Standing on a palatial salmon farm next to the Florida Everglades, Damien Claire isn’t bothered by the water dripping from the pipes and ducts overhead, even as it soaks his company-issued button-up and shaggy brown hair. Instead, the 47-year-old chief marketing officer for aquaculture company Atlantic Sapphire ASA is focused on the 450,000-gallon tank before him swirling with some 30,000 fully grown salmon. When one, a 10-pounder, leaps from the water, Claire yelps, “She says hi!” 

This wasn’t the future he’d imagined for himself two decades ago, when he was a “tech guy” at a Wall Street hedge fund. But Claire couldn’t resist the pivot when, in 2011, he met Atlantic Sapphire co-founder Johan Andreassen, who said to him, “I’m going to change the world—do you want to be a part of it?”

Salmon are an unlikely vehicle for a world-changing venture, but Andreassen and his cousin Bjorn-Vegard Lovik saw potential to alter the way fish are grown for human consumption. In the 1990s the cousins were the first to introduce tiny, sea-lice-eating fish into open-water salmon cages, called net-pens, in their native Romsdal, Norway. The tactic has been successful at curbing sea-lice-related deaths, yet infestations, along with disease outbreaks and mass escapes that threaten native marine species, remain major problems. The net-pen industry produces 99% of the salmon the world eats, yet the mortality rate is estimated at 10% to 15%.

Andreassen and Lovik were looking for a better way to raise the fish, so in 2010 they founded Atlantic Sapphire and established their first “bluehouse” in Denmark. The bluehouse, like a greenhouse with water, utilized a complex filtering technique called a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) to raise Atlantic salmon in highly controlled conditions entirely on land.

Some 3.8 million metric tons of salmon—about 700 million individual fish—are consumed globally each year, fueling a $19 billion industry that’s projected to more than double over the next decade. By volume, the US is the planet’s largest salmon consumer—the average American eats about 3 pounds per year—yet it imports 96% of the fish, primarily from Canada, Chile and Norway. Andreassen and Lovik understood that an oceans-spanning supply chain not only was economically vulnerable but also left a massive carbon footprint. The “dream,” Claire explains as we sit in Atlantic Sapphire’s sleek, unabashedly Scandinavian-design conference room, was not just to take salmon farming out of the ocean but also to bring it to its biggest market.

Andreassen initially wanted to set up Atlantic Sapphire’s first American bluehouse in Maine, where Atlantic salmon are a native species. Then he learned about South Florida’s subterranean geography, which is layered with both fresh and saltwater aquifers—a huge advantage for raising fish that are born in freshwater in the wild before they migrate to saltwater as adults. In 2017, Atlantic Sapphire broke ground on a $250 million facility with the design capacity to produce about 9,500 metric tons of fish every year. The complex is located on what used to be tomato and squash fields inside a chessboard of farms in Homestead, a dusty agricultural hub that grows many of the houseplants sold in the US. 

In 2019, the first year Atlantic Sapphire successfully hatched salmon, it announced plans to scale up to 90,000 metric tons by 2026 and to more than double that volume by 2031. To accomplish that, the bluehouse would have to be massively expanded. So, in 2021, construction on the second phase of the facility started. Where rows of tomato plants once stood, three dozen 580,000-gallon concrete tanks began rising into the sky. 

Atlantic Sapphire’s Homestead Bluehouse is the largest land-based salmon farm in the world, but according to a 2024 report by Boston Consulting Group, more than 110 similar projects are in various stages of completion. Most are in Iceland and Norway, where the salmon aquaculture industry has been operating the longest, but others are sprinkled around the globe, including in the United Arab Emirates.

Superior Fresh, which runs a 100,000-square-foot facility in Northfield, Wisconsin, became in 2018 the first land-based farm in the US to send salmon to market. The company has since opened a second location at a former fish farm in Albany, Indiana, which will start shipping fillets to retailers this summer. “It’s precision agriculture,” co-founder Brandon Gottsacker says of raising salmon in an RAS. “If you create an ideal environment for the fish to thrive in, you don’t need to add any harsh chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics.”

Lars Daniel Garshol, a salmon industry expert for the Norway-based seafood analyst Kontali, estimates that land-based salmon farming will eventually achieve industry dominance. Traditional net-pen farmers, he says, are facing “barriers of trade and stagnation” because of geopolitical turmoil and capacity caps on farms in places such as Norway. Negative public perception is also growing due to the environmental and mortality risks; net-pen farming is banned in several US states and is being phased out in British Columbia.

But overhead remains the primary obstacle for the land-based industry, with initial investment up to 12 times higher than for a net-pen farm. And operational costs—particularly the immense amount of electricity required to power an RAS and pump cool water—can be up to 50% higher. Andreassen, who left Atlantic Sapphire in 2023, has been candid about the challenges facing the industry he pioneered. “Without better volume performance, the cost structure won’t work,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post in April 2025, noting that a handful of the world’s leading land-based salmon farms had fallen short of their production goals the year prior, including Atlantic Sapphire. “Reality must come before theory.” 

On the morning I meet Claire, he structures our tour to follow the life cycle of an Atlantic Sapphire salmon. Our first stop is the hatchery, where one side of the room features a floor-to-ceiling rack of black trays full of bright orange roe, resembling a bank of glowing database servers. Claire carefully pulls out a tray, revealing thousands of eggs in a bed of crystalline water. On the other side of the room, a gigantic computer cycles through data from some of the facility’s roughly 10,000 sensors, which monitor every step of each fish’s existence, from yolk sac to packaged fillet. 

Atlantic Sapphire, Claire says, is leaning more on artificial intelligence to raise better fish. The facility’s tanks, for example, are equipped with cameras whose output is analyzed by AI to optimize feeding. As they mature, the salmon move through a network of pipelines to progressively bigger rooms until they reach their final tanks. Then they’re sent through a pipeline that’s pulsed with electricity to stun them unconscious. After the fish are processed, their fillets are shipped out to grocers like Publix, Sprouts and, most recently, Fresh Thyme Market. 

At times, it’s hard not to feel bad for the land salmon, who never get to experience the marine world of their wild cousins. But Atlantic Sapphire’s mortality rate, which is below 2%, speaks to their pristine conditions. Everywhere, enormous filters and sophisticated machinery, all of it either damp or soaking, hum—laying bare the technological and financial wherewithal needed to raise creatures on land that are meant for the sea. “In the ocean, you just wait for Mother Nature,” Claire says of his company’s ultimate goal of producing one-seventh of the US’s salmon. “Here, we need to use, to the best of our abilities, the infrastructure that we built.”

Will Runion’s 736-acre cattle and hay farm is tucked into a horseshoe bend of the Nolichucky River in northeast Tennessee. On the morning of Friday, September 27, 2024, he was in the middle of two big projects: building a riverfront campground on his land to bring in tourists and income, and cutting the last of the season’s hay. Hurricane Helene had been arcing up from Florida toward the Appalachian Mountains, carrying heavy rain, and the river was high. Even though the banks seemed to be holding, he decided to move some of his cows and equipment to higher ground.

But the river kept rising. At about 11 a.m., the brown water topped its banks. He and his fiancee, his son-in-law’s parents, and neighbors scrambled to salvage what farm equipment they could, but they were nearly trapped when the quickly expanding river flowed into a low-lying area behind where they were working, cutting them off from dry land. 

By afternoon, the river had swollen to some 1,200 feet wide — nearly 10 times its usual size. It “looked just like a lake,” Runion said. Trees snapped in the swift current and neighbors’ barns, roofs, hay bales, and household debris swirled by. The water swallowed Runion’s hay equipment and sent the little white house he’d planned to use as the new campground’s office sailing across a field. 

At around 8 p.m., the Nolichucky finally crested and started to recede. Runion found a third of his fields covered in debris, dead fish, and tomatoes from upstream vegetable growers. The flood had gouged two holes the size of football fields in his hay pastures, down to a depth of 12 feet. Other sections of the farm were buried in up to 8 feet of sand or silt. 

Helene dropped up to 30 inches of rain on southern Appalachia, causing historic flooding and landslides in parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, and Virginia —  a largely rural region where agriculture is a vital economic driver and cultural cornerstone. The mountains make it hard to spread out here, so farms tend to be small, and many growers use flood-prone bottomland because it is flat and fertile. But floods of this magnitude hadn’t hit here in generations. In North Carolina alone, Helene caused an estimated $4.9 billion in damage to the state’s agriculture sector. In Tennessee, agricultural losses were estimated at $1.3 billion. Thousands of farmers lost crops, tools, machinery, barns, buildings, animals, and fences. 

More than a year later, growers are also contending with the loss of something more vital, and more difficult to replace: their soil.

Runion knew immediately that his livelihood was ravaged. Without good soil, a farmer can’t farm. “When you see 4 feet of sandy soils on top of your topsoil, you know that’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “That was overwhelming.” 

He sent drone footage of the damage to Forbes Walker, an environmental soil specialist with University of Tennessee Extension. “How do you fix this?” he asked.  

“I don’t know,” Walker recently recalled thinking when he got Runion’s email. “How do we fix this?”

Over millennia, floods helped build the fertile land that farmers depend on. But today, climate change is driving more powerful and unpredictable storms. One study found that rainfall associated with Helene was 10 percent heavier due to man-made climate change. Research by the U.S. National Science Foundation suggests that what scientists call “100-year storms” will become three times more likely, and 20 percent more severe, over the next 50 years. What’s more, there’s little solid information about what happens to soil during a flood, or what to do when a farm’s soil is eroded or covered with material from elsewhere — its nutrients washed away and microbial communities disrupted. It’s a blind spot that is becoming more of a liability as storms like Helene become more common. 

“None of us had ever seen anything like this before or responded to an emergency like that,” said Stephanie Kulesza, a nutrient and soil scientist at North Carolina State University. “And so we weren’t really prepared for recommendations to provide to producers.” 

Soil can take thousands of years to form. Rock is weathered and slowly dissolves into smaller and smaller pieces. As dead leaves, animals, trees, and other plants decompose, they add organic matter and nutrients to the rock. Microorganisms establish themselves in the mix, driving nutrient cycling, aiding in decomposition, and stimulating plant growth; then worms and bugs, like beetles and ants, burrow into the mixture, aerating it. For soils to work well for agriculture they need the right structure — airy enough to allow water to enter and move through, but not too quickly or too slowly — and sufficient biological and chemical richness, including nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, to nourish crops.

Farmers use synthetic or natural fertilizers to ensure their soil has enough nutrients. They can also introduce practices like no till — farming without plowing up the ground — to maintain the physical properties of their dirt. Topsoil, the rich, uppermost layer with the most available nutrients for crops, tends to make up less than a foot of the entire soil profile, but it’s crucial for agriculture.

Helene’s floodwaters either washed away significant topsoil or deposited new sediment on top of it on thousands of farms. Some, including one of Runion’s neighbors, saw their fields stripped down to bedrock, or river rock. Runion and others woke to pastures blanketed by feet of sand or stone. 

When topsoil is washed away, the necessary nutrients for growing go with it. And when topsoil is covered with sand, farmers can’t get to it. Both scenarios can significantly alter the land’s usability. Topsoil can take decades, or even centuries, to develop, and sand lacks both the organic matter and the physical structure to hold water and nutrients. “These aren’t soils yet,” said Kulesza of what Helene left on Runion’s and other farmers’ land. “They are in their infancy now. The clock has been reset.”

Runion had cared for his soil, working to eliminate weeds, adding fertilizer to keep nutrient levels ideal, and lime to control pH. “They were our way of life,” Runion said. “They were our income.” 

After the storm, from October to April, he removed debris, bulldozed sand off his fields to get closer to the topsoil, filled holes, and graded uneven land. Crews from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, removed and shredded downed trees. He applied for government relief and received close to $1 million in state and federal aid. Runion said he could have easily used all of that money replacing equipment and paying for clean-up labor, fertilizer, and fuel, but that he’s trying to stretch the money as much as possible.

By June, it was time to mow the fields that hadn’t flooded. He managed to put up enough bales of hay to feed his herd of 125 cattle, but not enough to sell. In a normal year, hay sales made up about a third of the farm’s income. With months of work behind him and his flooded land still too sandy and generally depleted, he realized the recovery would be a slog. 

Runion returned to work on the campground, which he hoped would diversify the family’s earnings. The longer-term plan included a music venue and some hiking trails, and to host weddings and corporate events. After the storm, finishing it took on new urgency. He chose a new spot, about 450 feet upland from the river, and began clearing enough land for 45 camping sites. 

Runion also prepared a parcel of land for Walker, the extension soil specialist, to run tests that could guide his recovery. Last November, soon after the one-year anniversary of Helene, Walker showed me around Runion’s farm.

Working with students, Walker established four experiments over about 300 test plots. He’s looking at how different soil amendments — hay, wood chips, poultry litter, and a charcoal called biochar, to help the soil hold water and fertilizer, and Triple 19, a common plant food with equal parts nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium — affect the growth of wheat and fescue grasses.

When I visited, some of the plots remained mostly bare while in others tufts of green had sprouted. “We actually got some stuff to grow,” Walker said.

He described the academic literature on flood-damaged soils as “thin.” While some research and case studies exist on how agricultural soil recovers after a flood, there are few systematic investigations like the one Walker is conducting — on what works and what does not —particularly in Appalachia, where floods of this magnitude have been historically rare. 

When so-called atmospheric rivers spawned devastating floods in the Pacific Northwest and southwestern British Columbia, in 2021, Aimé Messiga, a Canadian soil research scientist at the Aggasiz Research and Development Centre, found a similar “scarcity of data.” He conducted a detailed review of the existing research, and concluded that there was limited long-term monitoring, little understanding of how floods affect nutrients and microorganism communities in the soil, and uncertainties about what the actual impacts of floods on agriculture and crops are. Complicating everything is the variability between farms, soils, and crops. 

“You need decades of accumulated data in order to be able to predict what will happen,” Messiga said. “We don’t have those data.”

Today, some researchers are attempting to replicate flood conditions in labs to better understand, but field work is rare, Messiga said. There’s little money for it and in the U.S., the Trump administration has cut funding for climate-related research. In addition, “many among us still look at these events as random,” Messiga said. “They’re not random. They will keep occurring.”

Since 1980, 45 flooding events have caused damages over $1 billion each in the U.S., with more than half of those occurring in the past 15 years. In 2024, flooding in the upper Midwest drowned crops. Repeat events in central California damaged agricultural operations from winter 2022 to spring 2023. Flooding along the Mississippi River in 2019 reduced crop planting by millions of acres. There also have been numerous smaller or more localized floods. One study found nearly 75,000 flash floods in the contiguous U.S. from 1996 to 2017, with increasing frequency in the past 22 years. Flooding frequency and strength is predicted to rise in the years to come due to climate change — a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and leads to stronger rain events — and poor land-use management. 

Scientists are also starting to study a new type of event, called “weather whiplash,” when sudden changes occur from one extreme to another, amplifying the effects of the disaster. In Texas in 2025, a flood came after prolonged drought, causing widespread destruction. 

For farmers, the effects of flooding on soil may linger for years after the disaster. In 2011, the Missouri River flooded states in the Upper Midwest, including thousands of acres of farmland. Fields were swamped for months with up to 20 feet of water. When the water finally receded, those fields were covered with anywhere from 2 to 20 feet of sand; other fields had washed out holes up to 70 feet deep. It looked like the surface of the moon, said John Wilson, a now-retired educator and agricultural expert who served Burt County, Nebraska, which was particularly hard-hit. “It was just bare soil,” he said. “There was no crop residue whatsoever.” 

Wilson led teams that sampled the soil and helped farmers build back. He found that levels of nitrogen and organic matter were low in flooded soils, and fertility suffered when farmers planted their crops. Over about five years, fertility generally improved, but not everywhere. “If you went out today and did a yield map, you could still tell exactly where the erosion was because those areas are not as productive,” Wilson said. 

Yield is money for farmers, who already navigate thin margins and, often, years without any profit at all. North Carolina’s strategic plan for agriculture recently enumerated just how thin: Of the state’s “42,500 farms, only 8,000 produce annual gross sales that exceed $100,000 annually. The overwhelming majority … some 23,400, gross less than $10,000 in sales, with only around 40 percent of the farms in the state having a positive net income in 2022.”

As floods increasingly wreck farmland, more researchers are starting to focus on understanding the effects of the floods and how to address them. Most of that work is happening in Asia, Messiga said. But a study in coastal North Carolina, where hurricanes regularly land, found that after a storm there was less organic matter in the soil, including carbon, and a disruption of microbial activity and nutrient cycling. The ground also absorbed water less readily. 

Coastal flooding is also driving saltwater into the soil of farmland, making it more saline and unable to sustain crops. A North Carolina State University team has been developing test kits for farmers to sample the salinity of their soils, as well as a set of recommendations for keeping their soil viable. Such local work is important because soils vary greatly from place to place, and findings are not often easily transferable.

For now, in the mountains after Helene, farmers are relying largely on trial and error to build back what was lost. Nicole DelCogliano has been farming vegetables, flowers, and livestock with her husband on 50 acres on the South Toe River, near Asheville, North Carolina, for 25 years. Helene washed away her barn, tractor, and other infrastructure. Of her 6 acres of vegetable fields, one was covered with several feet of sand, another got a foot, and a third field suffered extensive erosion. 

“Our entire operation was wiped out, essentially,” she said. 

With the help of some friends with tractors, DelCogliano cleared her main field and spread compost and lime on everything. “There was a mix of guidance about what you should do, like should you disturb the soil, should you not?” she said. “At an instinctual level, we just felt like we got to get the soil covered, we got to get something in the ground.” They sowed rye, a dependable cool season grass, as a cover crop, to protect the soil from erosion and add nutrients. 

Karen Blaedow, an agricultural educator in Henderson County, North Carolina, said farmers should expect to put in at least three years of cover cropping before they see results in their soil. “It’s not something that can be fixed overnight,” she said. “This is a long process.”

In the spring following the flood, DelCogliano spread various amendments on her least-damaged field, including compost, lime, biochar, and blood and bone meal, which provide nitrogen and phosphorus, respectively. After all that, she and her husband seeded crops. 

Their new vegetables came in about two weeks later than normal, but the season was more productive than ever, even though they grew on just 4 instead of 6 acres. “Which is pretty amazing,” she said. “When we first started harvesting crops [after Helene], we didn’t yet have power at the farm. I had to dig one of our sinks out of a bank and bleach it and clean it and drag it up to the new barn — that we barely got a roof on — to wash and pack for that first [farmers] market.” 

She doesn’t really know what made the year so productive. They planted more intensively to account for the smaller acreage and were able to harness their years of expertise to restart their operation basically from scratch. She also attributes the relative health of her soil to years of organic practices. “We’re dirt farmers,” she said. “Our primary job is to tend the dirt. Because that’s the basis of everything.”

Some farmers who’ve seen good harvests may have gotten a little lucky. Rather than sand, floods dumped silt. Even Runion got silt deposits in one section of his farm. Unlike the sand, the silty layers carry nutrients and create a positive growing environment. “We have a producer we work with and he said it’s the most fertile soil that he’s had in decades,” said Emine Fidan, a biosystems engineering and soil science researcher at the University of Tennessee, who’s also working on Runion’s farm. “And he said it grew the sweetest corn he’s ever had. It was growing just beautifully.”

Runion didn’t plant anything until this past fall. He prepared about 65 acres of the 220 that were underwater. It was slow going; he used a disking machine to till his land but had to stop often to clear sticks and trash and to grade out low spots. He mixed in mulch and planted oats, wheat, and fescue. Walker drove me past one of the fields and it still looked sandy, the grasses just a pale green shadow on the tan land. Runion said the greenery was “struggling to have any vigor about it.” He won’t know for sure how well or poorly the grasses do until spring, their peak growing season. 

He considered planting more acreage but decided to wait and see what he learned from Walker’s trials. “It’s a process and the knowledge we’re gaining there will help on the whole rest of it, too,” Runion said.

This spring, Walker’s team will measure the biomass in each plot, as well as the quality of the crop, including how much protein it has and its digestibility. They’ll also be evaluating the soil itself, including its ability to hold water, to determine if any of the treatments improved the structure of the sandy dirt.

Preliminary results suggest that in plots where they put down mulch, the grasses are growing better than in plots with other amendments. The woody debris is reducing erosion, seeds are germinating well and standing up in the rough matrix. Spreading this kind of mulch isn’t an obvious solution, Walker said: Wood chips are a carbon-rich material, but as they break down in the soil they consume nitrogen, which can lead to a deficiency for the crops. But this mulch had sat in piles and started to decompose before it was applied to Runion’s fields, which made it less likely to cause these problems.

Runion had asked FEMA to leave the piles of wood chips on his farm rather than remove them like they normally would. Walker is looking for solutions to the soil problem that not only work but are also accessible. Have a mountain of mulch? Put it to work. Have nearby chicken houses? Maybe their nitrogen-rich manure can help revive flooded fields. His hope is that his team’s research can provide some guidance to farmers who find themselves in similar situations in the future. “I think it will have broad implications for a number of different crops,” including vegetables, Walker said. 

Meanwhile, Runion is coming to terms with his situation. He thinks the hay he’ll get in the coming years will be lower yielding, lower quality, and will cost more to produce due to the extra prep time, new seeds, and fertilizers. He used to sell a lot of square bales, which tend to contain high quality grasses and fetch a higher price, but he doesn’t expect to be doing that for a while. He’d initially hoped to have his land back in shape in a year or two. “Now it’s a four- to five-year [plan], I think,” Runion said. “It has been frustrating, and exhausting, too.”

He remains optimistic, though. On my visit, I watched him grade out the new campground in a large dump truck. Freshly exposed red soil lay open to the sky. He thinks he can get the campground open by late summer or early fall. Over time, he hopes, it will be a more lucrative, and more sustainable, source of income. “The farm is really beautiful,” Runion said. “It still has a lot to offer.”

A landmark class action settlement agreement between Amazon and a group of residents in Eastern Oregon today marks the first time a Big Tech company has committed to paying damages related to public health threats allegedly exacerbated by the construction and operation of its data centers. The $20.5 million settlement was revealed in a filing in the U.S. District Court in Pendleton submitted by attorney Steve Berman, on behalf of six Eastern Oregon residents his firm represents in an ongoing class action lawsuit over the pollution of the Lower Umatilla Basin. The basin is the only source of drinking water for as many as 45,000 residents who rely on well water in and around Morrow County. As reported in Rolling Stone in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network in November, Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality has collected samples from the basin since 1991 that have shown a continual increase of nitrates, a byproduct of chemical fertilizers used by the mega farms and food processing plants in the area.

While the pollution predated Amazon’s arrival, experts say the data centers have supercharged it through the annual discharge of tens of millions of gallons of water, used to cool server equipment, much of which eventually reaches the groundwater system. That water accelerates the movement of existing nitrates through the soil and into the basin and contributes to an increase in the level of nitrate concentration in that water. Scientists believe that excess consumption of even a small amount of nitrates can do significant harm to the human body; they can cause debilitating conditions in newborns and have been linked to increased risks of cancer.

For its part, Amazon “denies each and every one of the allegations of wrongful conduct and damages by Plaintiffs, including, without limitation, that ADS has contributed to any alleged contamination of groundwater, surface water, or drinking water in or around the [Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area],” according to the filing. “[Amazon] is entering into this Agreement to settle all claims by Plaintiffs and Settlement Class Members relating to alleged contamination of the LUBGWMA … solely to avoid the burdens and expense of litigation.”

Amazon, which opened its first data center in Morrow County in 2011, now operates 13 such facilities in and around the basin, according to the filing.

