Targets on Their Backs … and Ours? Reporting on Immigrant Farmworkers

Relevant sources seemed to shy away from speaking to the author about ICE’s presence in California. Photo: usicegov via Flickr Creative Commons (United States government work).

Feature: Targets on Their Backs … and Ours? Reporting on Immigrant Farmworkers

By Anahita Banerjee

When I first decided to write an article about immigration enforcement and water access in California, I didn’t expect to be making revelations about the reality of journalism in the United States today. And I definitely didn’t expect one of the biggest hurdles to be, not my lack of experience, but the color of my skin.

So naturally, I plunged into it, with all the naivety that comes with writing your third story ever.

I knew that the agricultural heartlands of California — the Central Valley and Central Coast — grapple with notoriously polluted groundwater due to decades of heavy pesticide and fertilizer application. This bodes ill for the health of 1.3 million Californians who rely on private domestic wells because of the lack of safe piped water infrastructure in rural areas of the state. ​​Many of these households resort to purchasing bottled water instead, either by traveling miles to the nearest vendor or enrolling in a state-sponsored program.

However, I was also aware that contaminated water wasn’t the primary threat anymore for nearly 800,000 California farmworkers, 88% of whom are immigrants.

 

Immigrant California farmworkers

have been subjected to a regime of

terror under the Trump administration.

 

Despite producing over 25% of the nation’s food, immigrant California farmworkers have been subjected to a regime of terror under the Trump administration, primarily at the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These federal agents have been given the green light by both President Donald Trump and the U.S. Supreme Court (may require subscription) to stop, detain and deport individuals at a breakneck pace, often by profiling them using race, occupation or accent.

As a result, many immigrant workers in California are afraid to leave home — and as I would come to learn, not even to secure the clean water vital to their health.

 

Afraid to speak

I sent my inquiry emails and made all the cold calls.

It’s not unusual for people to ignore or decline requests from journalists. But there comes a point where even the greenest of reporters realizes something is up. From well-established organizations to personal connections, a plethora of relevant sources seemed to shy away from speaking to me about ICE’s presence in California.

Only one organization was willing to give me an interview: Community Water Center, a public interest group with two decades of experience in rural California.

In addition to providing advocacy services, Community Water Center is also one of the state-sponsored organizations that administers a free bottled water program, delivering water to the doorsteps of affected households.

Yet despite the deliveries being made by trusted advocates, I learned that enrollment numbers had dropped — people were scared to open their front doors and share their identifying information.

I also spoke with a program director at the UC Merced Community and Labor Center about employer retaliation threats that prevent farmworkers from addressing poor water facilities at their workplaces.

 

Safety concerns in the field

I wrote up my draft and sent it to my editor, Keith Schneider, at Circle of Blue. He replied, saying that the story was "screaming" for an I-was-there angle and a firsthand perspective from an agricultural worker — in other words, field reporting.

As I evaluated my options with colleagues, friends and family, a pattern of concern emerged.

 

Field reporting for this story would entail

going door to door in rural communities

or hovering around agricultural

work sites — ICE’s hunting grounds.

 

Field reporting for this story would entail going door to door in rural communities or hovering around agricultural work sites — ICE’s hunting grounds. I would be stumbling around in the dark, trying my luck in unfamiliar towns and in a climate of fear under which people are unlikely to speak to journalists.

As my friends from rural California pointed out, stumbling in the dark also would leave me vulnerable. All it would take to escalate the situation would be one phone call from a suspicious onlooker or one coincidental run-in with ICE.

This was off the back of the fatal raids ICE had conducted in Santa Barbara County and Ventura County just weeks earlier — very close to where I grew up and where I would be reporting from.

I started weighing the odds: If I had my U.S. passport with me, would federal agents let me be? Or would proof of my citizenship still fail to protect me in the face of my dark hair and brown skin, especially if the agents in question were hostile toward the topic I was reporting on? Would I be imperiling people close to me who do not have my American accent or birth certificate?

For the first time, I felt professionally limited by my ethnic appearance in the country I have always called home.

And then there was the question of safety for the workers I would be attempting to interview. Could they be inadvertently caught up in an encounter with ICE because of the attention I would draw? Would their employers fire or report them if they found out their employees were speaking with a journalist? Would anyone even agree to speak to me at all?

 

Unprecedented times for journalism

I emailed Keith with these concerns, concluding with my decision to not attempt a field reporting trip. He immediately replied with “equal measures of concern and bewilderment about what we're becoming as a nation.”

Keith and the team at Circle of Blue were very supportive of my backup plan: interviewing an impacted agricultural worker through a trusted organization.

Once again, it was Community Water Center that stepped up. I sent them my questions, and they sent me back a translated transcript that maintained anonymity for the worker who volunteered to speak.

To this day, I don’t know anything about this source other than her first name, the area where she lives and what she chose to share in that interview. But despite this, her testimony still anchored the story.

As the political circumstances that led to my work-around grow more extreme, this may be the new reality of journalism in our nation: reporters having to consider not only the safety of our sources, but also how our own identities relate to the marginalized groups we are writing about.

We may have to outsource our reporting more often, relying on reputable intermediaries that, unlike us, have worked for years to earn the trust of communities living under persecution.

This new reality also raises concerns about one of the core rights of the American public, guaranteed by the First Amendment: the freedom of the press.

Journalists in this country today must cope with an unprecedented age of militarized crackdowns on major cities and roving patrols that seize individuals from their homes and workplaces.

In addition to not complying with the Freedom of Information Act when dealing with journalistic inquiries, ICE has gone as far as to detain and deport a journalist with a legal permit, as well as physically target dozens of members of the press during raids in Los Angeles.

The limitation that this atmosphere places on the free flow of information is a threat to our society’s ability to hold meaningful dialogue, organize ourselves and speak truth to power.

Anahita Banerjee was a reporting intern for Circle of Blue during the summer of 2025. She holds a degree in civil engineering and in global poverty and practice from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently completing her master’s at Oxford in water science, policy and management. Banerjee has extensive field experience with rural water and sanitation projects around the world, including India, Peru and California.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 37. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.