The federal government deported three migrant farmworkers to Mexico this week, out of eight detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents last month on a dairy in northern Vermont.
The deported workers include Luis Enrique Gomez-Aguiliar, 28; Urillas Sargento, 32; and Dani Alvarez-Perez, 22. A fourth worker, Juan Javier Rodriguez-Gomez, 41, has been detained in Louisiana, where he faces a high likelihood of imminent deportation, according to his attorney Brett Stokes.
The workers were deported “without due process, in clear violation of their rights,” said Stokes, the lead attorney for all eight detainees and director of the Center for Justice Reform of Vermont Law and Graduate School, in a statement Wednesday. None of the three had been previously deported, he said.
Both U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Stokes said federal immigration officials were likely relying on an unprecedented expansion of an authority called “expedited removal.”
The authority used to be applicable if a person was seeking entry or was found crossing the border into the United States. But since January, President Donald Trump’s administration has used that authority to arrest people who currently live in the United States and don’t fall under the traditional scope of this deportation process, according to Stokes.
Stokes said the arrests were a “foreseeable result of the current enforcement landscape in this country” but that expedited removals are almost impossible to challenge.
“I can’t appeal these decisions unfortunately,” Stokes said of the deportations. Instead he planned to connect with other folks in the country who’ve seen similar issues to take on the expansion of expedited authority. “I’m not sure there are any remedies for these three but the door, maybe, remains open,” he said Wednesday.
The farmworkers were detained at Pleasant Valley Farms, the state’s largest dairy, less than 3 miles from the Canadian border in Berkshire after Border Patrol agents responded to a report alleging that two men wearing backpacks had crossed through the woods and onto the farm property.
In April, Ryan Brisette, a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, said in a written statement that agents apprehended one of those individuals while the second fled.
“During the ensuing search of the area, agents located and apprehended additional individuals determined to be illegally present in the United States,” Brisette said.
But Stokes said he did not believe any of the eight individuals arrested matched the identities of the two whom federal agents were initially investigating.
“It’s remarkable because what we have here is the reported suspicious behavior of one, maybe two individuals, which results in the warrantless arrest of eight individuals, and based on my accounting of their stories, which I believe, none of them were the individuals being investigated,” Stokes said.
The detentions happened on farm property, with most farmworkers detained while in a trailer where they fled after seeing immigration officials. They were arrested around 6 p.m. April 21, and they were booked into the Northwest State Correctional Facility between 4 and 6 a.m. the following day, according to Vermont’s jail tracker system.
On May 1, three of the men were transferred to Louisiana, according to Stokes. They were held in the Alexandria Staging Facility, a 400-bed transfer center near an airport that holds detainees for about 72 hours before ICE removes them from the country. Rodriguez-Gomez was shown to be held at the facility on May 7, after he was temporarily transferred to a detention facility in New Hampshire, according to ICE’s online locator system.
The other four remain at the Vermont correctional facility. At least one was seeking asylum before the arrest, according to Migrant Justice, a Burlington-based advocacy group for migrant workers.
All eight workers have family in Vermont, said Will Lambek, a spokesperson for Migrant Justice, and some of those family members continue to work at the dairy.
Vermont’s farming community has been nervous about the impact of the Trump administration’s ramp-up of deportations for those who don’t have authorization to work in the United States since Trump was elected last year.
“There’s migrant farm labor on probably every farm in the state,” Stokes said. “But detentions like this were not common in Vermont until a couple of months ago.”
Migrant workers are hired by almost every farm in Vermont, according to a 2025 report published by the state Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. Up to 850 migrant farmworkers are employed year-round by Vermont farms, mostly on dairies. About 500 more farmworkers, largely from Jamaica, are also hired seasonally through the H2A visa program, which supports agricultural workers who are in the U.S. temporarily.
Nationally, migrants make up more than half of dairy laborers, according to the report, and losing this workforce could nearly double retail milk prices and cost the U.S. economy more than $32 billion.
“Farmers in Vermont tell us they are concerned about their workers and are doing their best to take care of them during a difficult time,” state agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts said in an emailed statement Wednesday, noting that immigration issues had created anxiety for farmworkers and farmers.
“It’s time for Washington to address the issue,” Tebbetts said. “Reforming our visa and immigration laws would provide the nation with a legal and reliable workforce while maintaining our food supply, and the invaluable contributions of our migrant farm workers.”
The co-owner of Pleasant Valley Farms, Amanda St. Pierre, said in an email that she didn’t have an update to share on the workers, and she did not respond to specific questions. Following the arrests in April, the company released a public statement on its Facebook that their “employees were hired following the federal and state employment requirements.”
“What I can tell you is that we’re continuing to support them and all our employees,” St. Pierre wrote in the Wednesday email. “We hope this is resolved soon.”