The company is one of several defendants in the case, along with multiple large-scale farms and dairy operators including Lamb Weston and Threemile Canyon Farms, as well as a local utility and the Port of Morrow, which oversees the county’s wastewater system. Amazon is the first party to reach a settlement in the case for the role its data centers may play in accelerating the pollution of the basin.

“The lawsuit alleges that millions of gallons of wastewater from [Amazon’s] data centers and operations of other parties’ facilities in the Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area (“LUBGWMA”) in Morrow and Umatilla Counties in Oregon contribute to nitrate pollution in the groundwater in the LUBGWMA,” says the notice that will be sent to residents eligible for the settlement. The deal would release Amazon from liability in connection with any facet of its data center operations, “including cooling water discharges, that is alleged to contribute to groundwater, surface water, or drinking water contamination” in the basin.

As part of the settlement, which will need to be approved by the court after a hearing open to the public for comment, Amazon’s $20.5 million will be allocated into two primary funds for any resident in the Basin Groundwater Area after covering attorney fees. The first fund will cover private well projects that tap into a deeper, less contaminated portion of the aquifer for residents whose homes currently have drinking water with nitrate contamination levels above state safety limits. The second fund will underwrite public water-system projects for the treatment and distribution of cleaner water. A block of $30,000 from the original settlement will also be set aside for $5,000 one-time payments to the six plaintiffs for their effort in achieving the settlement. 

“I was hoping they’d settle for north of $100 million at least. Without real money going back to each person affected I don’t know if everyone’s going to keep their outrage to themselves. Not the folks who can’t let their grandkids drink out of the garden hose, or someone dealing with cancer or a miscarriage,” says Jim Doherty, a former county commissioner who spearheaded the effort to declare a public health emergency in Morrow County in 2022 because of the contamination. “They’re not going to buy into the idea that the richest company in the world would pay anything for something they didn’t do. [Amazon is] doing this because they can’t win, and because they know they’re part of the problem.”

“It seems like a drop in the bucket,” says Kathy Mendoza, a local resident who retired early, in 2019, because of a debilitating joint and muscle condition that she believes was caused by exposure to nitrates. “That money won’t go that far when you consider how vast that problem is.”

In response to the filing and related allegations, a spokesperson for Amazon tells Rolling Stone and FERN: “Communities in Eastern Oregon have faced groundwater quality issues for decades — long before we opened our data centers. Federal, state, and local regulators have been working for years to address nitrates from agricultural fertilizer, manure, septic systems, and wastewater from food processing plants in the area. Our data centers draw from the same water supply as other local residents, we don’t add nitrates to that water, and the water we return represents a very small fraction of the region’s overall system. We don’t agree with the allegations in the lawsuit, and we sought an early settlement because we wanted to focus our time and resources on supporting the community rather than on litigation. Creating an independently managed fund devoted to building water infrastructure made more sense—it directly benefits residents now. This fund will support projects ranging from public drinking water treatment infrastructure to improved private wells that can access cleaner water.”

“We appreciate Amazon taking the first step toward solving the nitrate pollution problem, but the work is far from over,” said Berman, the plaintiffs’ attorney, in a statement. “The parties that contributed to this problem have a responsibility to come forward and help resolve these issues. That means we will continue to prosecute the case against the main polluters — the Port of Morrow, Lamb Weston, Madison Ranches, Threemile Canyon Farms, Portland General Electric, and Columbia River Processing.”

On Monday at 5:30 a.m., more than three thousand employees at the JBS beef packing plant in Greeley, Colorado, officially walked off the line. Members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, the union that represents the plant, had begun the first major meatpacking strike in more than four decades, effectively shutting down one of the largest meat processing sites in the country. About 7 percent of America’s beef comes out of this single plant on a normal day. But now, thousands of workers—mostly foreign-born laborers from Haiti, Somalia, Burma, and Mexico—formed a picket line across the street, singing in Haitian Creole, chanting through a megaphone in Spanish, and wearing placards that read PLEASE DO NOT PATRONIZE JBS.

They were walking out to protest stalled wage negotiations and poor working conditions. A recent class action lawsuit brought by Haitian workers at the plant claims that they have been segregated onto a night shift and forced to work at “dangerously fast speeds.” Last month’s strike vote was nearly unanimous—evidence, the union says, of worker frustration.

By mid-morning outside the plant, just three semis carrying cattle for slaughter sat idling on the side of the highway—a far cry from the usual long line of trucks, known among workers as “Death Row.” The cattle pens north of the plant were virtually empty. Production was at a standstill. But the company seemed to want to downplay the significance of the stoppage. “This morning,” a JBS spokeswoman told me via email, “many JBS Greeley team members chose to report to work rather than participate in the strike called by UFCW Local 7, and we expect that number to continue increasing in the days ahead.” 

But the scene outside the plant didn’t seem to support that optimism. JBS had erected fencing around the employee parking lot, and security personnel in company windbreakers stood at entry checkpoints, scanning IDs and waving through any workers who chose to cross the picket. There weren’t many of them. Union members had voted almost unanimously to strike a couple of weeks earlier. Workers on the picket parted to let the cars enter but speculated that these were probably managers at the plant.

“Don’t be late for work,” one picketer jeered.

Another shouted, “Have fun on the kill.”

All morning, the picket line continued to grow as union officials checked in more workers, handed out more picket signs, and called out simple reminders—stay on the sidewalks, keep moving, don’t block anyone trying to cross the picket line. Kim Cordova, president of Local 7, stood by the folding tables where strike placards were being distributed. She wore a winter hat and down jacket with a yellow reflective vest over top. “My toes are frozen,” she joked, “but everything is going well, very organized.”

She was projecting confidence, but the fact is that this strike is a huge gamble. The price of beef has soared over the past year. The work stoppage—choking off slaughtering, butchering, and packaging of some 30,000 head of cattle per week—promised to further constrict supply and likely send prices even higher.

“I think it’s unavoidable,” said Jennifer Martin, an associate professor of Animal Sciences and Meat Extension Specialist at Colorado State University. The only question, she said, is when. “That depends on how much of the kill they can relocate to other plants,” she said. “That’s going to be the thing that really determines the speed at which consumers see price impacts.”

In short, if the strike lasts more than a few days, then what has been a local battle over workplace conditions, healthcare, and wages could turn into a proxy for bigger picture conflicts—inflation and affordability, the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, and corrupt corporate influence.

If the strike continues, it stands to become a national issue, one that might force a reckoning over how our meat is made. “I don’t think the American public has a sense that the food on our table is being produced by immigrant workers under conditions that would make Upton Sinclair turn over in his grave,” said Peter Rachleff, a professor emeritus of history at Macalester College and author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement. “I don’t think the public has a clue that that’s what’s going on.”

JBS was well aware of the shockwaves such a strike could send through the system. Last week, in preparation for the work stoppage, the company halted slaughtering, canceled cattle shipments, and began redirecting deliveries from feedlots to its plants in Grand Island, Nebraska, and Cactus, Texas—exactly the strategy described by Martin. “By utilizing available capacity at other JBS facilities,” the company spokeswoman said via email, “we can maintain supply, protect the long term stability of the beef chain, and minimize disruption for consumers and retailers.” Still, the price meatpackers pay feedlots for livestock fell 4 percent in anticipation of the strike. (The price of livestock goes down whenever slaughtering slows, since there is more supply and ranchers feel pressure to sell at a lower cost.) “We are operating the facility to the best of our ability,” the JBS spokeswoman wrote. “We will continue scaling operations this week as more team members return.” 

Cordova says the company is trying to force employees back to work through implicit threats of firing. On March 9, she says, JBS called workers into a meeting, and managers passed out a form letter addressed to the union, resigning membership. All employees had to do was sign and then show up for work as usual—with no more union representation. I independently obtained a copy of the letter from a worker. On a recording of the meeting made by another employee, a manager can be heard telling workers who declined to sign that they should take all of their personal possessions with them. (The JBS spokeswoman wrote: “This is a legally compliant document that was shared in response to employees asking for direction on how to withdraw their union membership in order to prevent being fined by the union for making the choice to work.”)

On a new website posted to respond to questions about the strike, JBS again hinted that workers could be fired if they don’t return soon—vowing to continue operations “either with workers who choose not to strike, or with replacement workers.” Such language has fed fear among the workforce and fueled speculation that JBS might bus in workers from the recently shuttered Tyson beef plant in Lexington, Nebraska, or from Amarillo, Texas, where, in January, Tyson reduced operations from two shifts to one. 

This strategy of trying to turn the workforce against itself, some labor historians observed, is a familiar tactic—one that helped create the industry landscape of today. Rachleff, whose book Hard-Pressed in the Heartland is an insider account of the last major labor stoppage among meatpacking workers, the 1985 to ’86 union strike at the Hormel pork plant in Austin, Minnesota, sees parallels between that stoppage and the dispute unfolding in Greeley. During the Hormel strike, the company reopened the plant with more than five hundred “permanent replacements,” escorted through the picket lines by National Guard troops called up by the governor of Minnesota. Under such pressure, the union unraveled. Nearly five hundred members crossed their own picket lines. A thousand unyielding workers were fired. And, eventually, union leadership in DC stepped in and declared an end to the strike—with almost none of the union’s demands met.

The failure of that strike had far-reaching implications. The nearly all-white, US-born workforce was steadily replaced with immigrant workers. Wage increases were slowed or halted. Skilled work was broken down and automated. Most importantly, meatpacking giants were able to grow and consolidate, until just a few companies gained near-total control over markets for beef, pork, and poultry. Today, the US meatpacking industry is more centralized and monopolized than it was when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906, leading President Theodore Roosevelt to break up the so-called Meat Trust.

JBS’s size allows the company to achieve powerful economies of scale. It’s so large, in fact, that JBS and just three other companies (Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef), known as the Big Four, control as much as 93 percent of the market. Other members of the beef supply chain—cattle ranchers, grocery chains, and the fast food behemoth McDonald’s, among others—have argued in multiple lawsuits that the Big Four are working in coordination to depress the market price of cattle, suppress worker wages, and drive up the price of processed beef for their clients, who pass the pain along to consumers. Local 7 is gambling that workers can use the industry’s unprecedented consolidation against JBS: If they can hamstring the plant’s production, maybe prices will rise enough that the government will have to take action against JBS.

We’ve certainly been paying more for beef. Prices have climbed steadily since the pandemic—but in the last year, they’ve soared. Since Trump returned to the White House, the average price of steaks has climbed from $10.87 a pound to $12.51 a pound—a leap of 15 percent. The price of ground beef is 20 percent higher—nearly seven times the increase in overall consumer prices. Then, late last year, Tyson announced its plans to reduce production, cutting the national beef processing capacity by 10 percent and further driving price increases. This led some industry observers to allege that the company was intentionally constricting supply in order to increase profitability. (In a statement, Tyson said it was working to “right size its beef business and position it for long-term success.”)

President Trump took to Truth Social. “I have asked the DOJ to immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies who are driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation,” he wrote. “Action must be taken immediately to protect Consumers, combat Illegal Monopolies, and ensure these Corporations are not criminally profiting at the expense of the American People.” The Department of Justice immediately announced an investigation into JBS and other members of the Big Four. Last week, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer introduced legislation that mandated a breakup of the large meatpacking corporations and specifically called for an investigation of JBS for “corruption” and business practices that “distorted competitive conditions” across the industry.

The union is betting that if it can take another 7 percent of the nation’s slaughter capacity offline, it may drive up food prices enough that Trump and Congress would be forced to follow through on their promises to investigate JBS—and even break up the company.

But it could also backfire. Cordova worries that JBS will be protected by the Trump administration—in part because the company was the single largest donor to his second inauguration. And also because the plant’s workforce is estimated to be 90 percent non-white immigrants, including more than 1,200 Haitian workers, whose visa statuses are on shaky ground. The administration is currently arguing before the Supreme Court that it should have the power to revoke the Temporary Protected Status of hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants who entered the country legally under the Biden administration. If that happens, Cordova believes there’s a chance that the Trump administration could use the strike as justification for a raid of the plant by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

Cordova was a union representative in 2006 when the plant, then owned by Swift & Company, became a central target of the first major ICE action ever undertaken. “Those raids,” she told me in an earlier interview, “were a push by [President George W.] Bush, I believe, to make some sort of political statement—to come in and really go after the industry and these plants for what he believed were undocumented workers.” The situation today is different: All of the plant’s employees, who herald from dozens of countries and speak some fifty different languages, have documentation. At least, for now.

On Monday afternoon, as night shift strikers took to the picket, the threat of an immediate ICE raid dissipated. The Supreme Court had declined to allow the administration to revoke TPS protections for Haitians and begin deportations immediately. But no one could breathe a total sigh of relief: The justices had agreed to hear oral arguments for the case in late April.

Despite their precarious status, the Local 7 membership voted last month nearly 99 percent in favor of the strike—driven, many say, by years of mistreatment. “The chain speed is the main thing,” Robenson Franc told me, speaking in Haitian Creole through an interpreter. Franc is one of more than a thousand Haitian workers who arrived at JBS in 2023 as part of what Local 7 describes as a human trafficking scheme, aimed at undercutting the union and forcing new employees to work on the night shift at unfair speeds. The suit claims that the line on the daytime shift usually averages 300 head of cattle processed per hour. But the night shift, when many of these newly recruited Haitian workers are on the line, runs at 370—and has reached as high as 440 head per hour. “They put up the speed as fast as they need,” Franc told me. And regardless of the speed, he said, workers are expected to keep pace.

Last month, Trump’s Department of Agriculture removed all restrictions on the speeds of poultry and pork production lines—a move that will increase output and help stabilize JBS’s profits through its pork operations and Pilgrim’s Pride, which is majority-owned by JBS and one of the largest poultry producers in the world. Cordova says JBS is now pushing to lift restrictions on beef production lines. The prospect of government oversight being removed has made documentation and negotiations over staffing to safely match line speeds a central issue at the Greeley plant, where workers say that lines currently run so fast that there’s no time to sharpen their knives, leading to debilitating repetitive stress injuries.

On the new website posted by JBS, the company says it is “false” that “UFCW Local 7 is striking over worker conditions.” The website claims that JBS “and the union resolved all non-economic items in bargaining” and says that the company has implemented “a process to provide newly sharpened knives frequently throughout the day”—with new, state-of-the-art knives to be installed soon. JBS says that the only remaining disagreement is over hourly wages and other “economic considerations.”

“They’re just trying to push that this is an economic strike,” Cordova said, which she believes is an effort to paint workers as only concerned about money. “That’s not true,” she said: Unresolved issues include disagreements over who should have to pay for worker personal protective equipment; the amount of sick time and paid leave benefits workers receive; and accurate accounting of line speeds, in order to make sure there’s enough staff to keep up with the pace of sped-up lines. While those issues may be strictly economic considerations for JBS, she said, for workers “it’s a staffing issue, it’s a safety issue, it’s a transparency issue.”

It remains to be seen whether this strike is short-lived or stretches on for weeks or months in the way of historic strikes of the past. Jennifer Martin emphasized that the length of the strike will determine the future for consumers. “If the strike continues, would we expect to see higher prices? Yes. And would we expect that to be compounded by higher input costs, fuel prices, all of those sorts of things? Yes.”

What she couldn’t predict is who would feel the impact of those changes the most. Would it be the workers, who are forced to risk their livelihoods or accept what they consider unsafe conditions; the ranchers, who will have to sell their cattle at a lower price; the company, which says its razor-thin margins are “pressuring profitability”; or the American people, who are struggling to put food on the table?

“Is this the final straw,” she continued, “where all of these pressures have been building, and this is the thing that sends it over the edge, where prices move far enough that consumer behavior changes in a meaningful way?”

“That’s an unknown. It will really depend on how long this strike continues.”

Nick Ramsden, a farmer from Pretoria, South Africa, spent a long Thursday in July driving an eighteen-wheeler along a three-mile loop at the Nelson-King Farms, in rural Mississippi. He began at the edge of a soybean field, where workers were piloting combines and cutting the crop; once the truck was loaded, Ramsden delivered the load to the farm’s silos on a highway outside of Chatham, Mississippi. His freckled face crinkled as he squinted into the sunlight. Wisps of blond hair curled out from his baseball cap.

The best-known landmark in Chatham is Roy’s Store, on Roy’s Store Road, which has a gas station, a bait shop, and a restaurant. The owners have a few rental cabins, too, for people who want to fish in Lake Washington, an oxbow of the Mississippi River. Otherwise, Chatham is just a crossroads surrounded by turnrows and a few swampy stands of cypress trees. And yet, in recent years, it has attracted a growing population of white South African workers.

Ramsden, who is thirty-one, grew up in the Lowveld region of South Africa, where his family managed a game reserve, farming livestock and sourcing wildlife, including lions, hippos, elephants, and rhinos, for export. In 2021, he moved to the U.S. to take up work at Nelson-King Farms. The job was gruelling: during harvest, he sometimes worked hundred-hour weeks. It helped, though, that thirty other young men whom he’d known back home, and more than a hundred more whom he didn’t know, were within about a half hour’s drive. At certain bars in the area, it had become commonplace to find groups of young South African men—distinguishable by their accents and their extraordinarily short shorts—knocking back beers. “It’s such a small community. You get to know each and every person around here,” Ramsden told me as he drove. “We really enjoy it. People are good out here.”

South Africa has been an obsession of the second Trump Administration. The President has seized upon the claim by right-wing groups that white South Africans, particularly farmers, are victims of an ongoing genocide. In February, 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order freezing foreign aid to South Africa, citing what he called “violent attacks on innocent disfavored minority farmers.” Later that year, he set a thirty-per-cent tariff on imports from the country and announced that its leaders would not be invited to the 2026 G20 summit, in Florida. Trump aims to slash refugee admissions to the U.S. by more than ninety per cent; last fall, a federal notice announced that the remaining asylum slots would be primarily allocated to Afrikaners, white South Africans of mostly Dutch or French descent.

Such special treatment has set off a fierce debate about the purpose and future of America’s refugee program. What has been mostly undiscussed, though, is that there are already quite a few South Africans here: in 2024, nearly fifteen thousand arrived in the U.S. through the H-2A agricultural-visa program, which allows migrant laborers to spend months—sometimes years—working on farms across the country. (The maximum term of each visa is three years, but workers can re-apply in perpetuity.) At this point, the majority of the agricultural workforce in some communities in the Mississippi Delta appears to be South African.

Mississippi residents who are not involved in agriculture are often shocked by their first encounters with men like Ramsden in the Delta, a place where Black sharecroppers once supplied the workforce on the region’s sprawling farms, and where the percentage of Black residents remains one of the highest in the country. Debates arise on Facebook: a few years ago, one user wondered whether the workers were there on “a gap year for the sons of South African plantation owners.” It only adds to the confusion that men like Ramsden do not fit the stereotype of an H-2A worker. The vast majority of U.S. agricultural visas go to Mexican citizens, and a great deal of the work is what is sometimes called “stoop labor,” ripping out weeds, handpicking fruit, hauling crates of produce. Kitted out in boots and a safari shirt, Ramsden looked more like a tourist than a farmhand.

Sometimes, Ramsden and his peers in Mississippi might hop down in the mud to lay irrigation pipe. But their work typically involves operating machinery. The region’s farms mostly grow commodity row crops such soybeans, corn and cotton, which require modern tractors running complex software; laborers monitor G.P.S.-guided equipment that automates planting depth and seed spacing. Jason Holcomb, an emeritus professor of geography and global studies at Morehead State University, told me that South African H-2A workers in the U.S. first found jobs on the Great Plains in the nineteen-nineties, working on custom harvesting crews that travelled from farm to farm, to cut crops. Historically, this work had been a rite of passage for high schoolers and college students in the region. But in the nineteen-nineties, as regulations tightened, local interest waned. Now South Africans represent the fastest-growing source of H-2A farm labor in the U.S.: from 2011 to 2024, the number of visa holders has increased by more than four hundred per cent and the number of South Africans in the program has increased fourteenfold. Ramsden told me that on a flight from Atlanta to South Africa, in November or December, at the end of the working season, you might find that two hundred and fifty of the three hundred passengers are farm workers headed home. “If this program went away tomorrow, farming would cease,” Walter King, one of the co-owners of Nelson-King Farms, said.

For the South Africans, part of the draw is money. Ramsden estimated that workers in Mississippi could make at least four times the wages they earned back home. But it’s not just the pay that sends them abroad—there’s also a feeling that they are escaping anti-white sentiment. Many of these men in the Delta are the descendants of colonists who, beginning in the eighteen-thirties, embarked on the “Great Trek,” a migration from the coast of South Africa into the region’s interior to establish farms, and, later, whole republics that were independent from the British Crown. They called themselves Afrikaners to indicate their commitment to what they saw as their homeland, unlike the Brits still tied to London.

In the twentieth century, Afrikaners seized power in South Africa. Eve Fairbanks, the author of “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning,” told me that, in the Afrikaners’ narrative, farmers were “the total backbone of the country—the great ones, the heroes.” (The word “Boer,” which means “farmer” in Afrikaans, is sometimes used interchangeably with Afrikaner.) They talked about themselves as a people who had tamed an empty place, making nationhood possible. To maintain the illusion of democracy in a country that was majority Black, Afrikaners created the apartheid system, which, nominally, created smaller, independent states for different ethnic groups, but effectively denied citizenship to Black South Africans, stripping them of the right to participate in politics, own land, or move freely. (The architects of apartheid were inspired by the Jim Crow policies of the American South, which effectively disenfranchised much of the region’s Black majority.)

In 1992, after decades of external pressure and internal resistance, the country voted to end the system. But imbalances in property ownership persisted: today, white South Africans, who make up around seven per cent of the country’s population, still own seventy-two per cent of its private farmland. Meanwhile, millions of Black South Africans still live in informal settlements.

The workers in Mississippi often voice the same complaints that many South Africans have about their country, such as its sluggish economy and widespread crime. Back home, the men had experienced difficulties finding farming jobs—or any jobs at all. “The country has gone to shit,” one farmhand told me. But many of the workers also presented themselves as victims of racially motivated government policies. In South Africa, legislation in the early two-thousands codified a program called Black Economic Empowerment, which, among other initiatives, incentivizes employers to hire Black South Africans; a more recent law allows the government to expropriate private land, sometimes without compensation. There was a pervasive sense among the workers that the government was ignoring—if not outright encouraging—violence against white farmers. Many South African farms are ringed in barbed wire and outfitted with security cameras; one of the migrants told me a story about confronting armed robbers. “Your firearm is out next to your bed,” Ramsden said. “You need to always be prepared.” Another worker noted that he had two acquaintances who had been murdered, but described these as “normal crime.” “It’s difficult to say what the motivation was,” he said, adding that, whatever the reason, such violence was frequent. Other farmhands were less circumspect. “The party that’s in control of South Africa now, they need to be wiped off this earth,” Franco Hendriks, a twenty-six-year-old worker at a farm in Boyle, Mississippi, said. “They need to be thrown in jail.”

For some white South Africans, the case for persecution is summed up neatly by the rhetoric of Julius Malema, a member of parliament and the founder of an opposition party called Economic Freedom Fighters, who sometimes sings a controversial anti-apartheid anthem called “Kill the Boer.” But Malema was convicted of hate speech for making threats last year, and his party won less than ten per cent of the national vote in the most recent South African election—hardly a ringing endorsement of his ideas. Uncompensated seizure under the land-expropriation law can only be pursued under narrow circumstances—when land is unused or has been abandoned, for example—and the program seemingly has yet to seize any property. Many white South Africans reject the claim of genocide, and mock the Trump Administration’s refugee policies. On social media, the first plane flights to the U.S. under Trump’s resettlement plan were dubbed the “Great Tsek”—a pun using an Afrikaans vulgarism that means, basically, “good riddance.”

