Migrants are vital to LI farms. The immigration crackdown is sowing uncertainty. 'It could be game over.'

Mycki McKay can remember when carloads of seasonal workers from Central and South America rolled down the drive at Helen’s Flower Farm & Greenhouses in Riverhead during the busy spring and fall looking for work. "We used to get them in caravans," she said.

But this year is different. "I don’t think we had one," said the retail manager of the sprawling East End nursery and farm stand the McKay family has run for decades.

The large seasonal influx of migrant workers who cultivate plants at greenhouses, prune grapevines and harvest corn and pumpkins across Long Island has been driven into the shadows, wary of the federal crackdown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Large groups of workers who used to mass for work in public places are now rare, and the seasonal influx of workers has diminished, making recruitment more competitive, farmers and their advocates say. 

Long Island farms are trying to accommodate change, where they can. Businesses — largely unable to recruit domestic workers — are relying more than ever on established federal visa programs. They ensure their immigrant workers are legal during the time they need them, although they say the process is cumbersome and expensive. One type of worker visa used by farms and nurseries has jumped 155% in the past decade.

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At the same time, farms that rely on essential workers with temporary protective status are facing their potential loss. The status of Salvadorans, who make up a large portion of farmworkers, is under review by the Trump administration and expires on Sept. 9 unless it is extended.

Some immigrants, fearful of detention and unwilling to cope with the anxiety, are self-deporting and declining to return. 

"At night sometimes I didn’t sleep, thinking that at any moment they’d come for me," Byron Cano Lopez, a highly prized landscape worker for a North Fork business, wrote Newsday in a text message from his native Guatemala on Saturday. The former Greenport resident self-deported in January; fear of ICE detention was "exactly the reason," he wrote. 

Julio, a Greenport landscaper from Guatemala whose last name is being withheld for privacy reasons, said while he works alone and hasn't seen a financial impact, he's fearful a wrong turn could have unintended consequences. Last month he was in Riverhead court on a traffic violation — crossing a white line in a roundabout. He acknowledged being fearful of the court date because “maybe the immigration is there, maybe not."

The sense of fear that workers now face only adds to the challenges of farmers, who need them to do the jobs U.S. workers don't always want to do.

"To try to get domestic labor is getting harder and harder every year," said Bill Zalakar, executive director of the Long Island Farm Bureau, which represents farm-related industries from New York City to the East End. "That's why our industry relies so much on immigrants and workforces from other countries and through special visa programs to help us in agriculture."

Farmer Donald McKay, owner of Helen's, has reduced in recent years his planted acreage to about 100 acres from 300, in part because workers are harder to find and local produce markets are drying up. "People are working, but they're not working doing this ... If you don't have the help, you have to find some other way to do [the work] — or you don't do it."

While he spoke, four workers from Guatemala hired through a federal visa program known as H-2A toiled in a vast field of potted mums, workers the McKays must provide with housing, meals and transportation to and from Long Island under the program. "It's a big expense," he said, noting he and his wife and two children home from college do the rest of the work — running farm stands, irrigating crops. "It's exhausting."

Five miles away from Helen's, Gary Vogel, managing partner of East Coast Nurseries, a grower of plants, trees, vines and grasses on 170 acres in Riverhead, is worried about the possibility of losing workers.

He has more than 50 workers, nearly all from Central America. Most have returned here for years under the H-2A visa program from El Salvador. The United States had provided Temporary Protected Status to eligible workers from El Salvador but that designation ended in September and is under review.

East Coast had its two biggest months in sales ever this May and June, and crews have plenty of work even during a hot July. Vogel expects to see another burst of business in the fall, but he sees clouds on the horizon. 

"If temporary protected status for El Salvador is not renewed ... that's going to leave a large hole in our business," including the loss of one of his top managers, Vogel said, urging regulators, "Please don't." 

The owner of one East End agriculture business, who keeps a staff of six workers under a different visa program known as H-2B, is facing the loss of at least one of his employees who had been working under an asylum visa. She recently agreed to self-deport in November after a series of asylum hearings did not go in her favor.

