Donald Trump rode to reelection on a campaign packed with racist rhetoric that promised mass deportations of immigrants. So far, Trump has appointed anti-immigrant extremists like Stephen Miller, Thomas Homan and Kristi Noem to top positions in his administration.

The new Trump regime threatens millions of immigrant workers in the U.S., including farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented. Beyond mass deportations and workplace raids, there’s the prospect of regulatory rollbacks around heat and pesticide protections and the ramping up of hyper-exploitative guestworker programs like the H2A program.

At the same time, farmworkers in the U.S. have a proud and defiant organizing tradition, and the entire U.S. food system rests on their labor. Truthout spoke to representatives from three farmworker organizations across the country to get their initial thoughts on the election, the challenges ahead, how they plan to defend their members and communities, and how they are staying hopeful and determined going forward.

Rossy Alfaro is a former dairy worker in Vermont and organizer with Migrant Justice, which organizes dairy farmworkers in Vermont and oversees the worker-driven Milk with Dignity campaign. Jeannie Economos is the longtime pesticide safety and environmental health project coordinator for the Farmworker Association of Florida, which has organized farmworkers for over four decades. Edgar Franks is the political director of Familias Unidas por la Justicia in Washington State, an independent union of primarily Indigenous Mexican farmworkers that formed a decade ago. All three organizations are members of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, a coalition of worker-based organizations in the U.S. and Canada organizing to improve wages and working conditions for workers along the food chain.

Derek Seidman: What are your initial reactions to Trump’s reelection? How will it impact your members and communities?

Rossy Alfaro: The election will of course impact our community and our work. But at the same time, we’ve faced criminalization and discrimination before. Trump’s not the first president to come after our community. We’ve been organizing a long time in Vermont to try to win protections for our rights as immigrants. We won our “No Más Polimigra” campaign that created “fair and impartial” policing policies in Vermont which ensure that local cops aren’t working hand in hand with ICE and Border Patrol. That will be an important protection in the coming years.

Jeannie Economos: In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has pushed through very harsh anti-immigrant legislation in SB 1718 that has affected the state’s entire agricultural workforce. If somebody leaves a job and they’re undocumented, they can’t get hired somewhere with more than 25 employees unless they go through E-verify. This impacts all undocumented workers in Florida. People are very scared that the election result will make things worse.

Someone working in the field is not going to speak up about pesticides or heat when they’re worried about being deported or getting home safely to their children.

Edgar Franks: There was a sense things would not go well for Democrats on election night. When you ignore economic hardships people are facing, no matter what race or gender, people will look for something else. It’s not a huge surprise. When we first formed around a decade ago, Donald Trump was ascending to the presidency, but we were still able to organize and win some victories for farmworkers and immigrants here in Washington. This is a progressive state, but nothing has been given to us. We’ve won overtime rules, heat and smoke rules, and paid rest breaks for farmworkers, but all this was possible only because of strong worker-led organizing and not necessarily because of which party was in power.

Trump has promised mass deportations. He’s trying to stoke fear. How is this impacting farmworkers?

Alfaro: This isn’t the first time that our community has faced the threat of mass........

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