According to Fairbanks, who moved to South Africa from the United States more than fifteen years ago, attacks on farms appear to be mostly economically motivated crimes. Rural properties are soft targets because they tend to store money and guns and are far from police stations. Fairbanks concedes that it is now more dangerous to be a white farmer than it was under apartheid, but this is, in part, because South Africa was then a police state that protected white people. “So you have a cohort of people who were not exposed to crime under apartheid, who now are more exposed to it,” she said. The fact of violence alone does not imply a genocide; “it is still safer to be a white South African farmer, just purely statistically speaking, than it is to be a young Black male,” Fairbanks noted. Crime affects many types of people in South Africa, but this fact is left out in the narratives that have inspired Trump’s resettlement policies. Fairbanks told me that, in her time in South Africa, she has noticed that a sense of Afrikaner victimhood has persisted in various forms. “It floats free of any actual events and just attaches itself to any possible evidence of a threat,” she said.

In the Delta, too, a white minority has held most of the wealth and farmland. In the early nineteenth century, the region’s rich soils lured wealthy men who, using enslaved labor, cut down swamp forests and launched sprawling cotton farms. By the late eighteen-sixties, landowners had settled on sharecropping—a system that kept agricultural workers, many of them former slaves, in perpetual debt—to rebuild their economic dominance after the Civil War. In the nineteen-fifties, as tractors and cotton pickers rapidly reduced the number of workers needed for row-crop farming, the government proposed a federal program that would train displaced Black sharecroppers to use the new technologies, but a Mississippi congressman killed it. (Around the same time, Mississippi’s Citizens’ Council, a powerful local segregationist group, expressed hope that advances in farming might rid the region of its Black majority for good.) White officials used their positions atop the local commissions that oversaw federal agricultural programs to drive Black landowners into so much debt that most of them had to sell off their land. There are still a few Black-owned farms, but they are small, and, like many small farms, they struggle. In the book “When It’s Darkness on the Delta,” Calvin Head, a farmer who runs a coöperative of Black farmers in Holmes County, tells W. Ralph Eubanks—a writer whose parents were forced to leave the Delta agriculture industry in the nineteen-fifties, amid segregationist fervor—that degradation from decades of intensive row-crop farming, including the ongoing use of pesticides, makes it harder for him to grow vegetables. “The people still making money in the Delta are white farmers,” Head says.

In 2021, six Black farmworkers in Sunflower County, an hour northeast of the Nelson-King Farms, filed a federal lawsuit that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions about the South Africans’ presence. Employers are only meant to use the H-2A program when they cannot fill their workforce with Americans, and they are required to pay local workers and visa holders nearly equal pay. (Higher-skilled H-2A workers in Mississippi receive $13.77 per hour; their American counterparts must receive $14.92 an hour, since they typically do not, like the migrants, receive housing.) But, according to the lawsuit, Pitts Farms, a sprawling corn, cotton, and soybean operation, had paid Black locals as much as four dollars and fifty cents less per hour than South African H-2A workers; a few of the workers had been pushed out of their jobs entirely, and one was forced to move out of farm-supplied housing. One of the plaintiffs’ families had worked for Pitts Farms for generations.

A wave of similar suits followed, and the Department of Labor launched “Operation Delta Force,” which sent a swarm of investigators into the region to investigate employers. The department eventually helped a hundred and sixty-one workers recover on average roughly three thousand dollars in wages each. Pitts Farms and others have settled out of court, and according to attorneys plaintiffs have received “significant wage recoveries.” The H-2A visa program is complicated, and some farmers in the Delta said that they hadn’t understood the requirements. But the employers I spoke to pointed to a different issue: the Black farmworkers in the Delta tend to be fifty or older—men whose age might limit their capabilities. (The plaintiffs in the lawsuits mostly fit these demographics.) Across the country, the number of workers interested in agricultural labor is shrinking. Any jobs for which farmers request H-2A workers must also be listed with local job centers, but Walter King said that, in a typical year, he gets only a single phone call from a local, and when he asks for a résumé he never hears back. Just before my visit, a motor on one of the farm’s grain bins needed repairs. “It’s an eighty-foot ladder you have to climb up to get up there,” King said. Almost ten years ago, before his farm started hiring South Africans, he said he had only one or two employees who could manage that climb while weighted down with the necessary tools. For now, King retains his longtime employees, who, in the wake of the lawsuits and investigations, receive higher wages. But as they retire his crew grows increasingly South African—and white.

Some of the South Africans I spoke to were enthusiastic about Trump’s immigration policies, even if they themselves were unlikely to qualify for asylum status. (“I’m glad Donald Trump spoke up about it,” Hendriks, the twenty-six-year-old worker, said. “He’s taking the bull by the horns. And I hope that stuff gets escalated.”) The H-2A program, unlike the refugee program, is supposed to be temporary, but many South African workers are applying for green cards so that they do not have to go home between each farming season. The process is long and costly, but some of the South Africans I met were being helped with the expense by enthusiastic employers, like King.

On my way to visit Looney Farms Partnership, a farm that grows soybeans and corn south of Leland, Mississippi, I passed a strange-looking flag hanging from a telephone pole. Closer up, I could see that the Stars and Stripes of the U.S. flag had been blended with the Y-shaped colored bars of the South African flag. Mark Looney, the farm’s owner, said that his neighbor had put it up to honor his crew’s work. Looney told me that he approved of Trump, who is generally supported by the region’s farmers. In 2025, Trump’s sharp tariffs prompted China to stop importing U.S. soybeans, the biggest crop in the region—King called it a “gut punch” amid rising input costs and a broader nosedive in commodity prices. But in December the White House announced a twelve-billion-dollar bailout to row-crop farmers. The Administration introduced separate rates for lower and higher-skill workers, a change that enabled farmers to significantly reduce the wages that they are paying to many H-2A workers. The Department of Labor recently eliminated a requirement that Delta farmers advertise their H-2A-eligible jobs in local newspapers; an official from the Department of Labor told me that it had “ceased all operations” from its Biden-era investigations into discrimination.

On the farm, I chatted with two of Looney’s South African employees as they huddled in the shade of a tree, working to repair a backhoe. One of them, Deon Oliver, wore a safari shirt and a short beard. He told me that he’d arrived in the Delta a decade ago; because he’d rushed through an agricultural high school in just two years, he was still a teen-ager. He had come with clear intentions: work for five years, save up money, then head back home. He’d planted macadamia trees on his family’s farm before leaving, and knew that after about a half decade they’d mature into a profitable little orchard. But, two years into Oliver’s stay, he met a woman from the Delta while he was fishing from a bridge. “It’s kind of a funny story,” he said. He was twenty years old, but she didn’t believe him. So she asked for proof. “She looked at my I.D., and she said, ‘Ain’t no way,’ ” Oliver said. It turned out that they’d been born on the same day on different sides of the world. They got married, had a daughter, and moved out of the housing that Looney was required to provide to his foreign workers into their own house on Route 61, the famous blues highway. “I’ve got my wife over here, and I got a kid over here, so I got responsibilities to stay with,” he said. “I’m definitely going to stay.” 

In early February, more than 1,000 Haitian migrants employed at the unionized JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, faced imminent deportation, as the Trump administration fought in federal court to revoke their temporary protected status. Many of the Haitians say they were brought to JBS as part of a human-trafficking scheme concocted by a supervisor in the company’s HR department. (A JBS spokesperson told me there was no evidence tying the company to the union’s claims.)

Among them is Carlos Saint Aubin, who fled from the gangs in Port-au-Prince to Brazil, where he began a harrowing journey on foot—across the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia, north to the US border. He came to Colorado after seeing TikTok videos promising jobs and housing. Instead, he ended up among the hundreds of Haitians packed more than six to a room at a roadside motel after working long hours. Now Saint Aubin is one of the lead plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit alleging that the Haitians on the evening shift there were forced to work as much as 50 percent faster than those on the daytime crew.

On February 4, less than 48 hours after a federal judge blocked their deportation, 99 percent of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union members at the facility voted to strike in what could become the first sanctioned walkout at a major meatpacking plant in decades.

On 21 November, at the end of the first shift at the Tyson Foods beef processing plant in Lexington, Nebraska, all workers were called to the lunchroom and told they no longer had jobs. Many gathered afterward in the gravel parking lot. Some wailed and cried out. 

“It’s a terrible thing to know that we won’t be able to pay rent, won’t be able to pay the electricity, our cars — all the bills coming our way,” said Constancio Perales, a 64-year-old worker born in Durango, Mexico, who has worked at the plant since 1996 — the last 25 years cutting the bone out of chuck steaks. “It’s very sad that they would fire us like that — just telling us there’s no more work, as if to say go away.”

And the move didn’t seem to make sense. Tyson is one of four beef producers — along with JBS, Cargill, and National Beef, known collectively as “The Big Four” — that control 85% of the industry, and their profit margins are at their highest levels in years as consumer prices soar. Tyson had just announced that its profits were up 6.5% over the previous year. Why would the company shut down one of its largest plants, employing 3,200 workers?

In a statement at the time, Tyson said it was working to “right size its beef business and position it for long-term success” and that it will meet consumer demand by increasing production at other company facilities, “optimizing volumes across our network”. 

Dan Osborn, an independent Senate candidate in Nebraska who got into politics after leading a strike of Kellogg’s workers in Omaha in 2021, didn’t believe that explanation. He went on social media to charge that the plant closing was the continuation of a longstanding pattern. A class action lawsuit brought in 2019 by a coalition of cattle ranchers and feedlot owners, led by Ranchers-Cattlemen Legal Action Fund (R-CALF), claimed that the Big Four were engaged in an “illegal scheme” of “price-fixing, market manipulation, and unfair practices,” carried out by constricting production, including plant closures, to drive down the price of cattle for slaughter and drive up the price of processed beef by creating artificial scarcity.

“This is a time of near record high beef prices and demand for beef,” Osborn wrote on X. “In a real free market, one would expect packers to want to increase capacity to meet this demand. At a minimum, they wouldn’t idle capacity for fear of ceding market share to competitors — who might take advantage of the high prices to expand their own production. But Tyson is doing the opposite. Why?” He answered his own question: “Tyson made a calculation that the profits they will reap manipulating market prices by shutting down this giant plant will EXCEED any loss they incur.” (In October, Tyson agreed to pay $55 million to consumers who claimed that the company colluded with other beef producers to inflate prices, and in January agreed to pay an additional $87 million to a group of small grocers and retailers of case-ready beef. Tyson denied wrongdoing in both cases.)

Beef prices have become a flashpoint among broader concerns about the overall rise in the cost of living. Over the past several years — and in recent months — the growth in beef prices have far outpaced the growth in the US consumer price index. 

From January 2020 to December 2025, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows, the average price of beef steaks soared from $7.65 a pound to $12.51 a pound — an increase of just over 63%, while the general rate of inflation rose roughly 25% over that period. (Ground beef saw a similar jump.) During the first year of the second Trump administration — from February to December last year — the average price of steaks climbed from $10.87 a pound to $12.51 a pound, a jump of 15%. Overall consumer prices increased 2.2% over those same months.

In response to what they allege is years of price-gouging and collusion, many of the Big Four’s business partners have filed lawsuits — including grocery store chains Kroger and Aldi, big-box stores Target and BJ’s Wholesale Club, food distributors including Sysco and Sodexo, and burger giant McDonald’s. President Donald Trump felt compelled to call for action, directing the U.S. Department of Justice, in a post on Truth Social in November, to open an inquiry “into the Meat Packing Companies who are driving up the price of Beef.”

A statement issued by R-CALF applauded Trump, asking that he ensure “that consumers pay prices set by a competitive market rather than a monopolistic one.” Tyson Foods and National Beef did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in response to the antitrust lawsuit said the plaintiffs had to “dream up an elaborate scheme” to explain normal market corrections. A spokesperson for JBS said only that the company “remains firmly committed to producing safe, high quality, affordable food for American families and consumers around the world.” A spokesperson for Cargill directed questions to the Meat Institute – the lobbying organization that represents members of the Big Four and other large meatpackers. The Meat Institute issued a statement claiming that “beef packers have been losing money because the price of cattle is at record highs.”

Osborn still doesn’t buy it. The price of cattle has increased, but only marginally, while prices at the grocery store have soared. He offered his own shopping experience as proof. “I was standing in front of the big meat aisle, and I was just looking at the beef,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s $17.99 a pound for sirloin steak, and a couple years ago, I was paying $5.99, maybe $6.99, for that same sirloin steak.” (Osborn supplied a photo as proof of the current price.) “I find it very, very hard to believe that this is not being manipulated.”

Here’s how the alleged scheme Osborn and others describe works, according to documents filed in multiple lawsuits against the beef packers.

From 2009 to 2014, the Big Four were paying steadily increasing prices for cattle. This was due to a shortage brought on by drought, which had spurred the cattlemen to reduce their herds. The packers responded to the higher prices by closing a total of five plants between January 2013 and September 2014, including one of Cargill’s largest plants in Plainview, Texas, which processed more than 4,500 head per day — roughly 5% of all beef production in the country. Ranchers and small feedlot owners with full-grown, fattened cattle don’t have space or feed to wait out a dip in buying, so they were forced to accept a lower price.

The cattlemen say that was the intended effect: Cattle prices leveled off in November 2014. Industry experts expected prices to remain steady in 2015 and for several years after, before experiencing a gradual decline as the drought eased and the inventory of cattle was replenished. But, according to the lawsuits filed by the cattlemen, the Big Four didn’t want to wait for prices of cattle to come down on their own. Emboldened by the effectiveness of their earlier alleged manipulation, the class action suit filed in federal court in Minnesota alleges, the packers “colluded to make sure, notwithstanding growing beef demand, that this widely predicted period of price stability would never happen.”

This time, the suit alleges, they came up with a system where the heads of operations at all of the Big Four were in direct communication to temporarily halt buying and slaughtering if cattle prices got too high. Because the packers control so much of the market, even a temporary reduction of kills immediately depressed market prices. When those prices hit an agreed-upon level, the lawsuit alleges, packers simultaneously resumed buying. The alleged scheme worked so well that prices for cattle across the US collapsed dramatically in 2015 and then stabilized, but below the prior trend line.

This collusion, according to the lawsuit, increased “the meat margin” — the spread between the price paid by big packers for “fed cattle” (cattle fattened in feedlots and ready for slaughter) and the price they can charge Kroger, Target, or McDonald’s. “Even with the drastic collapse in fed cattle prices caused by [the Big Four’s] conspiracy,” the lawsuit claims, the meatpackers “continued to benefit from record beef prices,” allowing them “to post record per-head meat margins.” (In response, the packers questioned the credibility of key witnesses and denied any allegations of coordinated efforts to keep prices low. In a motion to dismiss, they argued that “fed cattle and beef markets are concentrated commodity markets — where companies should be expected to respond similarly to market forces.”)

In short, the suit charges, they were simultaneously using their dominance of the market to depress the prices paid to cattle ranchers for their supply, while artificially keeping prices high.

For the alleged scheme to work, no one could betray the others by offering a higher price to the cattlemen. By the middle of 2015, Cassandra Fish, a former Tyson risk manager and then a market analyst with the trade journal The Beef, noted the “incredible discipline” among packers in making coordinated decisions to modify the number of kills. “Most have cut hours,” she wrote in June. “So will someone break ranks, pay up for cattle and add hours?” In other words, wouldn’t some company pay the higher prices and increase production?

The answer was no — not for years. Data gathered by the cattlemen show: production rose and fell in unison. 

The Big Four attribute this to market conditions and argue that it is not sufficient evidence of “parallel conduct.” But even when Tyson lost its plant in Holcomb, Kansas, to a fire in 2019, shuttering the plant for four months and slashing the company’s annual slaughter capacity, the other producers didn’t use the disaster as an opportunity, according to the cattlemen’s lawsuit. Instead, the cattlemen claim, the other members of the Big Four cut their production, too.

This was the tip-off, the lawsuit says, that proved the collusion. 

Again, the Big Four attribute their shared low demand to “market forces.” But the cattlemen dispute this claim. “Supply and demand principles do not explain the 2015 price collapse or subsequent low prices,” the lawsuit alleges. The drought had receded, making it possible to increase the inventory of cattle, and demand by Americans for beef had only increased. But the Big Four still weren’t buying cattle above a certain price, and it was working. The price for a single cow ready for slaughter fell from $170 in January 2015 to under $100 in September 2019.

The evidence supplied by the cattlemen was compelling enough that many of the largest companies that buy from the Big Four eventually filed lawsuits of their own – claiming that the Big Four weren’t just shorting the cattlemen; they were also gouging wholesale distributors, grocers, and fast food chains, who, in turn, passed the pain along to customers. The most notable suit came from McDonald’s, which, in a complaint filed in federal court in New York in 2024, claimed that “the market for beef became a monopoly,” because the large processors “collude with seeming impunity,” acting as “a single enterprise to advance their conspiracy.”

In other words, according to the lawsuit, the Big Four control so much of the market for beef in this country that they constitute a cartel capable of overpowering McDonald’s, an iconic corporation with more than 13,000 stores in the US selling north of 5 million hamburgers each day.  The meatpackers again denied any wrongdoing, saying that descriptions of a concentrated market do not constitute evidence of conspiracy. 

The Big Four’s business partners — from the cattlemen to the Golden Arches — say the strongest proof of the meatpackers’ stranglehold on prices emerged during the pandemic.

The COVID-19 virus spread unevenly among their packing plants, forcing closures in some areas of the country while plants in other places were able to remain open. In theory, that should have created an ever-shifting market, depending on which producer had more plants in active operation.

For example, in early May 2020, two giant beef plants in Nebraska — the Tyson Foods plant in Dakota City and the Cargill plant in Schuyler — were shut down due to COVID concerns. Those plants could process a combined 13,000 animals per day, more than 10% of the country’s total cattle slaughter. But JBS and National Beef didn’t move to seize that portion of the market with their plants in other locations. Instead, they reduced cattle purchases to match their competitors — and all of the Big Four raised prices to their clients. The cost of choice cuts of beef — ribeye, New York strip, filet mignon — doubled, while the price paid to ranchers for slaughter-ready cattle dropped 30%.

But all four companies reduced production, according to data collected by the cattlemen, even at plants that were functioning. By the last week of April 2020, nearly 40% of the nation’s beef processing capacity was offline as plants were idled due to COVID-19 illnesses among plant employees.

Complaints from ranchers grew so loud that the US Department of Agriculture widened an existing investigation into allegations of price-fixing that was opened after the Tyson fire in 2019. But it wasn’t until May 2020, after attorneys general from 11 states issued a letter urging the US Department of Justice to investigate the beef industry, that Trump finally took action. 

The DOJ issued civil subpoenas to the Big Four, specifically seeking any evidence of collusion, and simultaneously opened a criminal investigation into poultry producers, including criminal indictments of the CEO and former vice president of Pilgrim’s Pride, a subsidiary of JBS. Among other evidence cited in the indictments, the DOJ described text messages from executives at Pilgrim’s directing employees to be in touch with supposed competitors to raise their prices. In one message, a Pilgrim’s manager reported to the CEO, “They are listening to my direction.”

Within months, JBS’s Brazilian parent company settled a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) investigation brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The US investigation had begun after a police investigation in Brazil concluded that JBS’s owners, Joesley Batista and Wesley Batista, had systematically offered bribes to public officials in order to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from a state-owned bank. The SEC concluded that those ill-gotten loans had been used to facilitate JBS’s 2009 acquisition of Pilgrim’s Pride — allowing the Brazilian conglomerate to increase its control over the American food supply. 

Charles Cain, chief of the SEC’s foreign corrupt practices enforcement unit, bluntly accused JBS and Pilgrim’s of “engaging in bribery to finance their expansion into the U.S. markets and then continuing to engage in bribery while occupying senior board positions at Pilgrim’s.” These were, he added, examples of “brazen misconduct” and, in the language of bureaucratic understatement, “a profound failure to exercise good corporate governance.”

Between 2009 and 2020, according to the SEC, JBS officials had paid bribes to obtain loans to purchase American companies, funneled those payments through U.S. banks, and then filed falsified books to cover up those payments, while simultaneously engaging in illegal collusion and price-fixing to boost their profits by cutting American cattle ranchers and other livestock producers out of their share of the market. JBS, its Brazilian parent company, and the Batistas “consented” to the SEC’s finding that they “caused Pilgrim’s Pride’s violations of the books and records and internal accounting controls provisions of the FCPA.” JBS paid $27 million in fines. The parent company also pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to violate the FCPA” and paid more than $250 million as a “criminal penalty.” The agreement saved JBS from criminal charges, but the company’s bid to be publicly traded in the US was effectively ended — and the criminal cases against Pilgrim’s Pride executives proceeded to trial.

In early 2021, Tyson paid more than $221 million to settle a private class action alleging price-fixing in the poultry industry. But the attempt to take on the biggest of the Big Four, JBS, during the Biden administration unraveled in 2021 and 2022. Criminal trials in Colorado, where JBS and Pilgrim’s Pride are headquartered, ended in an acquittal of the executives — despite what the Wall Street Journal described as “cooperating witnesses and mounds of evidence, including phone calls, emails and text messages over several years that showed competitors talking about their prices.” The defendants argued that sharing price information isn’t illegal, and said that they never agreed to set prices. 

The DOJ dropped the remaining criminal charges, but an executive order issued by President Biden promised to work toward increasing competition in the beef industry. But nothing changed. The DOJ investigation into the Big Four technically remained open, but no new prosecutions were brought, and longstanding lawsuits seemed to stall or produce small settlements.

Beef prices continued to climb. By early 2024, the price of steaks was up more than 30% from its pre-pandemic price, even though the cost of cattle had steeply declined. The Big Four blamed inflation, but their prices had risen at more than double the rate of other consumer goods. As the 2024 presidential campaign heated up, food prices became a central issue with voters. Biden dropped out of the race in July, but unchecked food costs under his administration — driven by skyrocketing staples like beef and eggs — dogged his vice president, Kamala Harris, as she tried to pick up the campaign, and turned races against Democrats down the ballot.

In November, Trump surged back to the White House, in part by repeatedly promising that he would bring voters’ grocery bills under control. “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,” he said in August 2024.

That hasn’t happened.

At Trump’s inauguration, press coverage focused on the support of tech companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and PayPal, as they raced to curry favor with the White House by giving millions in donations. Less attention was paid to the fact that the largest single donor to the inauguration — contributing as much as those tech giants combined — was Pilgrim’s Pride, the embattled JBS subsidiary that Trump’s DOJ had been investigating less than five years before.

Weeks into his new term, Trump’s administration removed key members of the agencies that had kept open the investigation of JBS under Biden. And then, by executive order, Trump paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Charles Cain, the enforcement chief, resigned in April, and that same month, the SEC allowed JBS to offer shares on the New York Stock Exchange, increasing its capitalization by billions of dollars. 

In September, it was reported that Trump’s DOJ had quietly closed the longstanding investigation of the Big Four. In 2018, under the first Trump Administration, another Brazilian company, Marfrig, had acquired a controlling share in National Beef. That means, that just months into his second term, “America first” Donald Trump had allowed two foreign companies to gain a powerful position in the American beef market without meaningful fear of oversight or investigation — even as prices at the grocery checkout and drive-thru window continued to soar.