Her sister, the company's top employee, was recently told her multiyear work permit "can be rescinded at any time." The woman has a home on the East End, said the business owner, who requested anonymity to protect the workers. 

"She's built a pretty nice life here," he said, and neither sister wants to go back to their home in El Salvador. What's more, he said, "A lot of these men and women we consider part of our families." 

An essential workforce

Long Island's more than 600 farms comprised 34,468 acres and generated nearly $373 million in sales in 2022, according to a report from the state comptroller’s office. Most Long Island farms are in the greenhouse, nursery and flower businesses, while vegetable and fruit farming, including vineyards, is just under one-third of the total. All rely heavily on seasonal or migrant work forces — upward of 65%, according to the Long Island Farm Bureau.

According to U.S. Census data, the number of hired farmworkers in Suffolk for 2022, the most recent year available, was 4,910, with 451 labeled as "migrant." That's a decrease in migrant workers from 2017, when 523 of the 4,665 hired farm workers were labeled migrant. "Hired" farmworkers excludes self-employed farmers and unpaid family members. Figures from Nassau showed no known migrants among the 102 hired farmworkers in 2022.

The cost of labor for Long Island farms has spiked in recent years — up 131% in Nassau County between 2017 and 2022, and up 52% for Suffolk during that time, according to the state comptroller's office. Zalakar, noting labor costs amount to about 30% to 45% of farm production expenses, estimated upward of 80% of farmworkers are immigrants and that more than half of those are likely undocumented. 

Dozens of Long Island farms, landscapers, nurseries and others use the H-2A and H-2B programs to staff their operations through the planting, growing and harvesting seasons. The programs are tightly regulated, audited and expensive, bound up in red tape, but worth it, farmers say.

Use of the H-2A program nationally has soared to more than 415,000 workers, for which just over 100 U.S. citizens applied for the work, Zalakar noted. Ten thousand of the visas went to New York. Use of the program jumped 17% in the first six months of 2026, and some say it's still not enough. 

On Long Island, the number of H-2A visa workers has increased 155% between 2016 and 2025. Last year, there were 232 workers on H-2A visas on Long Island, all of them in Suffolk. Ten years ago, there were just 91. 

Issuance of H-2B visas, which guarantee minimum wages and overtime but do not have a housing requirement, has increased 39% on Long Island in the past decade, though peaking in 2018 at 1,776. The number has climbed steadily in the past three years, from 1,229 in 2023 to 1,544 last year, according to federal figures. The numbers include visas for agriculturally related jobs in Nassau and Suffolk, including farms, landscaping and equine work.

Participation in the worker visa programs isn’t cheap. For those using the H-2B program, legal fees, flights to and from workers’ home countries, even transportation from the airport and food, can amount to several thousand dollars. For those bringing in workers under H-2A, the cost of housing can add thousands more, including for some the purchase of homes to accommodate teams of workers.

The Securing Agriculture's Workforce Act, sponsored by Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, a Republican, would lower farmer costs while increasing the number of workers who could access the program. It also promises to streamline the cumbersome process that can bog farmers down in paperwork. Zalakar, of the farm bureau, said farm bureaus support it. 

Anxiety over ICE

Business owners say using H-2A ensures their employees will be protected from deportation for the time they are working their land. Despite the relatively low profile of ICE agents on East End farms, the threat of a crackdown has injected a level of caution into the sector that hadn't been there before. 

"I think to an extent people are keeping a low profile," said Phil Schmitt, a Riverhead farmer whose family has owned and worked farmland across Long Island for generations. He hires as many as 20 workers during the busy spring planting and fall harvest seasons and said the ability to know for sure who will be back is becoming a little harder.

"I know I’ve heard of a few guys getting deported," he said of local workers.

Earlier this year, Newsday reported, two field workers for Pindar Vineyards were picked up in Greenport, and general manager Pindar Damianos had to work the winter pruning season with two fewer workers. It’s been quiet since then, but as other vineyard owners told Newsday at the time, workers are wary.

