing. That’s where federal immigration enforcement officers showed up in the early morning hours of March 27 with a warrant to arrest a worker charged with distributing child pornography to an undercover law enforcement officer.

The three children and their mother, who works on the farm, along with three others, were swept up in what the agency calls “collateral arrests” — when agents detain people they suspect are undocumented who happen to be present when they show up. The Trump administration has been using the tactic across the country.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions about why the seven individuals were detained, and federal officials have provided conflicting information. Some told local media that the individuals were not part of a criminal investigation and were “awaiting removal proceedings.” Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” said in an interview that the children were being detained as potential witnesses to a crime.

ICE “can really only detain people if they think that person is a flight risk or a danger to ‘persons or property,'” said Amy Belsher, a senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

She said the collateral arrests in this case appeared “unlawful.” (Belsher is not the family’s attorney and commented on publicly available information about the raid.)

ICE has ramped up its operations in Upstate New York in recent weeks, announcing last week that it had “apprehended” 133 undocumented immigrants in Western, Central, and Northern New York. The release said that just 20 of them had criminal charges or convictions, and nine had been previously deported.

The agency has visited other dairy farms recently. And in late March, immigration enforcement agents arrested two people at a dairy farm in Lisbon, a hour-and-a-half drive north from Sackets Harbor. Around the same time, ICE detained nine employees from a lumber mill in the Adirondacks.

In New York, dairy is good business. The state is a nation-leading producer of yogurt, cottage cheese, and other milk products from 630,000 dairy cows.

Milking cows in an industrial dairy is around-the-clock work, grueling and sometimes dangerous. Farms “have a very hard time finding employees” willing to do the job, according to Richard Stup, the director of the Agricultural Workforce Development Program at Cornell University.

As a result, there are more dairy jobs than there are people in the area who want to fill them. Immigrant workers, largely from Mexico and Guatemala, come to New York specifically for those jobs, and often, they stay for years or even for decades, Stup said. And many don’t have legitimate work authorization because there are few paths to obtain it for farm work that is not seasonal.

The owner of Old McDonald’s dairy farm, Ronald Robbins, has not spoken publicly about the raid. He discussed the industry’s reliance on immigrant labor last fall on an episode of a podcast he co-hosts with Jay Matteson, the Jefferson County agricultural coordinator.

On the podcast episode, Robbins said he provides housing, utilities and “in many cases we pay for cable TV” for his workers. “We try to eliminate as much turnover as possible in the dairy operation,” he said. “Longevity of those employees is of the utmost importance.” (His farm did not respond to a request for comment.)

Robbins said that a few employees on the crop — not dairy — part of his farm are working on H-2A visas, a program for seasonal farmworkers that has grown dramatically in recent years.

Dairy farmers have long clamored for the program to be expanded to their industry, which is currently excluded because the jobs are not seasonal.

“We would hope that this focus on immigration and national security could put a focus on the importance of food security, and how having a temporary guest worker program that includes the dairy industry is a better fit,” said Allyson Jones-Brimmer, a vice president at the Northeast Dairy Producers Association in a March interview.

Robbins said on the podcast that he supports a policy like that to make it easier for immigrant workers to receive work authorization for a few years.

Such a proposal, which would have to happen at the federal level, would allow workers to come to the U.S. legally and on a longer-term basis, but provides no path to citizenship and ties them to their employer. Worker advocates have often opposed the idea for these reasons, arguing that it makes workers vulnerable to exploitation when their immigration status is tied to their employers, and the visa status excludes them from key benefits available to other workers, like Social Security.

If raids “become much more widespread … they’re going to find quite a few people who are unauthorized” in the dairies, Stup said. “Especially if it’s concentrated in a small area, then we could have a real problem finding enough workers to get the work done. It could be pretty devastating to the industry pretty quickly.”

On Saturday, upwards of 1,000 people from the town and neighboring ones rallied to demand the children be returned home. The rally was organized by the Jefferson County Democratic Committee, although organizers told New York Focus they did not want the event to be “political.” They said the goal was just to have the family returned home.

The detention of the family from Sackets Harbor prompted a strong local response, in part, according to some community members, because the school and town are so small, and the raid felt unexpected.

Some rally attendees noted that the kids stood out in a school where, according to state data, about 90% of the students are white and only six students across 12 grades are “migrants.”

“I think that there was an understanding that our students were maybe vulnerable, but I don’t think anyone thought this was going to be our reality,” said Jonna St. Croix, a teacher in Sackets Harbor who teaches the two teenage students who were detained. She’s also the president of the local teachers union. “This was shocking for us because, you know, this is a family. These aren’t criminals.”

Protestors marched from the town visitor center to his house, and some people carried signs saying, “Return The Children, Deport Homan.” They said they believed the children had been denied “due process” and lamented a lack of transparency around the situation.

Some were concerned because the family had been attending hearings in their immigration case. “These people were following the rules,” said Dawn Nier, town board member in neighboring Hounsfield. Nier, who went to Sackets Harbor high school herself, is a farmer selling produce and goat’s milk products. With detentions like this one, she worried, “we are not living by the rule of law.”

Others drew a link to local agriculture. Paul Siskind attended the rally from the nearby town of Norwood. He said he was there because, as a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church, he believes in the dignity of all people. “The whole situation with immigrant farmworkers is an open secret,” he said.

For the dairy industry, it is also a stark material fact.

“It’s a choice for the U.S. government at this point,” said Matteson, the Jefferson County Agricultural Coordinator, on the podcast. “Do you want to import your food or do you want to import your labor?”

Robbins, the farm owner, responded: “They can sensationalize this issue all day long, but that’s the reality.”

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This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a non-profit news publication investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/368trn9p