Weeks later, as “affordability” began to dominate political and media narratives, President Trump announced the US would boost its cattle inventory by quadrupling the amount of Argentine beef allowed to enter the country at a lower tariff rate each year. “If we do that,” Trump told a group of reporters aboard Air Force One, “that will bring our beef prices down.” American ranchers were dismayed. “It’s really just a kick in the nuts,” a Kansas cattle rancher told the New York Times. “Come on, President Trump, this is ‘America First’ policy? No.” Importing foreign beef, they said, would just further undercut their ability to command higher prices from the Big Four.

At first, on his Truth Social account, Trump responded dismissively. “The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil,” he wrote. “It would be nice if they would understand that.” The United States Cattlemen’s Association said the White House’s efforts targeted the wrong link in the supply chain by putting pressure on cattle ranchers, instead of the Big Four.

Representative Julie Fedorchak, a Republican from North Dakota, told the New York Times her office had been flooded with calls and texts from ranchers after Trump first mentioned buying more Argentine beef. Within days, she and seven fellow Republican representatives sent a letter to the White House relaying “strong concerns” and asking for more information about its plans.

Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins seemed to take note. “When you have four major processors,” Rollins said, during an appearance on Fox News in late October, “you have a major issue [because] they are processing 85% of the beef in America.” Her proposed solution was what independent cattle ranchers have been advocating for years: “We have to decentralize, deregulate, invest in and incentivize smaller processors.” In November, Trump shocked everyone by announcing that he was instructing the Department of Justice to open an inquiry.

Attorney General Pam Bondi responded within minutes: “Our investigation is underway!”

Soon after, the White House issued a press statement identifying the Big Four beef packers as the targets. It noted that these four companies “currently dominate” the industry and echoed Trump’s objection that two of the companies are “either foreign-owned or have significant foreign ownership and control.” The statement cited “mounting evidence” that these companies “have violated antitrust laws through coordinated pricing or capacity restrictions.” The White House promised to “root out any illegal collusion, restore fair competition, and protect our food security.” No mention was made of the DOJ dropping its investigation into these very allegations weeks earlier. And, according to Bloomberg, the Big Four “have chosen not to comment on the investigation or the president’s allegations.” (The White House declined to provide on the record responses to questions about the reporting  in this article.)

And though the Big Four complain that the meat margin has been reduced by rising cattle prices, their earnings remain strong. (In fact, JBS Beef North America reported record revenue of $7.2 billion for the third quarter of 2025.) Meanwhile, many cattle ranchers — unable to maintain their herds with razor-thin margins — have reduced the size of their operations, pushing cattle prices slightly higher. JBS, in its quarterly earnings statement, said this was “pressuring profitability.” 

Soon after, Tyson announced the closure of its Lexington plant. The move seems to mirror the decision by each of the Big Four to close plants in coordination in 2015 — and hints at more closures to come now. Just days after the Tyson announcement, Beef Magazine wrote, “Tyson went first. Now the question becomes, Who goes next?”

All of which puts President Trump in a tight spot.

Since JBS’s giant donation to the inauguration in January, the company’s CEO Joesley Batista flew from Sao Paulo to personally petition Trump to lower trade tariffs on Brazilian beef (it worked). But now, deep red towns in deep red states are losing thousands of jobs, seeing cattle operations go bankrupt, and are watching their grocery bills go through the roof. (In a statement, a JBS spokesperson said: “We continue to invest in best-in-class practices, technology, and innovations that support a resilient food system and meet the expectations of our customers, partners, and the communities we serve.”)

Will Trump insist on a full investigation of the Big Four or listen to their claims of steep investments and falling profits? In an email to The Guardian, a spokesperson for Tyson said the company “continues to navigate significant headwinds in its beef business, which reported a $143 million loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, following $720 million in losses over the past two years, as the U.S. cattle herd remains at historic lows.”

Back in Nebraska, Senate candidate Dan Osborn doesn’t believe the claims  that Tyson is doing necessary belt-tightening. “We’re seeing big profits out of Tyson. We’re seeing executives get huge bonuses. We’re seeing all the stockholders getting paid.” The only ones suffering, he says, are Tyson line workers like Constancio Perales. “There’s people that have been there thirty years that are ready to retire, and now they’re just out. That’s not the right thing to do.” 

He hoped that President Trump would step in and prevent the closure in Lexington or, at least, force Tyson to sell the plant to a smaller competitor. And he hopes that Trump will deliver on his promise to investigate the Big Four, in order to save cattle ranchers and small town jobs and ease food prices for working families.

In the meantime, Tyson has proceeded with its plans to close the plant in Lexington. Its last day of full operation was January 20. The company temporarily retained about 300 employees to “perform duties related to the plant closure” — but most of those workers have been laid off now, too.

“For me it was a very good place to work,” Constancio said. “Yes, I get worn out and my whole body aches because I’ve been there for so many years, but I feel at home working there.” He made enough money to buy a 1,500 square-foot house just south of the Union Pacific tracks, a place to raise his kids and give them an education, so they could have better jobs than he has. “I’ve been able to provide for my family, that’s the most important thing.”

But with the plant closure, everything may be lost. And not just for him. The whole town depends on Tyson — more than half the working-age adults in the town of 10,000 are employed by the company. An impact analysis conducted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in December estimated that the closure may cost the state nearly $3.3 billion in annual economic losses. María, Constancio’s wife of 32 years, works as a lunch lady in the public schools. Employees there have been told that their contracts could be cancelled because soon there may not be enough kids to keep schools open. María said she didn’t know what they would do. Constancio was months shy of getting his pension and still two years away from qualifying for Medicare.

He could apply for jobs at other Tyson packinghouses in Nebraska or Kansas, but there’s no guarantee he’d get work at those plants. And he hates to think about moving away and, with everyone leaving town, his family is worried what it could get if they sold the home in Lexington where they have lived for more than a generation. 

“Without his work, nothing in Lexington would be worth anything,” María said, sitting at the kitchen table while a pot bubbled on the stove. “But after almost thirty years, this house is going to be worthless, and it’ll be as if we did nothing. We don’t have any savings; this is all we have.”

On December 6, Trump signed an executive order to create task forces in the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price-fixing. “My Administration will act to determine whether anti-competitive behavior, especially by foreign-controlled companies, increases the cost of living for Americans,” Trump wrote. Task forces are one thing, but prices continue to climb. And it is starting to take a toll – both economically and politically. Days after Trump’s announcement, POLITICO published a poll of more than 2,000 Americans that showed that half of those surveyed said they find it difficult or very difficult to pay for food. A majority — 55% — blamed the Trump administration for the high prices.

Dan Osborn warns that Trump is especially at risk of further alienating voters in rural areas, where grocery prices are often as much as 25% higher than in urban areas — due to lack of competition and reliance on dollar stores and chains like Walmart.

“This is rural America,” Osborn says. “This is his base that essentially he’s — for a lack of a better term — fucking over.”

The brothers were starting to wonder if their smugglers had left them to rot. For more than two days, Begaí and Mariano Santiago Hipólito had been holed up with roughly two dozen other migrants in a cramped stash house in the border city of Laredo. The single room had no furniture and had barely enough space for everyone to lie down. There was no place to bathe, and the only toilet was foul. The meager food rations and cases of bottled water the smugglers had given them were long gone. Anxious and confused, Begaí began peppering Mariano with questions. Why were they stuck here? How far were they from their final destination?

Mariano had been to the U.S. once before, nearly a decade earlier, but this was nothing like his previous trip. His first time crossing, there hadn’t been swarms of cartel thugs on the Mexican side of the border, and he hadn’t had to endure prolonged confinement in a squalid and sweltering stash house after crossing the Rio Grande. Now, drenched in sweat, he had taken off his T-shirt to fan himself. Every so often, he let out a long sigh.

“Tranquilo,” he told Begaí. “Chill out.” 

The brothers had been inseparable since they were kids, so when Mariano told Begaí he was leaving their hometown in southern Mexico to find work in the U.S., in part to pay for his ailing wife’s medical bills, Begaí reluctantly agreed to join him. Tall and lean with a neatly trimmed goatee, 33-year-old Begaí was the more serious older brother. One year younger, Mariano was stocky, outgoing, and always looking for a laugh. But Begaí noticed that his brother’s upbeat demeanor was beginning to crack. 

It was the morning of June 27, 2022. The migrants they shared their quarters with had come from all across Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. There were a few children and some women among them, but most were men in their prime working years. They had all paid extraordinary amounts—as much as $15,000—to be smuggled into the U.S. Now they were waiting for a ride out of the heavily patrolled border zone to San Antonio, where they would fan out and travel on separately.

Some were bound for nearby cities in Texas, and others were heading as far as Tennessee and California. Many had plans to reunite with loved ones they hadn’t seen in years—parents, romantic partners, siblings, cousins. Almost all of them had left their homes in hopes of landing a job. Some had a specific opportunity waiting for them. Others would take whatever they could find. Begaí and Mariano had family in Atlanta, where they planned to work construction.

Concerned that a local might spot them and tip off authorities, the smugglers had forbidden the migrants from leaving the stash house, even for a quick breath of fresh air. Their organization had lost two houses to local police and the U.S. Border Patrol earlier that month. Similar busts happened in Laredo all the time, sometimes several in a day, turning up anywhere from a handful of migrants to dozens, usually lodged in abysmal conditions. In most cases the stash-house operators got away. As for the migrants, they were expelled to Mexico, but many would be back in the U.S. within a few days. Still, busts were a costly disruption for the smugglers, and they did everything they could to avoid them.

When a white box truck finally showed up to pick up the migrants, Begaí and Mariano weren’t exactly relieved. The men who ushered them aboard wore masks and barked orders, confiscating their phones and the water bottles some of them had refilled from the sink. The truck’s cargo area was already jammed full of people who’d been staying at another spot. Despite their reservations, the brothers climbed in, and soon the truck was moving. It rattled along for about ten minutes until they felt it come to a stop. When the rear gate was rolled up, they saw that a tractor trailer had backed up to the box truck, its open doors forming a tunnel between the two vehicles. As they shuffled toward the trailer, Begaí hesitated. “What happens if we don’t get in?” he said. “Then you’ll stay here, in Laredo,” Mariano replied. 

They were among the last to leap across to the trailer, jostling in the semidarkness for a place to sit. They noticed a strange combination of scents, some kind of cooking seasoning mixed with the odors of more than five dozen people who had been living in filthy conditions for days. The brothers sank down along one of the walls somewhere near the middle. 

Among the dimly lit faces around them was a trio of young women from a small town in Guatemala, where many live in concrete-block homes with dirt floors and no running water amid small plots of maize. One of them, a 21-year-old with long black hair, had worked hard to earn an education degree, at great cost to her parents, but because of her country’s dysfunctional government, she couldn’t find work as a teacher. Determined to repay her parents, she was on her way to join a sister in a meatpacking town in Minnesota. 

The youngest in the trailer were two cousins from Guatemala, thirteen and fourteen years old, who had relatives in the U.S. and had convinced their parents that their futures would be brighter if they could attend school there. The older of the two was a fan of Lionel Messi and dreamed of playing professional soccer someday, but in the meantime he wanted to earn enough to help his mother care for his sister and younger brother. 

The oldest was a 55-year-old construction worker from Morelos, Mexico. He had lived in a small town in western Arkansas for more than two decades, just outside a county where Hispanic residents make up about a third of the population. He had traveled back to Mexico to visit relatives despite the risks of a dangerous return voyage. Now he was on his way home to his wife, three children, and four grandchildren. 

Near the rear doors of the trailer were a brother and sister in their twenties from a suburb of Antigua, Guatemala’s former colonial capital. The pair had all but adopted a teenage girl they’d met at various points along their journey north. The girl was now scared and crying, so when they sat down, the siblings placed her between them and tried to comfort her. A former Mexican soldier and his cousin were also caring for a younger traveling companion, an eighteen-year-old boy from Mexico City whose mother had asked them to keep an eye on him.

Somewhere nearby, a 27-year-old Honduran woman who was around twelve weeks pregnant did her best to get comfortable. That morning she had called her mom, who was already living near Los Angeles, to tell her she’d made it to the U.S. “We’ll see each other soon,” she’d said. They all spread out and made room for one another as best they could. It was nearly 100 degrees outside, and the air inside the trailer was already unbearably hot. Moments later, the doors swung closed, and they heard the unmistakable sound of the exterior latches turning and dropping into place. In complete darkness, they felt the truck lurch into motion just before 2 p.m. If all went according to plan, they would be in San Antonio in a little more than three hours.

“The U.S. Failed”

Everything did not go according to plan. The catastrophe that unfolded that day would result in the deadliest immigration-related disaster in modern American history. Fifty-three passengers perished, including 26 Mexicans, 21 Guatemalans, and 6 Hondurans. The incident briefly captured international headlines, but this story—based on more than two years of reporting—is the first full account of that awful event, its complex causes, and its wrenching aftermath. 

To piece it together, I traveled throughout Mexico and Guatemala, ultimately spending time with sixteen of the victims’ families. Eventually, I was also able to interview a survivor whose harrowing tale provided rare firsthand insight into a smuggling operation gone terribly wrong.

On a forensic level, there was little mystery about what happened inside the trailer. The more urgent questions were: Why did it happen? And who was responsible? During the trial of two of the smugglers, at a federal courthouse in San Antonio, jurors heard testimony from investigators, Border Patrol agents, other smugglers, and survivors that revealed the complicated inner workings of the smuggling organization, the cartel that dominates the Mexican side of the Rio Grande across from Laredo, and the formidable border-security apparatus on the U.S. side.

Charged with conspiracy to transport illegal aliens resulting in death, the accused faced a mountain of damning evidence. The defense attorney—whose long goatee, alligator cowboy boots, and theatrical delivery contrasted with the staid dress and demeanor of the prosecutors—made several attempts to blame the U.S. government for allowing the disaster to occur. Why didn’t the government take down the smuggling network sooner? Why had agents allowed a trailer loaded with more than sixty people to pass through a Border Patrol checkpoint north of Laredo? “The U.S. failed,” he said while cross-examining a Homeland Security Investigations agent. “Would you agree that somebody dropped the ball?” The judge had to repeatedly remind the jury that the U.S. government was not on trial.

In fact, as the trial revealed, a smuggling network composed of ordinary people who were often reckless and incompetent had managed to slip through one of the best-funded and most technologically sophisticated border-policing systems in the world. As with countless similar operations, the perpetrators had gotten away with their scheme over and over, succeeding far more often than they failed—until the day they failed in the most horrific way.

What happened in that trailer between Laredo and San Antonio is the only exceptional part of an otherwise commonplace narrative, and in the years since, no meaningful legislative progress has been made to reduce the mortal dangers that migrants confront en route to jobs in the U.S. Instead, Congress has continued to increase the budget for walls and fences, checkpoint expansions, surveillance technology, detention facilities, and law enforcement personnel. Every escalation of border militarization heightens the danger to migrants, but there’s little evidence that it will deter them or their smugglers over the long term.

The disaster was the worst of its kind but by no means the first. And unless something changes, it won’t be the last.

A Mysterious Ailment 

Begaí and Mariano’s journey to the back of the truck began in Tuxtepec, a bustling city on the humid plains of eastern Oaxaca, about fifty miles from the Gulf. They had grown up in Lázaro Cárdenas, a tiny Chinanteco Indigenous community in the foothills of the Sierra Madre. The brothers and their seven younger siblings were raised in a house made of palm leaves near the wide and gentle Usila River, where they fetched water before daybreak and learned to spearfish to supplement their mother’s sparse table—the family subsisted mostly on maize and beans. There were no roads leaving the village, only a narrow dirt path that they walked barefoot. To get to a hospital required an expensive trip by motorboat downriver and across the sprawling Lake Miguel Alemán. As soon as they were old enough to swing machetes, the siblings joined their father and uncles in the fields, felling trees and digging furrows by hand, returning at the end of the day soaked in sweat, their hands bloody from the thorny brush. 

Begaí, the eldest, dropped out of school when he was fourteen to help support his family. He left home for the first time at sixteen to work on a sugarcane plantation outside Tuxtepec, about an hour away by boat. It was punishing labor, but his wages helped Mariano become the first in the family to graduate from high school.

Armed with his diploma, Mariano set off for Mexico City, but whatever hopes he’d had of saving for his future and contributing to his family’s welfare were quickly dashed. The chaos of the capital was bewildering for Mariano, who spoke Spanish as a second language (his family spoke a variant of Chinanteco) and had never been away from home. He was lonely, and the only job he could find was in a pizzeria, where he barely made enough to pay rent. After a few years, he returned to Oaxaca with empty pockets. He trained his sights on the U.S., where one of his uncles worked construction, owned a house, and had settled down with an American wife. Mariano’s goals were similarly humble: He wanted to save enough money to build a house in Mexico and start a family. 

Around 2013, he met a woman at a religious gathering in Tuxtepec, where he and Begaí played guitar and sang in a worship band. Luz Estrella Cuevas Remolino was devout, like Mariano, and told him she also dreamed of starting a family. Soon after they met, he departed for the U.S., borrowing money from his uncle to finance the journey, crossing the border on foot somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, and eventually making his way to Atlanta. He kept in touch with Luz Estrella by phone, and the relationship grew serious. 

After three years of working as a plumber six days a week and saving almost every penny that didn’t go to food or housing, Mariano injured his hand on the job. He’d been so broke when he left for the U.S. that he’d had to borrow a pair of pants from one of his younger brothers. With a workers’ compensation payout padding his savings, Mariano saw no point in staying until he healed. He rushed back to Mexico to marry Luz Estrella. 

At the wedding, she carried white roses and wore a white dress with a veil that trailed on the floor behind her. He sported a gray three-button suit with a metallic sheen and a dark red tie. They lived with her parents in Tuxtepec while he began building a home in a new subdivision outside town. Begaí and three of their younger brothers pitched in whenever they could, and after about a year, the house was mostly finished. But the project depleted Mariano’s savings, so he started picking up construction gigs alongside Begaí. 

By then, Begaí had also gotten married. María Antonia Torres Morales, who went by Mari, was four years older than her husband. She wasn’t looking for a new relationship when he came along, but she was drawn to his earnestness and his desire to start a family. When she was in her early twenties, she’d had a daughter with a partner who’d abandoned her. She worried that when Begaí found out about her daughter, he would also flee, but when she told him, he promised to raise the girl as if she were his own. They were married in 2014, and Mari gave birth to a son later that year. They called him Jafet, after one of the sons of Noah.

Begaí enjoyed family life with Mari and the two kids. They lived with her parents in a house that had a lush garden, banana trees, chickens, pigs, and a small creek that ran along one side of the property. He and Mariano were both skilled at carpentry and plumbing, and sometimes they landed a long-term contract together and worked six days a week, making about $20 a day. But dry spells were frequent, so they took whatever they could get. 

One day in June 2022, they had just finished digging a septic pit when Mariano told Begaí some distressing news: He was so broke that he was barely able to put food on the table. Mariano’s finances had never recovered after he’d wiped out his savings building his house. With a four-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, he now faced the same financial stress that had plagued his parents and that he’d been so determined to avoid. 

Making matters worse, Luz Estrella needed an expensive diagnostic test to determine the cause of a strange pain in her chest. It didn’t cost much by U.S. standards—about $350—but it was more than Mariano could afford. Luz Estrella was also receiving treatment for a kidney stone and had been told she might need an operation to remove it, which could cost upward of $1,400, or about three months’ worth of full-time wages. Mariano had already borrowed from three of his younger brothers who were working factory jobs in Ciudad Juárez. He saw no other option than to trek north. “I’m going back to the U.S.,” he told Begaí, “and I want you to come with me.” 

Standing beside the septic pit, sweaty and caked with dirt, Begaí felt sick with worry. He told Mariano that he didn’t know the first thing about how to get to the border or how to pay for a trip like that. Mariano told him that he would handle everything. He had already talked to a friend who was still in Atlanta, and who had agreed to lend them the money to pay the smugglers and to cover the exorbitant tax the cartel charged to every migrant at the border. The only up-front costs would be plane tickets to Monterrey and bus tickets to Nuevo Laredo, the border city across the Rio Grande from Laredo. “It will only be for two years, and then I’ll come back with you,” Mariano said. 

Begaí’s first instinct was to say no. His family’s finances were relatively secure—Mari’s mother ran a food stall that was a reliable backstop when construction was slow—so he had no urgent reason to leave. What if something happened to him? Who would take care of Mari and the kids? Begaí told Mariano he needed to think about it, but Mariano said he was going either way. “I’ve already got the date.” 

Begaí broached the subject with Mari a few days later, and she pleaded with him to stay home. “You could fall into the hands of bad people, and they could hurt you. Then what would I do?” Begaí said he wanted to save money to build a house of their own and to help Mari’s daughter, now sixteen, finish high school. Mari became angry. Jafet was only eight, and she didn’t think it was a good time for him to be without his father. “We have everything we need here,” she said. 

Begaí confessed that he felt obligated for the simplest of reasons: “I don’t want my brother to go alone.”

A few days later, Mari was at home preparing dinner when Begaí burst in after work and started throwing clothes into a backpack. “I’m leaving,” he told her. 

“You’re not going to eat?” she asked. 

“I don’t have time,” he said. 

Stunned, Mari and the children followed him out the door and down the dusty street, begging him to come back, but he didn’t stop.

Smugglers Row

That evening, Begaí and Mariano boarded a flight to Monterrey. Begaí’s understanding of the gauntlet he was entering was as featureless as the darkness outside the airplane windows. He didn’t know that he was hurtling toward one of the most lawless regions in Mexico, where a powerful criminal organization exercised near-total control, or that an army of Border Patrol agents backed by helicopters, drones, thermal-imaging cameras, and scent-detecting dogs awaited them on the other side of the Rio Grande.

The Cártel del Noreste traced its origins to Los Zetas, a paramilitary group founded by former Mexican special forces soldiers. The Zetas began as an enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel before its leaders struck out on their own, creating one of the most brutal criminal organizations in Mexican history. Starting in about 2012, a series of arrests and assassinations of Zeta leaders unleashed a vicious power struggle within the organization. The Cártel del Noreste was one of several groups that formed from the fragments. By 2022 it dominated territory along the border in three Mexican states. Nuevo Laredo—the city of nearly half a million people where Begaí and Mariano were headed—was the base for its drug-trafficking and human-smuggling operations. 

Just as Prohibition gave rise to the illicit liquor trade and increased the power of the mafia organizations that controlled it, the U.S. war on drugs, launched in 1971 by President Richard Nixon, had helped create the conditions for drug cartels to flourish. Today those same cartels and the smuggling organizations that operate in their territories are raking in enormous profits because of the near-total ban on migration across the roughly 1,900-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico. 

People have been sneaking across the border for generations, but transporting them wasn’t always so lucrative. In the early nineties, guides known as coyotes charged as little as $20 to help a migrant cross on foot. The smuggling boom began in earnest in January 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, flooding Mexico with cheap, industrially produced American agricultural products. Squeezed out of their own markets, Mexican farmers began migrating to the U.S. in unprecedented numbers. Later that same year, a devaluation of the peso sent Mexico’s economy into free fall—unemployment nearly doubled, and masses of displaced industrial workers joined the farmers heading north.

Free trade did not mean freedom of movement for people, and President Bill Clinton sought to clamp down on the flow of undocumented workers by ordering the first major militarization of the U.S. southern border. A new approach known as “prevention through deterrence,” which debuted the same year that NAFTA kicked in, involved the use of fences, checkpoints, armed patrols, and other measures to push migrants away from common urban crossing zones and into harsh terrain. The idea was that migrants would then decide that the risk and discomfort of attempting to cross a hostile stretch of the border—the rugged mountains and scorching deserts of Arizona, for example—were not worth the reward. But migrants kept trying, and the number of apprehensions at the U.S. southern border each year rose from about 1 million in 1994 to nearly 1.7 million in 2000. 