"There is presence out there, I’ve heard of sightings and people seeing ICE, but they’ve been pretty good with the agricultural industry," Zalakar said. "I don’t want to jinx it. Lately, I have not heard of any problems, per se, and we’re going to hope that things can keep going the way they are."

80%

of Long Island farm workers are migrants, and more than half are undocumented

Source: Long Island Farm Bureau

Thus far for the year, Zalakar said, farmers appear to have just enough workers, with few reports of major labor shortages. "It hasn’t been an overwhelming influx of people, or a real major shortage of people out there from what we’re hearing. It’s been even par, and we’re just hoping that nothing upsets the apple cart," he said.

Crescent Duck Farm in Aquebogue is hopeful, too.

After nearly two years out of the job market for new hires following an avian flu crisis in 2024, Doug Corwin, chief executive of Crescent, is preparing to hire upward of 55 workers later this summer or early fall. But things have changed since Corwin was forced to shut down operations following the outbreak.

Corwin, whose former workforce has stayed in contact even as they have found other seasonal jobs picking crops or working for landscapers, said the new realities are likely to cause a few bumps in the road.

"Am I expecting 55 laid-off, well-trained people to show up all at once, and have no issues at all? No, that’s not going to happen," Corwin said. "But we’ll get there."

'Perfect storm' of farming challenges 

The immigration crackdown and the fear of ICE comes as farmers face myriad other problems.

"This is just really one more notch in the belt of difficulties for farm labor to begin with, because farmers notoriously have a shortage of labor," said Amanda Powers, communication director for the New York State Farm Bureau. "When you throw this in, especially for seasonal work, that’s really going to cause a serious problem."

The "perfect storm" of challenges includes rising costs of fuel and fertilizer, plus early frosts that have devastated some crops.

"So when you put all that together and then you have a shortage of labor on top of that it’s just one more thing for farmers to deal with," Powers said.

She said the belief that farmers can just shift to the local population to fill jobs is a "classic misconception."

"That’s just not a thing," she said. "It’s just very, very difficult for farmers to come up with people willing to work the long hours and hard work that it takes, and it is hard work. And to have this whole segment taken away from you or threatened to be taken away from you makes it very, very difficult."

Getting farmers to talk about the impacts of the crackdown can be as difficult as keeping fully staffed. The owner of one of the region's largest nurseries declined to have his name used, explaining, "Everybody’s afraid."

"Most of our employees have been with us for years. We don’t do seasonal hiring, generally," he said. "We only have four migrant workers and they are American citizens. They go back and forth to Puerto Rico. Everybody else is full time year-round."

The company has four H-2A workers at a separate location. Asked if the government can make it easier, he said: "I’m not going to comment. I’m not getting involved in commenting on a political story."

Where visa programs may fall short, farmers are relying on their good standing with workers to keep the best coming back. 

Schmitt, the Riverhead farmer, said for now his plans for hiring "seem to be OK," though he said it’s hard to predict in the end how many of the workers he’s known to come back for years will return. Schmitt provides housing for some of his workers, and his relations with them are good, he said.

"Most of the people who work for me kind of like working for me. We’re pretty fair and treat them with respect, and they tend to come back," he said. "I have employees who have been with me 10, 20, 30 years, and their fathers worked for me and grandfather and sister-in-law and brother-in-law. That’s the way it’s been."

Still, said the owner of another East End agriculture business, "It's a tough way to run your business — not knowing if you're going to get your workforce back." The owner, who asked his name not be used, noted the difficulty of getting local residents to do the work.

"The so-called traditional American worker dried up years ago," he said. "We used to run our business almost exclusively with high school and college kids. That's long gone. We rely on immigrant workers, which has saved us. But there's a lot of obstacles right now." 

Cano Lopez, the former Greenport landscaper who returned to Guatemala, expressed regret that he had to leave his life here. “The truth is that I miss Long Island a lot and my work because I had a good boss," he wrote.

Newsday's Belisa Morillo and Payton Guion contributed to this story.