This commentary is by Grace Oedel, executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association-VT.
Vermont’s leaders often wring their hands and lament the loss of young, driven workers from our state, and related declining numbers of children in our schools. The state is so desperate it has offered moving incentives of thousands of dollars for workers who will relocate.
Additionally, Vermont’s economy and identity are reliant on an eroding and challenged agricultural sector, with dairies closing rapidly and farmers unable to find skilled workers.
Vermont needs farming to maintain its pastoral beauty and tourism industry, along with its claims to fame like maple and dairy. Agriculture is the engine of our state, and farmers and farmworkers are those who keep it humming.
And yet, right now, a person who sits at the nexus of the very talents and identities the state so needs — a young Vermont farmworker, a mother of five children enrolled in Vermont schools, a skilled dairy worker, a passionate community builder — has been threatened with deportation.
The devastation of deportation cannot be overstated: families torn apart, lives ruined, children left without their mother, not to mention the farms left without skilled employees, the compounding crises facing Vermont’s agricultural community intensified.
This heart-rending story of a mother (who has been farming in Vermont for close to a decade) getting pulled over and then detained hits close to home: Wuendy has several young children for whom she is the primary provider, just like me. Wuendy has been on a farm here in Vermont since 2014, the year I started my farm. Wuendy was being driven home from church when she was pulled over and detained, and at that moment I was on the road from dropping my eldest off at Hebrew school at our synagogue.
Wuendy is a much more skilled community organizer than I, but I try to emulate the example she provides — she is a person who tirelessly shows up for her community’s needs, again and again.
Of course, immigration law is a system in dire need of reform on the federal level. As my friend UVM Professor Dr. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst wrote, “I doubt it is necessary (and I know it is not possible, due to word count limitations) to provide a thorough accounting of the history of unjust laws” — but let me simply point to my own identity as a woman (not to mention a Jew) who would have been perfectly legally prohibited from owning land or voting in this “brave state” in the past.
Legality and justice are two completely different terms — the former becoming the latter only through stubborn, collective effort. We have to do the uncomfortable work of not quietly complying with specific moments of injustice as unfortunate but “legal” unfoldings, but rather insisting on using those moments to create larger conversation, ultimately generating change.
The difference between how the many affluent remote workers who have moved to Vermont since the pandemic have been welcomed, while those workers (including both farmers and farm workers) who have been making Vermont a special place for years by tending our land and providing the food on our tables are placed under extreme stress and the threat of deportation, reveals deep, uncomfortable truths about what and who we value, welcome, overlook — and where we will be silent on injustice.
Climate change projections indicate Vermont is well-positioned to be a relatively decent and safe place in the coming years and recent trends show that people have noticed. We should be grappling now with how to be a home for all — not just the people with money and jobs at computers (not to mention asking what we all will eat when no one is farming here anymore).
How will we ensure that the future will be just — and fed? How will we stand for both farmers and farm workers for our state to be a place where agriculture can flourish?
Vermont needs more people like Wuendy — skilled, devoted, hard-working people who know how to tend land, feed the community, maintain Vermont’s agricultural economy, and who are eager to raise their children here, despite the very real challenges that parents face in Vermont. People willing to organize for a better future, who show up for their communities, who speak out for justice.
I stand with and for Wuendy — a farmer who cares deeply about this place, our land, and keeping Vermonters fed. Join me in raising your voice to let ICE know that not deporting this mother and farmer is critical for a thriving Vermont agricultural future.