The Border Patrol’s budget in 1993, the year before prevention through deterrence went into effect, was $363 million. Three decades later, it had swelled to more than $7 billion. Over that same period, the number of Border Patrol agents on the southern border climbed from fewer than 4,000 to roughly 20,000. Yet no amount of militarization at the border has ever resulted in a long-term reduction in migrant flows. The policy’s engineers, and those who have continued to push for increased militarization under every successive Democratic and Republican administration, have repeatedly underestimated the migrants’ determination and the creativity of smugglers, who have found ways to circumvent everything the Border Patrol puts in their way. 

Immigrant labor, meanwhile, remains vital to every part of the U.S. economy. The result is a perverse system in which migrant workers determined to provide for their families continue to come north, and industries and small businesses across the country continue to rely on them. Rather than acknowledge that reality and pass legislation to address it—such as expanding the number of temporary work visas for sectors that already employ large numbers of undocumented people—Congress continues to pour money into the border-industrial complex and the deportation machine. 

Since 2003 the U.S. has spent an estimated $400 billion on the agencies involved in immigration enforcement—more than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. The primary beneficiaries of this buildup include the defense contractors that profited from the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, among others, have spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to both political parties. 

Under Donald Trump’s current administration, immigration-enforcement spending has skyrocketed, and the number of troops on the southern border has nearly tripled. And while unauthorized crossings have decreased significantly from the December 2023 peak—a fact loudly proclaimed by Trump officials—it’s unlikely that intensified policing was the primary cause. More than two-thirds of the drop occurred during the year before Trump’s inauguration, and it appears to have been driven mostly by reduced labor demand in the U.S. and changes to refugee policy at official points of entry.

The deterrent effect of escalating militarization is hard to gauge, but one thing is inarguable: It has added layers of complexity and risk that have made the smugglers’ services more valuable. One result is that human smuggling now rivals drug trafficking in profits. Another is that thousands of migrants have died attempting more dangerous crossings, and the U.S. southern border has become the epicenter of the world’s deadliest land-migration route. The Border Patrol has reported more than 10,500 migrant deaths on the border since 1994, but the true figure is likely much higher. Taking into account the migrants who die on the Mexican side and the many who go missing and are never found, some human rights groups believe the number could be as much as ten times greater. 

By the time Mariano and Begaí made their journey, the days of $20 crossings were history—migrants were paying an average of $6,000 to $10,000, with some smugglers charging more than $20,000. Those revenues are distributed across networks that stretch into Central and South America and throughout the world, divided among recruiters, drivers of all types, recipients of bribes, document forgers, stash-house operators, hotel owners, guides, and, of course, the cartels. In 1997 the U.N. International Organization for Migration put the value of the worldwide migrant-smuggling industry at $7 billion. By 2021 the Department of Homeland Security’s Operational Analysis Center estimated that human smuggling across the U.S. southern border alone was generating between $2 and $6 billion annually.

The cartels that control territory along the border don’t need to get involved in the logistics of moving people from their points of origin all the way up through Mexico. They leave that work to smaller organizations that have local ties and operate like independent contractors. The Cártel del Noreste simply sits in Nuevo Laredo like a troll beneath a bridge, extorting money from every migrant who shows up planning to cross. When Mariano and Begaí arrived in late June 2022, the going rate for the tax for Mexicans—known as a piso in Spanish and paid directly to the cartel by cash or bank transfer—was about $2,000. People arriving from farther afield paid more.

The cartel does not tolerate freelancers. Scouts keep a close eye on everyone entering and leaving the city, and all migrants who arrive from an out-of-town bus station are expected to have a code to prove that they’re linked to a smuggling outfit that’s in good standing with the cartel. The codes are simple words—Diablo, Ferrari, Demon—that help the smugglers keep track of their clients and that the cartel uses to maintain detailed accounts on the smugglers. Sometimes the smugglers also give their migrants colored armbands or matching T-shirts. Wandering the streets without a code—let alone trying to cross the river—can get you kidnapped, beaten, or killed. 

Mariano had kept his smuggler informed of their travel details, sending photographs of their Mexican identification cards, bus tickets, and bus numbers, and updating him as they made their way from Oaxaca to Nuevo Laredo. The smuggler relayed the photos to his cartel contact and texted Mariano his personal code—050 Flaco—which they would need to provide to cartel scouts at every stop. Mariano scribbled the code in red ink on a scrap of lined notebook paper, along with the name of the hotel where the smuggler had directed them to stay. 

As soon as the brothers got to the bus station in Nuevo Laredo, a cartel scout approached and asked for their code. Once they’d been cleared, they took a taxi to Hotel Calderón, a five-story brick building about three hundred yards from the Rio Grande. It was obvious that this was no normal hotel. Begaí and Mariano were struck by its filth and the disinterested attitudes of the staff. There was a table near reception heaped with belongings left behind by earlier migrants who had passed through—clothing, shoes, backpacks. They were under orders from their smuggler not to leave except to buy food, and in that case to return immediately. The brothers checked into a room with thin mattresses on aluminum frames and metal grates on the windows. At one point, an older man knocked on their door and confided that he was afraid. The three of them prayed together. “Cheer up,” Mariano told him. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

The cartel granted each approved smuggling organization exclusive access to a stretch of the riverbank linked to its code. Local guides on the Mexican side communicated with lookouts on the U.S. side who monitored Border Patrol movements. Wide sections on both banks were undeveloped, covered with palms and riverine vegetation that offered concealment up to the water’s edge. On the night of June 21, Mariano and Begaí followed a guide to the river for their first crossing attempt. 

The guide asked everyone in the group of about a dozen if they knew how to swim. Though it’s shallow enough to wade in many places, the Rio Grande still has dangerous currents and deep holes that drowned 172 migrants in 2022 alone, according to Border Patrol data from that year. The brothers, having grown up beside the Usila River, said they were strong swimmers. “Each of you needs to choose someone who doesn’t know how to swim and help them,” the guide said. 

They crossed without incident, crawling out on the U.S. side into a clearing that smelled like livestock and appeared to Begaí to be a cattle corral. He barely had time to take in his surroundings when spotlights flooded the area, blinding him. He heard shouts and almost took off, but Mariano grabbed him. “They already saw you. There’s no point running,” he said.  

Agents handcuffed the brothers and loaded them into a truck with about twenty others, then photographed them and scanned their fingerprints using a mobile device. At about one in the morning, the Border Patrol dropped them off at one of Laredo’s international bridges and watched them walk back into Mexico. Soaked and exhausted, they found a few sketchy men hanging around on the other side who demanded their code. They then took a taxi back to Hotel Calderón.

Less than 24 hours later, they made their second attempt. Again, they got caught and dumped at the bridge. A third effort failed as well. Their experience was typical—about 60 percent of all apprehensions on the border that year were repeat crossers. Failure is so routine that smugglers guarantee multiple attempts without an extra fee.

On their fourth try, the brothers successfully evaded the Border Patrol and managed to rendezvous with an appointed driver who took them to the single-room stash house, where they waited for the truck that would take them to San Antonio.

Evading the Dogs

050 Flaco—the code that Mariano and Begaí had used—was associated with two smugglers: Felipe Orduña Torres, who lived in San Antonio, and José Martínez Olvera, based in Houston. Of the two, it was Orduña Torres who maintained direct contact with the cartel. Both were undocumented Mexicans who had been in the smuggling game for years. They ran separate operations, but they’d formed a partnership in 2019 to capitalize on a tactic referred to by the Border Patrol as bulk smuggling—moving large numbers of people in commercial vehicles, usually tractor trailers. 

Bulk smuggling first emerged as a response to the explosive growth of commercial trucking between Mexico and the U.S. after NAFTA came into force. It became more attractive when the shift in manufacturing from China to Mexico—which started gaining momentum in about 2012—caused an unprecedented traffic surge on the border. Laredo is the busiest of all U.S. land ports, and it saw more than 5.5 million commercial truck crossings in 2022. Every day that year, trucks carried about $800 million worth of agricultural and manufactured products across the Rio Grande, and some six thousand of them passed through a single checkpoint that straddles Interstate 35 about thirty miles north of the border. The Border Patrol refers to it as Checkpoint 29, or C29. For smugglers, it was the narrowest part of the funnel. Blending in with all the other big rigs was the most efficient way to get past it.

Daunting as it was, travel by trailer through the checkpoints north of Laredo was marketed to migrants as a safer and more comfortable option than slogging on foot across the desert in less populous areas. Heat is the number one killer of migrants on the U.S. southern border, where about nine hundred undocumented people died from exposure to extreme heat between 2018 and 2022; during the same period, fewer than two hundred died in vehicle-related incidents. Migrants forked over steep fees for a journey that included a spot in a trailer once they reached the U.S. side, what some smugglers called the VIP option. 

C29 has been in operation since 2006 and encompasses fifteen acres, with an on-site detention facility, a secondary inspection bay, and X-ray machines that allow officers to detect humans concealed inside closed trailers. Despite the checkpoint’s size, traffic volume has long overwhelmed its capacity. In 2022 there were only two dedicated commercial truck lanes, which meant long lines of idling rigs often stretched south onto I-35, slowing the flow of commerce and increasing the risk of accidents. The worse the traffic at the checkpoint, the better for the smugglers. They kept an eye on commercial truck activity and timed their movements to hit the checkpoint when things were backed up and agents would be under pressure to keep traffic rolling.

Smugglers like Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres took care to forge convincing bills of lading, the documents that describe the contents of the trailers. If there was one threat they worried about more than any other, it was the scent-detecting dogs. Smugglers used detergents, coffee, and meat seasonings to try to mask the smell of hidden passengers, but the dogs were almost impossible to fool. The only surefire way to get around them was to slide through while the handlers were busy elsewhere. 

There were usually six to eight dogs present at C29 but only two on duty at a time—one covering the three passenger-car lanes and another for the two commercial lanes. At risk of exhaustion from overexertion and heat, each dog worked forty-minute stints followed by eighty minutes of rest. Overworked and outnumbered, they still presented a formidable obstacle. Of the sixteen semi loads that Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres had attempted to move since November 2021, six had been busted by dogs. It was never a total loss for the smugglers: The truck and trailer would have to be replaced, and they’d have to find another driver, but unlike in a drug bust, the valuable cargo wasn’t permanently confiscated. The detained migrants—who usually paid the second half of the smugglers’ fee after arriving at their final destinations—would be back in Mexico in a matter of hours, ready to try again. 

A Meth-Fueled All-Nighter

By the time the brothers arrived at the stash house, Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres had successfully moved more than a thousand people in trailers through the checkpoints north of Laredo. They outsourced most of the hazards, overseeing a team of subordinates who took on the direct risks of smuggling, often low-wage workers lured by the chance to earn extra cash.

The man they relied on to maintain their fleet of trucks and trailers, which they kept at a storage lot surrounded by ranchettes and undeveloped scrubland east of San Antonio, was a 48-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant named Juan D’Luna Bilbao. He had been living in Texas for more than a decade after overstaying a temporary work visa, working as a mechanic at a local garage. He had fallen into the smuggling business more or less by accident after a friend found him a side gig working on Martínez Olvera’s personal vehicle. 

On days of smuggling operations, Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres often tasked D’Luna Bilbao with moving a semi from the storage lot to one of two truck stops at the junction of I-35 and I-410, southwest of San Antonio, within sight of an Amazon warehouse and a Toyota dealership. Later, when the truck returned from Laredo, D’Luna Bilbao would retrieve it. For every successful operation, the smugglers paid him $500.

At about five in the morning on June 27, 2022, D’Luna Bilbao’s phone rang. Martínez Olvera wanted him to take a red tractor hooked to a 53-foot white trailer to one of the usual truck stops. “The driver’s already on his way,” Martínez Olvera told him. D’Luna Bilbao drove to the storage lot, where he performed his usual maintenance checks and sprinkled meat seasoning inside the trailer. Then he snapped photos of the identification numbers on the truck and trailer that his bosses would need to forge a bill of lading.

D’Luna Bilbao harbored a major concern about the trailer that he was preparing that morning: Its refrigeration unit was malfunctioning. He’d bought the trailer for the organization six months earlier for about $8,000 and had been having trouble with it ever since. No matter what he tried, the unit wouldn’t cool. This was a problem for two reasons. For one, the bill of lading specified a temperature setting for the trailer, and a mismatch between the paperwork and the actual temperature could raise alarms at the checkpoint. Over the previous year, the Border Patrol had busted four of the organization’s loads partly because of temperature discrepancies. Worse still, it was June in South Texas, and without a functioning refrigeration unit, the passengers in the trailer would be at grave risk.

D’Luna Bilbao had been warning Martínez Olvera about the faulty compressor for months, saying he didn’t have the parts or the know-how to fix it. Just three days earlier, on June 24, he’d texted Martínez Olvera a video of the faltering unit. The boss said he would get someone out to look at it but never did. D’Luna Bilbao had been told not to question orders, so despite his concerns, he delivered the tractor to a Love’s Travel Stop southwest of the city, where he filled it with diesel and walked away.

Minutes later, a beat-up Chevy Tahoe arrived, and a man in a black golf shirt with white stripes jumped out of the passenger seat and climbed into the rig. This was Homero Zamorano, who was tasked with hauling the load of migrants from Laredo that day. 

The Tahoe’s driver, a six-hundred-plus-pound man named Christian Martinez, had been working for Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres since March of that year. Martinez’s primary role was to find and hire commercially licensed drivers who were U.S. citizens or permanent residents, because they had to be able to pass through interior Border Patrol checkpoints. Critically, they had to be willing to risk getting arrested with a load of migrants, which would probably mean a long prison sentence. For each operation, Martinez would shuttle one of the drivers to the designated truck stop, where an empty tractor trailer waited. Then he would manage communications between the driver and his bosses throughout the journey. (Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres didn’t trust the drivers and preferred not to communicate with them directly.) 

Early that morning, Martinez had picked up Zamorano near Palestine, a small town some three hundred miles from San Antonio, in the Piney Woods of East Texas. When he arrived, he’d found Zamorano smoking meth with his girlfriend. There was nothing unusual about that. Both men used stimulants to stay awake on overnight hauls. Martinez preferred cocaine. Zamorano was Martinez’s third recruit, and this was their fourth run together. 

Martinez, who grew up in Palestine, suffers from severe cognitive disabilities and never learned to read. Because of his weight, Zamorano called him Gordito. Before he linked up with the smugglers, the closest Martinez had come to a steady job was working for his cousin selling ice cream. He was often homeless, living out of his Tahoe. All of a sudden he was pulling in money like he’d never seen. Every time a driver successfully made it to San Antonio with a load of migrants, the smugglers paid Martinez $5,000. In less than four months he’d earned $35,000. 

Things had not worked out so well for the drivers he’d recruited. The first was a childhood friend from Palestine. On his third run, that driver got busted at a Border Patrol checkpoint with 107 migrants in his trailer. The second driver Martinez recruited also went down on his third trip. For now, Zamorano’s luck seemed to be holding out.

“They’re Murdering Us in Here”

By around 11 a.m., Zamorano had completed the drive to Laredo and parked at a truck stop on the north end of town, where he awaited further instructions. As a rule, drivers were kept in the dark until the last possible moment. Rather than send them directly to the stash houses—which could draw attention and give the drivers information they might spill if they got caught—the organization had operatives on the ground gather migrants in another vehicle and move them to the site where they would be loaded into the trailer. 

Just before one in the afternoon, Zamorano received a Google Maps pin from Martinez directing him to a side street across from a steel supply warehouse in an industrial area east of town. When he got there, he found a white box truck—filled, as he knew, with the migrants he would carry to San Antonio. Nervous and worn out from his meth-fueled all-nighter, Zamorano struggled to turn the trailer around and back it into the tight space where the box truck sat waiting, flanked on one side by a chain-link fence overhung with mesquites. When he finally came to a stop, men on the ground quickly flung open the compartments of both vehicles. Fifty yards away, a steady stream of traffic flowed by on the highway. Anyone passing would have seen only shadows on the gravel as some sixty people moved between two unremarkable trucks. The loading process took about ten minutes. 

Roughly an hour after pulling out, Zamorano veered off the highway and toward the canopy of C29. The air inside the trailer was already suffocating, but Begaí, Mariano, and the others had been warned to stay silent, lest the slightest noise tip off Border Patrol agents. As Zamorano waited in the checkpoint line, they felt the vibrations of other trucks’ engines and heard the squeal of air brakes. When the truck briefly halted, they heard the driver talking to someone outside.

There weren’t any dogs working Zamorano’s lane when it was his turn to speak to an agent. Wearing a black H-Town baseball cap, he smiled as he leaned out of the truck’s window. According to the forged paperwork, Zamorano was hauling thirteen tons of blueberries, and the temperature in the trailer should have been below 66 degrees. The agent waved the truck through without checking the bill of lading or the trailer’s temperature display, and Zamorano pressed on toward San Antonio. 

As the truck continued north, the heat inside the trailer intensified. With no ventilation and the body heat of 64 people pumping out gallons of sweat, it’s likely the temperature soared above 140 degrees. The migrants’ composure soon broke. 

Mariano and Begaí listened to the frantic wails in the darkness all around them. Their eyes burned and their skin itched from the seasoning that D’Luna Bilbao had scattered. People began scrambling, tripping over each other trying to find an outlet for air, but inside the sealed container they only generated more heat and depleted precious oxygen. At one point, Mariano stood up and began sliding on the sweat-slicked floor. Begaí reached up and tried to pull him back down. “Don’t get up, just keep still,” he said, but Mariano slipped out of his grip. The younger brother made his way to the front, where he slammed the wall with his fists, desperate to get the driver’s attention. Somehow, he found his way back to Begaí’s side. “He didn’t hear me,” he said.

In fact, Zamorano had heard noises from inside the trailer. At about 3:20 p.m. he called Martinez to say that his phone had died and he’d stopped to buy a phone charger. He pulled over at least twice more, telling Martinez each time that he’d had to stop because he’d heard screaming and banging on the trailer walls. He tried to reset the refrigeration unit, which was mounted on the trailer’s exterior, but he’d unwittingly made things worse—the unit started blowing hot air.

The migrants heard Zamorano tinkering outside and felt the sudden rush of heat. “We’re almost there!” he shouted. At one point, they also heard someone fiddling with the latches of the back doors, but the doors remained sealed. 

At about 5:30 p.m., Zamorano linked up with a pickup on I-35 that would lead him to the designated drop-off spot on Quintana Road in south San Antonio. He called Martinez again, agitated. “They’re screaming and banging real bad,” he said. He asked what he should do. A few minutes later, Martinez called back with a message from the bosses: “What’s done is done. Don’t stop again.”

Inside, the migrants had grown desperate. Some clawed at the walls and tore out chunks of yellow foam insulation, a futile effort to reach fresh air. A group of women in the middle of the trailer formed a prayer circle, their voices rising above the din. Someone who’d managed to carry a phone onboard made a frantic call, pleading with the person on the other end to rescue them. A man begged for water for his dying wife. The brother and sister who had placed the young girl between them tried to comfort her, the brother fanning her with his pocket Bible. A woman who’d defied the smugglers’ orders to give up her water bottle shared her last drops with them.  

One by one, they began to die.

As extreme dehydration set in, they ceased sweating, their skin becoming hot to the touch. Electrolyte depletion can trigger a range of symptoms: muscle cramps, brain swelling, nausea, loss of coordination, delirium, and seizures. Then, as their body temperatures climbed above 105 degrees, their cells began to die and their organs began to fail. Their final moments before slipping out of consciousness were agonizing. 

Mariano squeezed Begaí’s hand. “I can’t take the pain in my chest,” he said. Begaí felt like he was submerged underwater, as if each labored inhalation was a smaller sip from the surface. “They’re murdering us in here,” he said to Mariano. His mouth and limbs twisted involuntarily. “We’re not going to die in here,” Begaí repeated over and over. 

“Stay strong, my brother,” Mariano said. 

The last thing Begaí remembers hearing from Mariano was a prayer: “My God, look after my heart, look after my soul.” 

A giant shadow appeared above Begaí. He was no longer in the trailer surrounded by the dead but all alone beneath a wide-open sky on a vast plain. He sensed an immense presence listening to him, and he offered his own prayer: “Give me one opportunity, just one opportunity.” There was no response.

Somewhere close by, he heard the unmistakable rumble of a train. 

Pocket Full of Prayer Cards 

The potholed stretch of Quintana Road that runs north from I-410 alongside the Union Pacific Railroad tracks was known to local police and the smugglers as a dumping ground for garbage and stolen cars. Its edges were overgrown with heavy brush, and spray-painted numbers on banged-up panel fences marked junkyards and construction depots. 

Parked at the drop-off point and still sitting in the cab of the red tractor, Zamorano watched in the side-view mirror as the various drivers who had arrived to retrieve groups of migrants converged on the rear of the trailer. One of them threw open the doors, but instead of the usual melee—drivers shouting codes and separating out their respective clients—everyone scrambled back to their vehicles and sped away. 

Zamorano was under strict orders to never leave the cab during loading or unloading. Panicked, he called Martinez, who told him to go look in the trailer. With Martinez still on the line, Zamorano climbed down and walked to the back. “There’s bodies stacked up,” he said, then hung up. 

His hands trembling, Martinez called one of Martínez Olvera’s lieutenants and asked what to do. “Go pick him up,” was the reply.

When Martinez arrived a few minutes later, he noticed a teenage girl sobbing near the semi, her sweat-soaked black T-shirt clinging to her skin. A handful of men whom Martinez didn’t recognize appeared to be helping her. Seeing no trace of Zamorano—who’d stopped answering his phone and responding to texts—Martinez fled the scene. 

Roberto Quintero worked for a nearby asphalt company, and he and a few coworkers had jumped in a company truck and rushed out to Quintana Road after hearing screams. That’s where they found the girl staggering near the semi. When Quintero approached the trailer, just before 6 p.m., he saw bodies piled inside, their faces swollen and their lips blue. Some appeared to have torn their clothes off. None were moving. Horrified, he dialed 911. 

“There’s an eighteen-wheeler with about twenty dead people in the back,” Quintero told the dispatcher, the girl’s screams audible in the background. “There’s more than twenty people,” he then stammered. “There’s fifty people!” As he and his coworkers gave water to the girl, they noticed a man in a black cap and striped golf shirt take off running from beside the truck. The girl told Quintero that she’d seen the same man climb down from the driver’s side of the cab. Some of the asphalt workers gave chase but weren’t able to catch him.

There was a fire station less than a mile away, and police and emergency medical teams arrived within minutes. As they approached the trailer, they were hit with the sickening stench of sweat and fecal matter mixed with the odor of cooking seasoning. A tangle of corpses lay near the rear doors, limp limbs dangling over the edge. Ambulance personnel dragged bodies out by their arms and legs, arranging them in the dirt on the side of the road. From inside the trailer they began to hear moaning and gasping for air. “Got a live one!” someone shouted. 

Sixteen survivors were rushed to local hospitals, five of whom would later die. After the trailer was emptied, 48 people lay dead beneath yellow tarps, including two that police officers had found several hundred feet from the truck. Worried that there might be more victims scattered in the area, emergency personnel carefully swept both sides of Quintana Road. They soon came across an apparently unconscious man sprawled in the brush beside the railroad tracks, a black H-Town baseball hat and a Samsung Galaxy phone lying beside him. They assumed at first that he was one of the victims. But when a policeman picked up the phone, its unlocked screen revealed a text message in English, delivered only a few minutes earlier: “wya bro?” The message—an abbreviation of “where you at bro?”—was from a contact labeled Gordito. 

Zamorano startled when emergency personnel dumped a cooler of frigid water on him. Police quickly determined that he fit the asphalt workers’ description of the driver and detained him. Diagnosed with amphetamine intoxication and dehydration, he spent that night in a hospital bed under police supervision.

D’Luna Bilbao heard about what had happened from one of Martínez Olvera’s associates that afternoon while he was waiting at the storage lot for the order to retrieve the semi. The trailer’s registration led police straight to his home. Frozen by fear, he was there when police arrived to arrest him that night. 

Martinez, too shaken to drive, had holed up in a La Quinta Inn just outside San Antonio. He didn’t know that the police had seen his text and figured out that he was Gordito, but once he saw Zamorano’s mug shot on the news that night he had no doubt they would find him. He returned to Palestine the next day, where he visited his mother and sister, blew the last of his cocaine, and waited for the cops to show up. Police arrested him in the morning hours of June 29. 

The scale of the disaster overwhelmed the capacity of the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office. Under the glare of emergency-vehicle headlights, five forensic pathologists worked through the night to process the bodies. They combed through the victims’ pockets, the interior of the trailer, and the surrounding area for identifying documents. Homeland Security agents identified some of them with a mobile fingerprint scanner. Once again, the migrants were loaded like cargo into the backs of large vehicles and hauled away—this time to the morgue. 

With the help of reinforcements called in from Dallas and Austin, Bexar County officials would take five days to complete the autopsies. The main cause of death was hyperthermia—basically, overheating—but the medical examiner determined that many may have also suffered asphyxiation from being smothered, crushed under the weight of other bodies, or simply unable to survive on the oxygen-depleted air.

Officials carefully collected and photographed the personal items that the deceased had in their pockets, which didn’t amount to much. Most had little more than loose change, and some traveled without any money at all. As a group, they had less than $2,500. The aspiring Guatemalan schoolteacher and one of her traveling companions carried fake Mexican identification cards to ease their passage through the country, where opportunists are known to prey on Central American migrants. The teenage boy from Mexico City carried three well-worn prayer cards. One of the men who’d promised the boy’s mother he’d look after him was also carrying prayer cards; he’d survived long enough to stagger several hundred feet from the trailer before collapsing. The pregnant Honduran woman died with two pregnancy tests in her pocket. 

One stocky male had a sweat-wrinkled scrap of paper in one pocket with a few notes scrawled in bleeding red ink, including the name of a hotel in Nuevo Laredo and a smuggler’s code: 050 Flaco. The man’s Mexican identification indicated that he was 32 years old and came from Oaxaca. His name was Mariano. 

His brother Begaí lay unconscious but alive in a hospital on the other side of town.

The Real Number of Victims

News of the disaster shot across the southern border. Families from all over Mexico and Central America watched the coverage on local channels and pored over social media posts, wondering if a loved one might be under the tarps on Quintana Road. It would take days for all of the victims’ families to be notified, and several weeks to repatriate all of the bodies. Saddled with debts they’d taken on to pay the smugglers, some families had to borrow still more for funerals. In some places—like the tiny Guatemalan village where the two youngest passengers grew up—entire communities poured out of their homes to follow the caskets to the cemetery.

Though the Bexar County medical examiner had concluded that the primary cause of death was hyperthermia, the manner of death was homicide. The investigation fell under the authority of Joint Task Force Alpha, a multiagency effort launched by Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021 to “enhance U.S. enforcement efforts against the most prolific and dangerous human smuggling and trafficking groups.” Seven of the organization’s drivers were already behind bars, including Zamorano, and cellphones confiscated from D’Luna Bilbao, Martinez, and Zamorano contained troves of data related to the organization’s activities, but it would still take a year for the authorities to close in on the more senior figures. 

On June 26, 2023, federal law enforcement officers swarmed Orduña Torres’s rental home in a modest neighborhood near Lackland Air Force Base, about ten minutes from the crime scene on Quintana Road. They found a pearl 2015 Cadillac Escalade and a lime-green 2017 Ford F-350 with custom chrome rims and a lift kit so massive it was almost a monster truck. Orduña Torres, 28 by then, lived there with his wife and daughter. The interior was freshly painted, and in the backyard he had installed a small swimming pool, synthetic grass, and a covered patio. The government valued the improvements at $41,000 and concluded that he had financed them with his smuggling revenues. The same day, federal officers arrested three other men associated with the organization, including Orduña Torres’s father-in-law. (Martínez Olvera somehow managed to avoid arrest, probably by fleeing to Mexico.)

“Human smugglers prey on migrants’ hope for a better life—but their only priority is profit,” Garland said in a press release announcing the arrests. At Orduña Torres’s house, the agents found a portion of that profit—$30,000 in cash stuffed into the bottom of a Special K cereal box perched on top of his refrigerator and another $29,444 in various hiding places, including his daughter’s dresser. According to the government, he was involved in between 24 and 48 human-smuggling operations over the two-year period leading up to the disaster, which meant that his bulk-smuggling runs with Martínez Olvera were only part of his business. In total, the government estimates that Orduña Torres earned between $96,000 and $240,000 during that two-year stretch. The lower estimate would put his family slightly above San Antonio’s median household income. The upper figure would place him in the middle class but far from the kind of wealth that signifies kingpin status in Mexico, let alone in the U.S. 

Of the seven arrested, all but two—Orduña Torres and his father-in-law, who played a minor role—would plead guilty to human-smuggling charges. Last March, nearly three years after the disaster, Orduña Torres shuffled into a high-ceilinged courtroom with wood-paneled walls in the new federal courthouse in San Antonio. The pronounced limp that earned him the nickname by which all of the other smugglers knew him—Chuekito, from the Spanish word for “crooked”—was noticeable even in leg-irons. He wore a suit and tie, with his hair gelled and spiked. He’d lost so much weight that D’Luna Bilbao, who took the stand early in the trial, hardly recognized him. 

Two survivors testified. The first, Greysy Sanjay Bacajol, had comforted the frightened young girl she and her brother had met en route to the border. Greysy’s brother Oswaldo also survived, as did the girl, whose name was Sebastiana Morales Morales. It was her screams that had caught the attention of the asphalt workers. 

The other survivor who testified, José Luis Vásquez Guzmán, was the former Mexican soldier who was looking after the teenage boy. The boy, Marcos Antonio Velasco Velasco, had been headed to a job in Ohio that was originally offered to his mother, but he’d begged to go on her behalf. Marcos Antonio died, as did the soldier’s cousin, Javier Flores López. When the prosecutors displayed a photo of his cousin on a screen in the courtroom, Vásquez Guzmán wept for several minutes. Some of the jurors wept with him.

Juan D’Luna Bilbao, Christian Martinez, and another smuggler charged in the case gave detailed testimony about how the organization planned and carried out its bulk smuggling operations. Federal investigators took the stand to walk through reams of text messages, WhatsApp communications, photos, and tracking data that connected Orduña Torres to numerous bulk smuggling operations, including the fateful trip on June 27, 2022. 

Before sending the jury to deliberate, the judge reminded them of the pregnant Honduran woman who died. The real number of victims, he said, was 54. 

The jury found both men guilty on all charges, and the judge later sentenced them to life in prison. Shortly after U.S. marshals led the pair away in cuffs, top-ranking federal officials held a press conference to announce the verdict. “ Today is a momentous day in the department’s relentless fight against the leaders, organizers, and key facilitators of human smuggling networks,” said Matthew Galeotti, Trump’s recently appointed acting head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. “We’re not done—not even by a long shot.”

Recently the federal government has unleashed another immigration-enforcement spending spree. In July, Congress gave Trump a record-shattering $190 billion to expand the Department of Homeland Security, effectively doubling the agency’s budget over the next several years. Upward of $80 billion is allocated for the border, including more than $50 billion for wall construction and border infrastructure. Funding is already in place for an expansion that will make C29 the largest checkpoint in the country. 

Meanwhile, Martínez Olvera remains at large, as do legions of others who make up the decentralized smuggling economy—stash-house operators, guides, scouts, cartel henchmen, drivers of various kinds. As long as there is money to be made transporting people across borders, their ranks are unlikely to diminish.

Have You Seen My Brother?

It took Mari more than a week to reach her husband’s bedside. A representative of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed her that she was eligible for a special permit to visit Begaí in the hospital, but she had to first get to Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso. She couldn’t afford the airfare, but a former employer of Begaí’s got in touch and offered to finance her trip. 

Someone from the consulate in El Paso was waiting for her when she landed in Juárez and drove her to the Bridge of the Americas, where she walked over the dry concrete channel of the Rio Grande, past rows of idling cars and into the U.S. Customs and Border Protection station. She explained her situation to an agent, who asked her to fill out a form, took her photograph, and told her she could stay in the U.S. for thirty days. As he waved her through, he said, “God bless you, señora.” 

She traversed West Texas by bus in the black of night, worrying all the way to San Antonio about what she would find when she got there—how Begaí would react to seeing her and whether she would be able to keep herself together.

Amós, one of Begaí’s brothers, who worked in a factory in Ciudad Juárez, had also gotten special permission to cross and was at the bus station to greet Mari when she arrived in San Antonio on July 5. Another consular representative drove them to Christus Santa Rosa Hospital, where a nurse briefed them on Begaí’s condition as they walked to his room. By then, he had been in the hospital for nine days. The nurse told them that Begaí had been unconscious when the ambulance delivered him to the emergency room, and the staff had thought he would probably die. His organs had shriveled like dried fruit, and he’d suffered two strokes. But eventually, after about three days in a coma, he awoke. Disoriented and with a debilitating pain along his spine, he had no memory of leaving Laredo. “The first thing he asked for was a Bible,” the nurse said. 

In the hallway, Mari heard Begaí’s voice before she saw him, and she recognized the words immediately: “Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.” Begaí was reciting Psalm 91:1, which they both knew by heart. She wiped a tear from her cheek and listened for a moment. Steadying herself, she slipped into the room, where she saw Begaí with his head covered in bandages. An intricate web of wires and tubes connected his limbs to blinking machines and bags of fluid. His face was pale and sad, and he looked to Mari as if he’d aged many years. “Someone came to visit you,” the nurse said. “Do you know who this is?” 

Begaí looked up. “Forgive me,” were his first words to Mari. “I didn’t listen to you.” 

It didn’t take her long to notice that Begaí’s short-term memory was badly damaged. He would lose the thread of conversations, forgetting things she’d told him only moments before. But it was the hole in his memory from June 27 and his confusion about what happened that day that troubled her most. Somehow, Begaí had come to believe that Mariano had never gotten in the trailer. “My brother’s okay, right?” he asked. “Is it true that he went back to Mexico? Have you seen him?” 

At first she couldn’t bear to tell him the truth. She dodged his questions and encouraged him to focus on getting better, but the deceit troubled her. When she finally told him, he cried out in such agony that it sounded to Mari as if something within him was shattering. 

Under constant care, Begaí gradually improved. On July 12, his doctor discharged him with one prescription for opioid painkillers and another for antibiotics. That day, an agent from the Department of Homeland Security had Begaí sign a form stating that he had been arrested and placed into removal proceedings but that he was being released pending an appearance before an immigration judge three months later in Atlanta, where he still planned to work. The document and the entire process were confusing to Begaí, who was so physically weak and cognitively impaired that he had to be cared for like a small child. Later, he received a temporary work authorization from the federal government, and an immigration attorney helped him apply for a U visa—a special category for victims of crimes that occur on U.S. soil that was created in 2000 to encourage undocumented people to cooperate with law enforcement investigations. But the lawyer told him that approval could take as long as six years, and in the meantime his immigration status was unclear. 

Mari traveled with him to a suburb of Atlanta, where they stayed with his aunt and uncle. During those initial weeks, Begaí suffered severe back pain and sometimes got lost looking for the bathroom. Mari escorted him to a nearby clinic where a Spanish-speaking doctor offered low-cost services. She applied ointment to his back and comforted him when he woke disoriented in the middle of the night. She wrote a letter requesting an extension of her humanitarian parole and sent it to the Customs and Border Protection office in Atlanta along with a supporting letter from Begaí’s doctor. Her request was denied. She flew home when her thirty-day permit expired. 

It would take eight months for Begaí to regain the strength to begin working again. He helped his uncle on plumbing jobs and picked up the occasional floor-tiling gig from a guy he met at church. At first he could only manage a few hours before needing to rest. Working one or two days a week, he wasn’t able to send much home to Mari, which deepened his despair. 

Meanwhile, the health of Mariano’s wife, Luz Estrella, had deteriorated swiftly. Though Mariano had gone to the U.S. to help pay her medical expenses, it turned out his earnings wouldn’t have made much difference. About three months after Mariano died, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. To pay for her treatments, her family raised about $1,000 by selling tamales around the neighborhood, offloading Mariano’s motorcycle, and pooling what little savings they had. But the cancer spread, making its way into her bones. 

Before disease ravaged her body, Luz Estrella decided to preserve a memory of herself for her children. She dressed her five-year-old daughter, Jade, in an embroidered pink dress and her three-year-old son, Mariano, in a plaid button-down shirt. Wearing a lavender dress, her long black hair brushed back, she posed her children in front of her and placed her hands on their shoulders. They reached their own small hands up to grab hers, and she mustered a smile. The photo now hangs in her mother’s kitchen, next to a picture of Mariano beaming beside Luz Estrella on their wedding day. She died on July 31, 2023. 

American Purgatory

As of last year, all eleven survivors of the disaster were still living in the U.S., but their exact locations were unknown. I tracked down a few nonprofits and one attorney’s office that had aided some of them, but all declined to help me arrange an interview. During my reporting trip to Mexico and Guatemala, I managed to speak with relatives of five survivors. At the time, none were willing to put me in direct contact with their loved one. Still, I held out hope. Only the survivors could describe the horrors of that day and the difficulty of healing in a foreign country they had nearly died trying to reach—and where their legal status remains uncertain. 

Over the months, I kept in touch with many of the families I’d met, and during the trial I created a WhatsApp group to update them on everything that transpired in the courtroom. Mari was part of the group, along with Begaí’s mother and two of his siblings, and they passed my messages on to him. Then, a few days after the trial ended, my phone rang. It was Begaí.

On a warm day last April, we met in a public park near his home that was busy with picnickers and dog walkers. Begaí wore jeans, a gray T-shirt, and lace-up leather shoes. He was reserved and spoke in a voice almost too quiet to hear over the noise of nearby traffic and children on the playground. I asked whether he was afraid of being deported. “Why would I be afraid?” he said. “In some ways, it would be a blessing.” 

Almost three years since he said goodbye to his wife and children, Begaí is still living in the U.S., lonely and racked by grief. He suffers chronic pain behind his right lung and tires quickly from rigorous labor or heat exposure. When Mari talks to him on the phone, she notices that he sometimes forgets what they’d been discussing minutes earlier. With time, his recollections of June 27 have grown more vivid, but memories of the days leading up to it and the period after remain hazy. 

Begaí works in a food truck now, ten hours a day, six days a week. He’s finally making enough to improve his family’s finances, but the pain of being separated from his wife and children has pushed him to a breaking point. His inability to comfort and support Mariano’s children is a source of constant anguish. “What I want more than anything is just to give them a hug,” he told me. 

Begaí remains confused about his immigration status. More than halfway through the potentially six-year wait for his U visa decision, he has no indication that things are progressing and does not know where to ask for information about his case, or whether that’s even a good idea. Despite what he said about the potential upside of deportation, he understands that being arrested wouldn’t mean getting dropped off at a bridge and walking back to Mexico—it would likely mean a long detention in a private prison in the U.S. 

When he was near death, Begaí had prayed for an opportunity to live, but he wound up in a kind of purgatory. Faced with waiting for a visa that may never come, he’s close to giving up. If he does return to Lázaro Cárdenas to visit his parents someday, he’ll take a footbridge across the Usila River and pass under an arcade of towering trees. New concrete homes, most of them built with money sent home by migrants working abroad, will add a layer of unfamiliarity to the homecoming.

Inside his parents’ house, filled with the commotion of his own children and many young nieces and nephews and the smell of woodsmoke from his mother’s kitchen, Mariano will be a haunting presence. Begaí will see the Bible verses his brother painted on the walls in neat, brightly colored script. In the windowless room where their mother sleeps on a mattress on the floor, Mariano covered an entire wall with Psalm 103. The lettering is faded now but still legible. One line may seem more enigmatic after all that Begaí has endured: “The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.”  The notion of divine justice might offer some comfort to Begaí, but he may wait a long time for redress from the U.S. government, if it ever comes at all.

Reporting for this story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Last month, with great fanfare, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled the new dietary guidelines for Americans. The advice was muddled—eat more meat but not more saturated fat!—and likely shaped by the very industry influences that Kennedy has vowed to curb. Never mind, though. Its message, “Eat Real Food,” was a certified hit among the faithful of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement and much of the broader public. And Kennedy is making sure that message is heard. During the Super Bowl, a 30-second spot featuring Mike Tyson crunching on an apple pointed 125 million viewers to the website RealFood.gov.

It’s no wonder the message is working. Today in the United States, Americans spend around $1 trillion each year on medical treatments for diet-related chronic diseases. Poll after poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly want policies to improve school lunches and to make fruits and vegetables more affordable. With MAHA, Kennedy has tapped into the inescapable feeling that something is wrong, and positioned himself as the only leader strong enough to do something about it.

Once upon a time, though, healthy food wasn’t a Republican talking point. In fact, “eat food”—the “real” was implied—has long been a progressive message. Journalist Michael Pollan coined it in 2007 in his ruthlessly efficient (and still excellent) nutrition advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Even RFK Jr.’s denigration of ultra-processed foods as “food-like substances”—a term he used at a “Take Back Your Health” event in Nashville last week—is a Pollanism, popularized in his 2008 bestselling book In Defense of Food.

But when Michelle Obama tried to translate that advice into policy, via her “Let’s Move” initiative, she was met by relentless accusations of nanny-statism from Republicans and their supporters. Rush Limbaugh warned that federal agents were inspecting lunch boxes and tried to rebrand Obama’s initiative as “No Child’s Behind Left Alone.” On Fox, Sean Hannity railed that he didn’t “want to be told how many calories are in my Big Mac meal.” (Last year, in an interview with Kennedy, Hannity agreed that “we are poisoning ourselves” with ultra-processed foods.)

Kennedy has appropriated more than just the language of the liberal food reformers. Many of the policies that have made MAHA a political force are long-held progressive ones—like improving school lunches and limiting ultra-processed foods—that have been repackaged with a side of rage. As Republicans ready for the midterms, they see MAHA voters as a critical constituency. Democrats, meanwhile, are conspicuously quiet, seemingly resigned to let RFK and the Trump administration run off with their issue.

“Democrats should be beating Republicans over the head with the truth that we will champion cleaning up our food system, we will champion creating healthier options for families, we will champion the programs that provide healthy fresh foods to local farmers and schools that the Trump administration has cut,” said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, adding that he has long felt out in the “wilderness” on these issues.  

“Everybody wants to talk about the cost of health care and how to make health care more affordable,” he added. “That is good, but nobody is talking about why the demand for health care is going so high.… There’s a massive opportunity here to connect the dots between health care and the sicknesses and the chemicals that are causing our families to be sick.”

Trump himself was the first to see the power of MAHA. After successfully pushing Kennedy out of the presidential race, Trump offered him a place in his administration, promising to let him “go wild on health.” Since then, he has suggested several times in his rambling way that MAHA might be key to avoiding a midterm shellacking. “I read an article today where they think Bobby is going to be really great for the Republican Party in the midterms,” President Trump joked at a Cabinet meeting last month. “So I have to be careful that Bobby likes us.”  

When I mentioned this in conversations with Democratic strategists, their responses were puzzling. Apparently, few people crafting the party’s electoral strategy were even considering the issue. “A good point,” one said. “You’re making me think about this,” said another. At a high level, the problem seems to be that Democrats broadly dismiss MAHA supporters as a bunch of conservative crazies and anti-vaxxers—which, to be fair, is how they appear on social media.

But a closer read suggests that is not the case. According to polling from progressive firm Navigator Research, 20 percent of the up-for-grabs electorate is considered “MAHA curious,” meaning they are skeptical of the U.S. health care system but not antagonistic toward doctors or traditional medical institutions. These voters are younger than the general population and include suburban and non-college educated voters—and, notably, do not support vaccine restrictions.

Or to put it more simply, MAHA is a diverse group of disillusioned voters who want more control over their health. “I look at MAHA and see a coalition of food people without a home who are desperate to have someone in a position of power talking about the problems in our food system,” said Sam Kass, who served as Michelle Obama’s senior policy adviser for nutrition policy.

Trump’s own pollsters have come to the same conclusion: “Vaccine skepticism stands as an outlier, rejected by most voters even within the MAHA movement,” according to a December poll by Fabrizio Ward. In contrast, “food policy, a key aspect of the MAHA policy agenda, resonates among most voters in these [congressional swing] districts, across party lines.”

In theory, these voters could be there for the Democratic taking. But Ryan Munce, president of co/efficient, told me that though voters will reward politicians who deliver on MAHA’s promises, “we don’t see any real, meaningful policy and messaging that makes us feel like [Democrats] see this as an opportunity.” 

Why are Democrats ceding such a popular issue? There are a few likely reasons. Democrats are notoriously once-bitten-twice-shy about these sorts of things, and may shrink from policies—like championing healthy food—that were effectively mocked as elitist and shouted down 15 years ago. Then, too, they believe they’re already winning on health care, so why talk about ultra-processed foods or pesticides if it could be construed as support for a crank like Kennedy?

There’s also the shortsighted tactical thinking that has plagued Democrats since Trump rode down his golden escalator in 2016. Midterms, one insider told me, are a referendum on the administration, not the moment to sell a new vision—even one you’ve had for the last 20 years, apparently.

But New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has shown that populist food policy can work for leftists. No one was talking about creating publicly funded grocery stores in New York until he floated the idea. A March 2025 poll from the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank, revealed that two-thirds of New Yorkers, including 54 percent of Republicans, support public groceries.

Mamdani’s not the only one to see food policy as a ripe opportunity for Democrats. “I feel like I’m on a constant crusade to engage my colleagues and say you forget the food issue at your peril,” said Maine Representative Chellie Pingree, an organic farmer and veteran champion of food reform. “Because you miss a whole lot of people in your district who you can talk to in a very nonpartisan way about issues you know people are angry about.”

It’s not too late for Democrats to win over MAHA voters. Two of their leaders—including Vani Hari, a.k.a. the Food Babe, and Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America—have been clear that MAHA votes are up for grabs. “We are not beholden to a political party,” Honeycutt, a former Democrat turned independent who voted Republican in 2024, told me in an email. “We moms vote for those who put health and safety first.”

The most obvious opening for Democrats is affordability. The message: “Eat Real Food” sounds great, but try making it happen at the grocery store. Sixty-nine percent of respondents in a Pew poll last year said increased costs had made it harder for them to “eat healthy.”

Democrats I spoke with agreed that food was one piece of a broader affordability pitch, along with housing and utilities. And to their credit, they have made some efforts to link food prices to Trump’s tariffs. Last September, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched a website, HouseRepublicanPriceHike.com, to highlight rising prices on staple items like ground beef, sugar, coffee, and beer. But aside from Booker, Pingree, and a handful of others, the party has confined its rhetoric on food to pointing out the hypocrisy of Republicans’ calling for healthier food while simultaneously gutting nutrition-assistance programs like SNAP and school lunch.

Democrats could be going a lot further. Food and food prices are among those rare political issues that voters see (and taste) in their everyday lives. Munce, the GOP strategist, compared food to potholes: “You know if your elected officials are filling them or not.”

A survey last month by Navigator Research showed that 86 percent of both independents and “persuadable” voters said that the cost of groceries caused the most strain on their budgets—above both utilities and health insurance. “Why shy away from talking about something like food that everyone is interacting with all the time?” said Maryann Cousens, Navigator’s senior manager of polling and analytics. “It adds to this narrative that politicians are out of touch.”

Another way liberals could win over some of the MAHA-curious voters would be to promise to crack down on pesticides. Kennedy’s recent silence on the issue and the Trump administration’s aggressive support for liability shields for the maker of the ubiquitous pesticide Roundup—the question is now before the Supreme Court—have infuriated MAHA loyalists who view curbing pesticides as an urgent matter for food safety. Democratic campaign promises to rein in the international chemical companies that profit at the expense of Americans’ health would show that Democrats are up for a fight. “Food is an issue we haven’t been muscular enough on,” said Celinda Lake, president of Democratic polling firm Lake Research Partners. “Democrats are seen as too weak, not too liberal. We need to take on the villains.”

There’s still time before the midterms for Democrats to reclaim the once-progressive messages that Trump and RFK Jr. have appropriated. A year into Trump’s second term, Republicans don’t own healthy eating. They certainly don’t own health care. Safe and healthy food is a winning bipartisan issue, one that Democrats have at least as much credibility on as Republicans.

As Booker put it, “the MAHA movement is not the Trump administration,” but rather a growing movement that Donald Trump is trying to exploit: “This is a political opportunity to let people know who’s really fighting for them and who’s betraying them.”

The voters are there. The policies are clear. All that’s missing is the will to get in the fight.

Shortly after Gustavo started working as a sheepherder in Cokeville, Wyoming, he says his boss took his passport. Over the years that followed, he and his brother, Iván, herded up to 2,000 sheep through the state’s remote mountains. All the while, they told me in 2023, the rancher stole their wages, deprived them of food and water, and shot more than one of their dogs in front of them. “We were afraid he’d kill us,” said Iván. After the brothers managed to escape they were granted special visas reserved for victims of human trafficking.

Originally from Peru, Gustavo and Iván (whose names have been changed due to fear of retaliation) came to the U.S. through the H-2A program, which provides temporary work visas for seasonal, foreign-born agricultural workers. In Washington, H-2A is having a moment. The visa is one of the only immigration programs that Trump officials have embraced — Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has said expanding it is “of the utmost priority” — with lawmakers from both parties on board. And last year the administration made a number of significant changes to the program, none of which would have protected Gustavo and Iván. Some of them will make the kind of abuse the brothers faced more likely.

It’s not hard to understand H-2A’s appeal. For Trump officials, it’s a solution to a longstanding problem they made a lot worse: Farmers have been coping with a labor shortage for decades, and an estimated 40 percent of the farmworkers they’ve hired are undocumented. By the administration’s own admission, its increased immigration raids in farm country would likely worsen this labor shortage to the point of increasing food prices. For policymakers across the political spectrum, expanding the H-2A visa can look like a panacea for much of what ails our agricultural labor force — a way to supply farmers with a sufficient number of workers who they can afford to hire, and who reside in the country legally. And much easier to accomplish than comprehensive immigration reform. For farmers, H-2A is the only viable path to a legal workforce. As a result, the visa has grown steadily popular: Over the past decade, the number of certified H-2A jobs has increased by 200 percent. As of 2024, about 17 percent of America’s roughly 2 million farmworkers were here on an H-2A. 

But H-2A is not a silver bullet. It is a poorly regulated, structurally flawed program in dire need of reform, and Gustavo and Iván are far from the only H-2A workers who have been trafficked. Workers in the program face a daunting array of concerns, from wage theft to assault, rape, and even death. The steps the Trump administration and Congress have taken to expand and overhaul H-2A are not designed to solve these problems, but rather to give the agricultural industry policies it has long lobbied for, like extending H-2A visas to year-round jobs. A bipartisan coalition is pushing to fulfill this longstanding goal of the dairy and meatpacking industries, despite its potential to depress farmworker wages. 

If all these changes are enacted, they are almost certain to exacerbate workers’ wage and safety issues without fully solving agriculture’s labor problem — and leave the underlying causes of this labor shortage unaddressed.

While the agriculture sector has suffered labor deficits since the 1940s, the shortage has worsened in the past two decades. Farmers say they are leaving blueberries, wine grapes, and strawberries to rot in their fields because they don’t have enough workers to harvest them; a recent study found that the average farmer employs 21 percent fewer farmworkers than they say they need. Field and crop workers are aging; the number of new farmworkers immigrating to the country has declined; and nobody else is taking on the work. American-born workers tend to avoid these jobs, which are dangerous and low-paid; at least 20 percent of farmworker families live below the federal poverty line. Native-born workers “will only work for one day or half a day, and then they quit,” says Cesar Escalante, a professor of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Georgia. “They cannot tolerate the working conditions.” 

Rather than enticing farmworkers to stay with adequate pay or better working conditions, the agriculture industry’s go-to move has long been to make it harder for them to quit — in some cases, a lot harder. Historically, America’s farmworkers have been enslaved, imprisoned, forced into debt, displaced and food insecure, under threat of deportation, or otherwise oppressed. At the federal level, agricultural employers are still largely exempt from many labor laws, including child labor laws, the right to form a union, and the right to overtime pay. This dates back to the 1930s, when southern Democrats refused to support President Roosevelt’s labor rights overhaul unless it excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who in the Jim Crow South were mostly Black. 

A product of the Reagan administration, the H-2A program was implemented in its current form to address agricultural labor shortages by providing farmers with a legal, foreign-born workforce. On the surface, the visa might seem like a better deal than the one many farmworkers have. In contrast to undocumented workers, H-2A workers are given temporary legal status, and employers are required to provide them with housing and, in most cases, an hourly minimum wage. And some workers have decent experiences in the program. “In my personal experience, my employer pays me what he owes me, down to the minute,” says Samuel, an H-2A worker in North Carolina who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation. Samuel, who’s also an organizer with El Futuro es Nuestro, a labor advocacy group, has his own bedroom and access to a clean kitchen and bathroom. “Thank God I’ve gotten to where I am.”

But the visa also gives employers an extraordinary amount of control over their employees. H-2A workers are only eligible to work for the farmer who sponsors their visa, and switching jobs, while possible, can be prohibitively difficult. If they quit, they’re sent back to their home countries, and for many H-2A workers that’s not a viable option either. 

Because H-2A is famously difficult for employers to navigate, many farmers outsource hiring to third-party recruiters and contractors — and many of those recruiters illegally charge workers fees for connecting them with job contracts. And though it is illegal under the law governing H-2A, some farmers force their workers to pay for their own travel from their home countries. As a result, more than half of H-2A workers enter the country with significant debt and could face financial ruin, and possibly violent retribution, if they return home before paying it off. This is why labor advocates often compare H-2A to indentured servitude: In practice, H-2A can become a form of debt bondage, where workers are trapped in jobs until their debts are paid.

Plenty of employers abuse the power that H-2A gives them over their employees. A survey conducted by the labor advocacy group Centro de los Derechos del Migrante found that 100 percent of H-2A workers interviewed had experienced at least one serious legal violation during their employment; a report from the Government Accountability Office found that 84 percent of federal investigations of H-2A workplaces have found at least one violation. In aninterview with Prism media, Mike Rios, a regional agricultural enforcement coordinator for the Department of Labor, which oversees the H-2A program, described wage theft as “baked into” it. In his capacity as an organizer, Samuel has seen his fellow H-2A workers deprived of water and forced to work sick. “Some workers have died from these conditions,” he told me.

Some employers use methods far beyond the “indentured servitude” that many H-2A workers experience. The Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking nonprofit, has connected H-2A to human trafficking, and while the extent of the visa’s trafficking problem is hard to quantify, the anecdotal evidence is glaring. In 2021, the Department of Justice charged two dozen employees of a farm labor contracting company with imprisoning H-2A workers behind electric fences, withholding their wages, and threatening them with guns to keep them in line. Defendants bought and traded the H-2A workers among themselves; several workers were raped repeatedly, and at least two died. H-2A workers were similarly held against their will and sexually assaulted in a 2024 case settled in North Carolina, and a trafficking case is currently working its way through the courts in Michigan. 

When employers mistreat H-2A workers, they usually get away with it; the program’s regulations are well-intentioned but rarely enforced. On the federal level, H-2A is overseen by DOL, which is so chronically understaffed that it inspects fewer than 1 percent of farms a year. State labor agencies can also be debilitatingly understaffed, and some of the states with the highest numbers of H-2A workers, like Florida, don’t have their own labor departments at all. In my own reporting, I’ve found that employers who are found guilty of labor violations are rarely banned from the H-2A program. In one case, from 2017, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration determined that an H-2A worker had died of heat-related illness and that his employer had deprived him of water. In 2019, the agency fined his employer $9,750. He was allowed to bring three more H-2A workers into the country later that year.

“They [the employers] can do anything to you,” Nestor, a former H-2A worker, told me, years after his employer had illegally taken his passport and deprived him of food and water. (Nestor’s name has been changed out of fear of retaliation.) “Anything at all.”

Rather than address these issues, the Trump administration has made H-2A cheaper and easier for farmers to use. Last October, the DOL issued a new rule that effectively cut the majority of H-2A workers’ pay and allowed farmers to deduct up to 30 percent of workers’ wages to compensate themselves for housing they’re required to provide. To worker advocates, this housing-related change is particularly galling; in the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante study, about half of H-2A workers surveyed claim the housing they may now have to pay for is overcrowded, unsanitary, or unsafe. In extreme cases, workers have been run over and killed by their own trailers and burned to death in trailer fires. Some workers are forced to sleep four to a bed, says Farmworker Justice legal director Lori Johnson, and “alternate who’s on the floor.”

A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that, collectively, these policies will transfer between $4.4 and $5.4 billion a year from farmworkers to their employers. The United Farm Workers and other advocacy groups have sued, arguing that the pay cuts illegally penalize the few farmworkers who are U.S. citizens and work alongside H-2A workers. Samuel thinks these changes could backfire on employers. H-2A pay could sink so low that experienced workers like himself would quit, having already used the program to create some stability for themselves in their home countries.

If H-2A workers object to these conditions, there is now far less they can do about it. Last summer, DOL abandoned a Biden-era rule that extended certain labor rights to H-2A workers and explicitly protected them from trafficking. Farmers can now retaliate against workers who complain about bad conditions, and prohibit “outsiders” — like labor organizers — from visiting workers at home. Employers also are also no longer prohibited from confiscating workers’ passports, a tell-tale sign of labor trafficking. And it’s increasingly unlikely that workers’ abuse claims will be investigated. Thanks in part to the Trump administration’s cuts last year, the resource constraints that have long plagued H-2A oversight have gotten worse. The Department of Labor currently employs between 490 and 611 investigators, the lowest number on record in its history; they’re tasked with overseeing 11 million workplaces.

“Employers are going to know that they can act with total impunity,” says Daniel Costa, a lead researcher at EPI.

Theoretically, lawmakers could overhaul H-2A in a way that does right by workers. Congress could increase funding to allow the DOL to properly investigate labor violations, and regulators could ban abusive employers from the program — something that rarely if ever happens. The recruitment process could be streamlined and tightly regulated to eliminate the illegal fees that entrap many workers, and farmers could be fined or held liable if they partner with recruiters who operate illegally. Perhaps most importantly, policymakers could make it easier for H-2A workers to change jobs and give them a path to legal residency, both of which would minimize the power that employers have over them.

But the agricultural lobby has aggressively opposed many of these ideas, and no one in the Trump administration has publicly backed them. The industry argues that such worker-friendly reforms would make the program even more expensive and bureaucratically onerous than it already is. 

This brings us back to the root cause of the agriculture sector’s labor shortage: Many farmers aren’t paying workers what they’re worth because they either can’t afford to or they prioritize profit over worker rights. And even if all the changes laid out by the administration and Congress are implemented, a decade from now H-2A will still only supply an estimated 42 percent of our agricultural workforce. What is being described as “reform” in Washington right now is going to make the many problems that plague H-2A worse without solving this root problem. As long as we avoid addressing the fundamental reason for the labor shortage, farmers will still be short-staffed, and the workers they do hire will be worse off for the changes.

“In the United States, we live in enslavement or semi-enslavement,” Jorge (whose name has been changed out of fear of retaliation), a former H-2A worker who’d endured abuse, told me several years ago. If current policy trends prevail, more workers will suffer from these conditions, and abusive employers will keep getting away with it.

This week, hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants faced an uncertain future as the Trump administration fought in federal court to revoke their legal status and deport them. But despite these threats, the largely immigrant union workers at a JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, many of them recent arrivals from Haiti, still voted on Wednesday by an overwhelming margin to strike over poor working conditions in what could become the first sanctioned walkout at a major meatpacking plant in decades.

Outside the plant on the day before the strike vote, semis idled on either side of Highway 85—the cattle trailers full and waiting to unload, the cows’ warm breath rising in clouds through the slatted sides. Across the highway, Tchelly Moise and other representatives of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 union walked through the employee parking lot, passing out handbills to workers coming and going from their shifts. The fliers (in Moise’s native Haitian Creole but also in Somali, Spanish, Burmese, and other languages spoken inside the plant) informed union members of a vote to be held the following day in the ballroom of the DoubleTree Hotel, a little over a mile away.

The daylong secret balloting was no surprise to members who had been demanding a strike vote for weeks, as tense and often contentious contract negotiations over pay and work conditions at JBS, the Brazilian multinational and world’s largest producer of beef, have dragged on for eight months. Haitian workers, who comprise a plurality of the plant’s night shift, have been especially upset. In 2023 and 2024, they were recruited to work at the Greeley plant under what the union characterizes as false pretenses amounting to human trafficking. (A JBS spokesperson told me that the company takes the safety and welfare of its employees seriously and that it follows all laws and regulations. The spokesperson also said that no substantiated evidence was provided that tied the recruiter or company leadership to the claims outlined by the union.) 

In December, a group of those workers filed a class action lawsuit alleging that they were promised free housing but, upon arrival, were charged “to live in overcrowded, uninhabitable housing” nearby at the Rainbow Motel. Worse still, the suit alleges, after being recruited to the B Shift, that they were made to work some of the hardest jobs on the line and at “dangerously fast speeds.” The suit claims that the line on the daytime A shift usually averages 300 head of cattle processed per hour, while the B shift runs at 370—and has reached as high as 440 head per hour.

Despite the lawsuit, the conditions, employees say, have remained largely unchanged—or even gotten worse. Some workers have told the union they struggle to keep up with the speed of the line at times. (JBS did not respond to a request for comment.) In recent weeks, some began coordinating short work stoppages, letting beef slide by on the conveyor belt uncut and untrimmed while banging their meat hooks on the sides of the metal work stations to alert supervisors that the chain conveyor system needed to be stopped.

Union officials told me it became clear that these kinds of spontaneous stoppages—known in the industry as “wildcat” actions, which can legally result in disciplinary action or termination—were only going to continue or increase as contract talks stalled. After months of fruitless negotiations with JBS, there was no choice but to hold a vote. This was no longer about whether or not to accept the company’s latest contract offer, Moise explained. The vote would be a simple ballot: strike or no strike.

In the union offices on the night before the vote, he told me he had no doubt about how workers would cast their ballots. “People at the plant,” he said, “they’re pissed off.”

For the previous few days, union leadership had quietly worried about turnout for the vote. A large number of Haitian workers—part of a group of roughly 353,000 migrants nationwide—were scheduled to lose their temporary protected status (TPS) and accompanying work authorization on February 3, the day before the vote was scheduled to take place. But then, late on the night of February 2, US District Judge Ana C. Reyes, of the District of Columbia, paused termination of TPS for Haitians. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem had not decided to end their legal status because order had been restored in Haiti, Reyes wrote in her ruling, but rather because of a “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes cited a social media post by Noem in December, calling immigrants “foreign invaders,” who are “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

When Reyes’ ruling was reported, Moise said, his WhatsApp group chat lit up. “It was a very big relief,” he said. “People were literally celebrating.”

But Moise, who once worked as a forklift driver at the JBS plant but left in 2024 to become a union representative, cautioned everyone not to make too much of the ruling. “It is not a final decision,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that we’re going to have [TPS] forever.” He noted that Venezuelans with TPS had received a similar reprieve from the courts, only to have the Supreme Court rule in October that the termination of their 2023 TPS designation could take immediate effect. (Indeed, within hours of Judge Reyes’s ruling to halt the deportation of Haitians, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of Homeland Security, posted on social media: “Supreme Court, here we come.”) Still, the ruling would buy the union enough time to hold the strike vote. “Now we have at least a few days,” Moise said. “We cannot get deported for the next few days.”

Still, at the DoubleTree on the day of the vote, as workers from the overnight C shift began to check in shortly after 6 a.m. to cast some of the first votes, a sense of apprehension was palpable. Rumors circulated that unmarked vans had been seen circling outside the hotel, raising fears of detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many workers reminded each other that, in recent weeks, proof of legal status had been little help to immigrants in Minneapolis. Nevertheless, workers lined up in the hallway, waiting to give their names and receive a blue slip of paper to record their vote and deposit it in an old-school wooden vote box.

Later, as workers from the B shift started to arrive, a group of Latino men in their twenties expressed deep concern about having been checked in by the union and registered as voting. Would JBS be able to access that information? The company was the largest donor to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Shortly after that donation, Trump changed the composition of the National Labor Relations Board, which then dismissed the union’s formal complaint alleging human trafficking by JBS. Months later, company CEO Joesley Batista met in person with Trump in a successful bid to lift US tariffs on Brazilian beef. JBS has the ear of a president already eager to deport immigrants, in the name of saving American jobs.

A union rep assured the young men that the vote will be 100 percent anonymous—“cien por ciento,” he emphasized—but they sat for hours, unsure whether to cast votes. “The fear of retaliation is very real,” Moise told me.

And yet, soon after, Carlos Saint Aubin arrived to cast his vote. Saint Aubin was identified as “Auguste” in my story published last year in Mother Jones about the plight of Haitian workers at the plant. At that time, he said of working conditions at JBS: “I feel like I was being treated as a slave.” He couldn’t fully close his left hand after months of working with a meat hook on the line. But he was afraid then to have his name appear in print. Now, he is one of the named lead plaintiffs in the class action suit against JBS. As he dropped his ballot into the vote box, he broke into a wide smile.

The vote stretched into the evening.

I asked Kim Cordova, the president of Local 7 who had driven in from Denver, what the union would do if the Supreme Court reinstated the Trump administration’s right to immediately terminate TPS for the Haitians on B shift, as they had done for Venezuelan TPS recipients. Was she concerned that workers might vote to strike and then be on picket lines just as the court ruled that they could be rounded up by ICE? She conceded that it was a worry, but she noted that there are 3,800 workers at the plant. JBS wouldn’t be able to replace so many workers on short notice, she said. “Locals aren’t exactly lined up to take these jobs.”

Precisely at 7 p.m., Mathew Shechter, the general counsel for Local 7, called out, asking if there were any remaining uncast ballots. When no reply came, he called for counting to begin. The vote box was unlocked and the blue ballots—with x’s marked beside STRIKE / HUELGA or NO STRIKE / NO HUELGA—were dumped out on a round table where members began sorting yes votes into stacks and wrapping them with rubber bands and putting the no votes into a tiny pile. A respectful distance away, Moise stood with Dahir Omar, a fellow union representative who works with the plant’s Somali members.

Omar shook his head and smiled at Moise. “Democracy,” he said.

Moise smiled back and nodded.

“This isn’t how we do it in Africa,” Omar laughed. “In Africa, they’re like, ‘Hey, you guys go home, and we’ll count for you,’ you know?”

In less than an hour, the ballots were tallied. Nearly 99 percent were marked for STRIKE.

The mood among the union representatives was jubilant. I texted Cordova, who had driven home by then, to give her the results. “The workers have spoken,” she replied. Now, the union would give JBS a week to come back to the bargaining table and address worker complaints. Cordova said she hoped that JBS would resume negotiations, but a press release issued by the union soon after was clear: “Workers are prepared to take immediate and serious action if JBS continues to violate federal labor law and prevent workers from securing a fair contract.” If workers do walk out, it would be the first time in the history of the Greeley plant—and the first major strike by meatpacking workers since the Hormel strike of the 1980s.

In a statement issued on Thursday morning, JBS said: “We respect the collective bargaining process and remain hopeful that the local union will choose to move forward with this agreement.” But in an email sent directly to workers on Thursday afternoon, which focused on a 60-cent wage increase and a pension plan, the company’s tone was less rosy. “[T]he union has not allowed you to vote on the Company’s Last, Best, and Final offer,” the email obtained by Mother Jones reads. “Demand the union lets you vote on this offer!” (JBS did not respond to a request for comment about whether this email indicated that the company would not be resuming negotiations.)

At the end of the day, Moise sat alone in the union office. “It looks like they’re willing to see us go on strike for real,” he said. “They’re ready for the consequences.”

He laughed quietly. The union, he said, has already ordered 4,000 picket signs.

On the morning of March 25, 2023, an estimated thirty thousand protesters set out across the countryside near the village of Sainte-Soline in western France.

They marched for miles in muddy fields and on country roads before coming in sight of the object of the protest: the unfinished 190-million-gallon Sainte-Soline reservoir, a taxpayer-funded boondoggle intended to create a surplus of water for irrigated agriculture. At that time, it was nothing more than a hole in the ground, fifty feet deep and as wide as several football fields. When filled with groundwater via pumps driven below the water table, however, it was to become part of a system of more than two dozen reservoirs in the Vendee, Deux-Sèvres, and Charente-Maritime departments of western France.

Proposed in the late 2010s, the reservoirs’ broad purpose was to help large agricultural operators meet their already enormous water needs in the production of corn, a singularly thirsty cash crop, as heat waves and drought worsened across the country.

Put another way, the reservoir complex was a form of climate adaptation, but one that attempted to monopolize a public good—water, that basic necessity of life on Earth—for the benefit of private interests. The protesters considered this both unwise and unjust. At Sainte-Soline, the largest of the planned reservoirs, they wanted construction stopped, the site demolished. By occupying the reservoir for a day, the intention was to make their displeasure known by their numbers, defying local authorities’ ban on such demonstrations.

As the first group of marchers crossed the field toward the site, they saw that on the towering berm around the reservoir hundreds of cops had massed, and thousands more were posted in the cover of a forest that edged the field. Then, according to reports, the police attacked without warning. Tear gas sent the crowd running, a toxic haze obscured the landscape, and helicopters whipped overhead while armored vehicles were deployed in the distance. A hail of sting-ball grenades exploded in the air and at people’s feet, sending rubber shrapnel in all directions. A man’s skull was blown open, a woman’s foot shattered, and several people lay blinded by tear gas. As the injured screamed in agony, a few of the marchers fought back. A group of young men, masked and wearing only black and carrying wooden shields, threw Molotov cocktails and rocks dug out of the dirt; others shot fireworks at the forces de l’ordre. Per news accounts, the protesters set at least three police cars on fire and injured sixteen officers.

The battle of Sainte-Soline, as it became known, did not issue out of a political vacuum. It was the culmination of years of conflict over the expanding reservoir system in western France. A coalition of French citizens—antireservoir activists, smallhold farmers, environmentalists, students, eco-saboteurs, and black-clad anarchists—demonstrated against several reservoirs in the Deux-Sèvres and Charente-Maritime departments in 2022, with some of the marchers tearing out pumps and pipes and ripping up and setting aflame the huge plastic tarpaulin linings that kept the water from percolating into the ground. Others had sabotaged reservoirs across the region under cover of night and escaped undetected. The police expected similar property destruction at Sainte-Soline.

After two hours, the battle was over, the protesters forced to flee. The government claimed that nearly fifty police were injured but only seven demonstrators required medical aid. Protest organizers, however, counted two hundred injured in the fighting, including one who fell into a coma from a sting-ball grenade that exploded by his head. The authorities had launched as many as five thousand grenades and tear-gas canisters. Around 3,200 cops had marshalled for the attack, deployed along with nine helicopters, four armored vehicles, and four water cannons, directed from a command center overlook-ing the field of battle. The attack had been effectively greenlit by Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister in the Macron government, who in the days and weeks following the bloodshed denounced the marchers as “ecoterrorists.” Human rights investigators with the UN had a different view. They called the violence at Sainte-Soline “alarming” and “anti-democratic” and noted that France is the only country in the EU known to deploy tear gas and stun grenades against a peaceful assembly. The repression arose, in part, because the antireservoir movement, radicalized and well organized, had succeeded in monkey-wrenching agribusiness in France—direct action against entrenched interests that could not be tolerated.

Machines in the Garden

I visited western France in 2024 to write about the antireservoir movement, and my first stop was at the home of one of its most outspoken leaders, an elfin environmentalist in his seventies named Jean-Jacques Guillet, in the village of Amuré in the Deux-Sèvres. By trade a carpentry teacher, Guillet had spent decades in some form of elected officialdom, typically as a rabble-rouser. As mayor of Amuré for nineteen years, he clashed with local farmers about their use of GMOs. For six years he was president of the local waste management authority and made a name for himself stopping the construction of a garbage incinerator in the city of Niort and, before that, a nuclear-waste burial site in the town of Neuvy-Bouin.

What most interested him were the consequences of the transformation of farming in France after World War II. It was to him a history of the destruction of a venerable peasant culture and the erasure of the landscape of his youth. “We say, ‘It is not water that flows through our veins, it is the river of our childhood,’” Guillet told me. “I was a child of agriculture, I grew up on a farm, and if today I am a seventy-three-year-old activist, it’s because, without being really conscious of it, I was traumatized in my childhood after the war,” when these terrible changes took place.

If you were to look at aerial photos of France in 1950, it was a country of millions of small parcels, irregularly shaped, diverse in what they produced, a “nation of three hundred cheeses,” as Charles de Gaulle reportedly once quipped. This patchwork of distinct food cultures had evolved over centuries of experimentation and adaptation based in local knowledge of the interactions of weather and soil, crops, and livestock. “We were smart enough,” said Guillet, “to understand that one did not just do anything one wanted anywhere.”

In the wake of the privations of wartime, France turned to the American model of productivist monoculture. Traditional wisdom was jettisoned and local diversity pushed aside for the cultivation of crops best tended by machines for maximum output and efficiency. Large parts of rural France fell to a regimen that required expensive tractors; heady volumes of fossil fuels, fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides; the capture of water for irrigation; and, not least, vast open fields where machines could run unimpeded over miles of uniform terrain. “Nowhere was the transformation of the agricultural sector effected so quickly and so thoroughly as in France,” University of Oxford historian Venus Bivar writes in her account of postwar farming upheaval in the country. “At the close of the Second World War, the agricultural sector was for the most part a backward holdover of the nineteenth century, and yet by the mid-1970s, France had become the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural goods—second only to the United States.”

Taming the land to make way for petroleum-powered tractors would prove devastating for western France’s bocage country, a tangled matrix of woodland, heath, fields, hedgerows, and orchards laced between brooks, rivers, and ancient canals. It was in the bocage country that Guillet romped as a child in the 1950s. Within a decade, large parts of the bocage came under assault. A teenage Guillet watched as bulldozers tore out the hedges and woods and straightened and redirected rivers and streams, transforming waterways into what was effectively “a large collector drain, the goal [being] to move water as quickly as possible for the sowing of cereals.”

The dominant voice of French agriculture, and the chief proponent of the corn regime, is the National Federation of Agricultural Workers’ Union (FNSEA), established in 1946. Though its membership includes lots of individuals who own farms, FNSEA defends the interests not of the workers but of the agro-chemical industry, the banks that finance Big Ag, and the largest and most powerful agribusiness companies and allied cooperatives. According to Corporate Europe Observatory, a Belgian-based watchdog, FNSEA is “France’s agribusiness war machine.” It is “much more than just a farmer’s trade union: it has been the co-manager, together with large sections of the French State, of France’s agricultural system for the past 50 years.” FNSEA promotes the distribution and use of toxic pesticides and herbicides in Europe, and it is also a proponent of pesticide-dependent grain as a cash crop for export. The union has been the loudest booster of reservoir construction in the face of the drought that has afflicted western France. And, unsurprisingly, it has gone to extreme lengths to make sure its interests are protected against dissenters.

In 2019, FNSEA partnered with the National Gendarmerie, the branch of France’s armed forces that focuses on civilian law enforcement, to establish a special intelligence unit, code-named Demeter after the Greek goddess of the harvest, that would single out for surveillance and harassment anyone who engaged in “agribashing.” Agribashing was defined to include criminal activity—trespassing on agricultural facilities, acts of sabotage, and so on—along with “actions of an ideological nature,” including “simple symbolic actions denigrating the agricultural sector.” In cities, towns, prefectures, and rural police stations, and with local members of FNSEA lending a hand, Demeter intel operatives created a network of informants across France.

French courts ruled the program illegal and shut it down in 2022. The Demeter network, however, may still be in place, according to antireservoir activists. When one approaches a reservoir site in the fields of western France today, the response from watchful vigilantes can amount to a menacing display. A few months before I met with him, Jean-Jacques Guillet led a group of fifty students from a Belgian engineering school on a tour of a reservoir not far from his home in Amuré. Angry farmers on tractors—he assumed they were FNSEA—surrounded them at the site, Guillet says; not long after, gendarmes showed up, asking them what they were doing there.

Before the cops arrived, Guillet was able to tell the students about the threat the reservoirs represented:

They were surprised to hear that in France, a democratic country, where we consider water a public good, it can be grabbed by a few, stored in the sun, on black tarps at the mercy of evaporation, at the mercy of cyano-bacteria. To be more stupid is impossible. And the cherry on top is that to fill the reservoirs we take water from aquifers. If we were taking the flow from a river or marsh, it wouldn’t be much smarter, but at least it would be less stupid. But to take high-quality water beneath us, protected from light and to place it in the sun? And best of all, to do it using public funds, with the support of elected officials?

Rivers Run Through It

The rivers that flow out of the gentle uplands of western France—the Mignon, the Sèvre Niortaise, the Vendée, and others—come together at roughly a single point west of the city of Niort, by the Atlantic Ocean, in the 386-square-mile coastal wetland-cum-canal system called the Marais Poitevin. No longer a true marsh, the Poitevin is an artifact of human intervention that began in the seventh century, when local monks embarked on construction of a complex of earthen canals and small barrier dams to drain stretches of land in the delta where the many rivers debouched to the sea. The man-made Marais Poitevin acted as a natural reservoir, storing excess water from the uplands. It became a marvel of bocage country—“It is one of the most important wetlands on the European continent,” said one account of the Poitevin, “a favorite stopover for migratory birds” and habitat for European otters—maintained for most of the last 1,400 years first by the monks, then by generations of peasants.

Among those who tended to the wounded at the battle of Sainte-Soline was a hulking, bearded forty-eight-year-old activist named Julien LeGuet, who had spent much of his life as a boat guide and self-taught naturalist in the Marais Poitevin. When the first group of reservoirs was proposed in 2017, LeGuet helped organize the opposition under the banner of a grassroots group called Bassines Non Merci, or Reservoirs No Thank You, which he cofounded that year with a collective of like-minded activists, environmentalists, and smallhold farmers. It was Reservoirs No Thank You that helped spearhead the march at Sainte-Soline.

I spent a day with LeGuet poling on his punt on the Sèvre Niortaise and in the canals that connected to it in the Marais Poitevin. With the spread of industrial-scale farming and the rise of the corn regime, the water had been poisoned with agricultural runoff, so toxified that locals advised not to swim in it. Thirty years ago, when he was a teenager, he and his friends bathed in that water all summer long. Old-timers attested that at one time, as recently as seventy years ago, one could drink the water. Julien’s seventy-year-old father, Christian, a retired schoolteacher who hosted me for a week at his drafty old stone house, told me about the wetland as it once was. “When Julien was a boy, he used to collect frogs, scores of them every day. They’re gone, mostly. And the dragonflies, the variety we once had, the noise they made, the water buzzing with them, the frogs croaking, the number of insects. You don’t see the same plants in the water either.” The water lentils that typically float on the surface of healthy wetlands, richly green, a protein source for waterfowl and cover for the fry and tadpoles of fishes and amphibians, used to be so abundant that the canals of the marsh were dubbed the Green Venice. But the water lentils, according to Christian, were dying out, slowly disappearing.

LeGuet poled our boat in the cold November afternoon under gray skies, wearing a sweatshirt that said “eco-terroriste.” Not long ago, he had discovered a high-end surveillance camera camouflaged on the ground in front of his father’s neighbor’s house but pointing directly at his father’s home. He assumed it was placed there by the gendarmerie or Demeter agents to keep track of the comings and goings chez la famille LeGuet. He knew he was a target and leaned into it: hence the blaring words on the sweatshirt, which he wore every day I saw him. When I remarked on the sparkling clearness of the water, he insisted that it was full of poisons, that at least two hundred types of chemicals, including a variety of neurotoxins, have been detected there. He related this with a heaving sigh and a shake of his head.

There’s only so much of this type of grief one can bear without descending into rage. In an essay he wrote that was published in 2023, LeGuet addressed the “ecocidal business executives of the sprawling tentacular FNSEA”:

You who idolize to the extreme a capitalistic system and all forms of techno-solutionism, you who are ready to blow up nurturing lands to dig megacraters surrounded with megadams made waterproof by an ocean of black tarps. For 15 years, in the Marais Poitevin, some of you thought well to come here and disturb the water and soil cycles. . . . you thought we’d let this happen? You thought we wouldn’t resist?

What shape, though, should resistance take? In the summer of 2021, LeGuet and other representatives of Reservoirs No Thank You met with members of a grassroots environmental action group called Les Soulèvements de la Terre, or Earth Uprisings, to answer that question. The group was an outgrowth of a successful land-defense movement that had formed in northwestern France, in the rural community of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, where farmers had been fighting for decades to protect four thousand acres of small-hold bocage farmland from destruction for a planned airport. Starting in 2008, activists and anarchists joined the farmers’ movement, and despite attempts by successive administrations to evict the land defenders, who fought repeated battles with police that involved tear gas and beatings and lots of injuries, the airport was never built and the bocage was left intact. The occupation at Notre-Dame-des-Landes—nicknamed zone à defendre (ZAD) as a middle finger at the developer’s common lingo “zone à déveloper”—provided the model for resistance that Earth Uprisings would now uphold. After the founding of Uprisings in January of 2021, chapters sprung up from one side of the country to the other, though the exact numbers of its membership were unknown.

The group’s 2024 manifesto, First Tremors, a three-hundred-page, anonymously authored book published by radical Paris imprint La Fabrique Éditions, made clear their vision of ecological revolt in the context of global capitalism that had become “intoxicated by Herculean power” and left the natural world a shambles. “We are young rebels who have grown up with the ecological disaster in the background and precariousness as our only horizon,” said the manifesto. It inveighed “against the urbanization that tends to cover [the planet] with concrete, to infinitely extend the tentacles of roads, lines, and flows,” the landscape suffocated with infrastructure. It denounced the extractivist economy “that pollutes irremediably in the service of fossil capitalism.”

Earth Uprisings proposed three prongs for land defense: occupation (of places, by people en masse who refuse to budge); blockade (of industrial activities and byways—roads, for example—that threaten those places); and sabotage (of industrial machines and property), which they called “disarmament.” They echoed the long history of working-class machine-breaking in Europe and hailed especially the antecedent of the Luddites of England, artisanal weavers who in the 1810s found themselves out of work with the advent of mechanical looms and took action by donning masks in the night to smash the machines with hammers and clubs. Starting in 2021, cells of direct actionists who issued communiqués via Earth Uprisings sabotaged cement and concrete factories, sand quarries, road construction sites, and road-building equipment across France. Following the meeting that summer with Reservoirs No Thank You, the list of targets expanded to include the reservoirs of the Vendee, Deux-Sèvres, and Charente-Maritime departments.

The movement thereafter grew by leaps and bounds. Autonomous collectives of French anarchists joined and would become instrumental in tactical and defensive strategy to fight back against violent policing and give other protesters, most of them terrified of battle, a better chance to exercise the right of assembly. Anarchists were willing to engage in physical combat with police and use incendiaries such as Molotov cocktails. As a general policy, the representatives from Earth Uprisings neither encouraged nor discouraged these acts of revolt. All rebels were welcome, all methods were in the running, as long as a line was drawn at the taking of life. (“We’re not terrorists!” LeGuet told me.) The movement was hardly fringe. By the end of 2021, FNSEA’s old enemy, the Peasant Confederation, a formidable union of smallhold farmers established in the 1980s to oppose agribusiness, had also joined the rebellion against the reservoirs.

Arrayed against the water defenders, farmers, anarchists, and environmentalists were the FNSEA patrollers—a mix of “virile fraternity, binoculars, beers, sodas, and shotguns in the trunks of utility vehicles,” as described in First Tremors—who took up posts around reservoirs deemed most threatened. The rebels evaded them again and again, raiding the sites under cover of night.

Saboteurs posted communiqués using names that evoked satire and enigma: here struck the “Regional Directorate for Water Protection,” there the “Fremens of the Marais Poitevin.” By the time of the Sainte-Soline march, so much damage to reservoirs had accrued across western France that the resources of FNSEA, the Macron government, and local municipalities and police prefectures had been exhausted by a campaign of sabotage that operated across hundreds of miles of rural terrain. The campaign was fluid, organized, anonymous, and relentless. “Considering the multitude of potential targets and the extent of the territory to be protected,” stated a prefectural decree from 2022, “the available law enforce-ment agencies will not be able to contain these disturbances.”

Dead Reservoirs

Some in the anti-reservoir movement saw the violence of March 25, 2023, as an explosion that issued from this administrative impotence. The odd thing about the Sainte-Soline site is there was nothing for the rebels to sabotage, no pipes or pumps or plastic tarps yet installed. The government defended with ferocity an empty crater because it was symbolic to hold the ground against unruly citizens. The seriousness of the police violence fell into vivid context when a government official noted in a hearing on Sainte-Soline that five thousand tear gas and sting-ball grenades fired in one day in that rural enclave was more than had been fired in 2018 across all of France (and this during the widespread unrest that year from the Gilets Jaunes protests). Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin attempted to legitimize the bloodshed at the battle of Sainte-Soline with a declaration that Earth Uprisings should be banned under French law, its principals and adherents to be charged and imprisoned as terrorists.

By dissolving Uprisings, rendering it an illegal entity and smearing by association all who worked with the group—including Reservoirs No Thank You, Julien LeGuet, Jean-Jacques Guillet, and so on—one could open the flood gates of mass arrests of ecological rebels. Darmanin issued his order for the dissolution of Earth Uprisings in June 2023, but within months France’s high court shut him down, stating it was Darmanin who was acting outside the law. “Inciting violence against property,” stated the court, “does not justify dissolution.” (In November, journalists with the newspaper Libération and the nonprofit investigative news site Mediapart revealed bodycam footage from gendarmes at the battle of Sainte-Soline that showed officers not only violating laws themselves in their use of weapons against protesters but also rejoicing in the thrill of injuring their targets.)

A few days after my visit with LeGuet in the Marais Poitevin, I went for a drive with Guillet in his little electric car to take a tour of reservoir-construction sites across the Deux-Sèvres. Some of the sites had been sabotaged in the last year, others more recently, others not at all. Piloting dirt roads, we came upon a reservoir in the afternoon light. The barbed-wire fencing of the berm rose from a sea of dead corn stalks, and when we approached the perimeter a surveillance camera flashed from a fence pole. “Uhp,” said Guillet, winking at me. “They’ve got us.”

“No, my friends,” he said, addressing the camera, “we are not here today to smash things or make trouble. That’s for another day.” He speculated on the ease of blowing the camera to bits with a carbine, then we got back in his car to continue the tour. We passed a pump that supplied a reservoir that repeatedly had been put out of commission. Someone, he said, kept hitting that pump again and again, tearing out its guts. It was just terrible, said Guillet, grinning like an imp.

A few days earlier, Guillet and I had attended a march of around a thousand people who gathered in the morning fog in the village of Saint-Sauvant, in the uplands thirty miles east of the Marais Poitevin, not far from the battlefield at Sainte-Soline. The goal was to walk from the village in a procession that would cross the countryside on backroads to the site of the planned Saint-Sauvant reservoir, which had yet to be built. A sizable number of police—scores of officers, allegedly—were said to be hunkered in the forests along the route of the march. No one I talked to knew what to expect. An attack was possible, for whatever reason the state deemed fit. Perhaps the marchers would be allowed to proceed without trouble.

The alliance of peasant farmers with Reservoirs No Thank You and Earth Uprisings’ direct actionists had produced a good run. Reservoirs in Deux-Sèvres were on hold, and in 2025 the authorities in the department of Vienne would announce the cancellation of the planned construction of forty-one other reservoirs, according to LeGuet. Some projects had “died in the cradle,” he told me, “abandoned without anyone knowing because elected officials are terrified of seeing a ‘Sainte-Soline’ in their backyard.” Prompted by lawsuits from nature conservation, fishing, and other environmental groups, French courts had weighed in and killed or delayed projects, finding them in violation of various laws, including those protecting water quality and wildlife. The list of questionable reservoirs included Sainte-Soline; a December 2024 court decision ruled that its construction threatened the habitat of an endangered bird species. At the same time, reservoirs as a publicly funded support for agribusiness have become a growing object of revulsion across France, largely because of the negative publicity the rebellion against them brought. After the violence at Sainte-Soline scared people from fighting in the fields, they opened their pocketbooks; one fundraiser for Reservoirs No Thank You in 2024 netted a sizable sum of donations, according to Jean-Jacques Guillet, though he declined to say how much, and close to two hundred new chapters of Earth Uprisings formed across France, Belgium, and Switzerland.

In some instances, however, the Macron government had defied the court orders and continued building reservoirs. “We are in a kind of Mafia state then. The law has spoken, the government doesn’t listen,” Guillet told me. He had marched at Sainte-Soline and come under attack and now was one of the marchers at Saint-Sauvant. The bitterness and pain of events a year and half earlier had not been forgotten, and many of the people mustered had been in the battle and seen the wounded and heard their cries. Julien LeGuet was also here for the march. That morning, at his father’s house, LeGuet had been chain-smoking and guzzling coffee. He looked weary, like he’d slept in a ditch, and he was worried about how the day would unfold. He expected the worst.

We set out past noon, the procession stretching a mile in length along muddy dirt roads through enormous fields of corn that had been cut for harvest. People sang and shouted slogans, and loudspeakers boomed music, and the marchers wanted to tell their story. I met a woman in her thirties named Laury Gingreau, a co-owner of a cooperative farm, where she and her partners in recent years had planted three thousand trees, including sixty different species, their goal the rewilding of the landscape. She had been tear-gassed at Sainte-Soline. “It was like war,” she told me. Gingreau joined Reservoirs No Thank You at its inception in 2017 and had no intention of backing off. I met a twenty-one-year-old philosophy student named Kate Saoirse, who told me the struggle against reservoirs was about “the nation-state versus the people who live in the land. It’s about ways of life lost to progress—which means colonialism, empire, corporate power.” She said she marched because she was “on the side of people living in the land.”

We reached the site of the future Saint Sauvant reservoir. For miles around, except a few remaining vestigial forests, all one saw was machine-scythed corn that crunched underfoot. Little children carrying buckets of seeds—types of peas and wheat and other grains—sowed the fields with their parents in an act of protest against monoculture. Two peasant farmers spoke about water woes; LeGuet exhorted the crowd with a chant of “No bassaran!” (a joking homage to ¡No pasarán!,” the rallying cry of Republican and anarchist forces in the Spanish Civil War); and a deputé from the National Assembly, adorned with the tricolor sash that elected officials in France often wear at public events, inveighed against agribusiness. A dozen men and women with hammers and nails then proceeded to build a bird-viewing station out of rough-hewn logs. This was in honor of the ground-nesting little bustard, which is headed for extinction in western France because of the overdevelopment of its habitat.

The march unfolded without incident, though at one point a young woman went to urinate in the forest along the route and flushed out a group of armored gendarmes hidden in the brush. The gendarmes ordered her to “piss somewhere else.” A drone followed the crowd, low in the fog. Cops in the distance, armed with long-lens cameras, took photographs. It was reasonable to assume the images would be held in data banks for use under whatever laws the government passes in the future to imprison so-called ecoterrorists—which is to say all those who defend land from the progress of the capitalist machine.

It was the tule elk, of all things—those velvet-pelted, doe-eyed creatures once thought extinct—that ultimately drove the organic ranchers, an imperiled species themselves, out of the Point Reyes National Seashore. Point Reyes is a place whose beauty is heightened by contrast: a foggy peninsula where, just a thirty-mile drive north of San Francisco, coastal prairie meets virgin forest, rugged tide pools meet wetland esteros and sprawling lagoons, and, at least until very recently, domesticated livestock graze on oceanfront pastures within mooing distance of the fabled elk—the oafish cows and majestic tule the town’s unofficial odd-couple mascots.

In October, I took a drive through this landscape with David Evans, a rancher who grew up inside the Point Reyes National Seashore, the federally protected wilderness area that stretches along eighty miles of undeveloped coast. Evans’s family has been running cattle on the peninsula since before California was even a state, but despite his beef bona fides, he isn’t your stereotypical meat-and-potatoes cattleman: in addition to riding his ATV, he likes to forage for mushrooms and make jam. In 1999, he launched Marin Sun Farms, an organic, pasture-raised meat and egg company he now runs with his wife, Claire—a former vegetarian—that supplies some of the Bay Area’s highest-quality organic meat to its most upscale markets and restaurants.

Since the Point Reyes National Seashore was established in 1972, ranches like the Evanses’ have been a part of a Bay Area sustainable-food revolution that helped reconfigure our nation’s understanding of what we should eat, how we should eat it, and the ethics of its production. Bill Niman, of Niman Ranch fame—now the largest source of humanely raised, sustainably produced meat in the entire country, sold everywhere from Whole Foods to Michelin-starred restaurants—began ranching in what is now the Point Reyes National Seashore in the early seventies. Until last year, Albert Straus, of the beloved Straus Family Creamery, sourced nearly 15 percent of his organic milk from dairies inside the park. Evans’s Marin Sun Farms created a one-stop shop where the region’s organic ranches—some of them his neighbors on the Seashore—have their meat slaughtered, butchered, and sold at market, cutting out a number of middlemen and thus reducing costs and waste. Encouraged by their geography, the high quality of land, and the environmental regulations that govern the hundreds of people and some 1,500 species of plants and animals that live within the boundaries of the Seashore, many Point Reyes ranchers have joined influential Bay Area locavores like restaurateur Alice Waters and food writers Michael Pollan and Samin Nosrat in advocating for local food systems that support regional economies, reduce carbon and the use of toxic chemicals, improve human health, and restore soil quality. Ranches like Evans’s were presented as proof that these grand designs were possible.

So successful (and rare) is this regional model that, when then-Prince Charles visited the United States in 2005 on an official tour of promising organic agricultural practices, he made a point to visit the farmers market in the eponymous town of Point Reyes—situated just a few miles outside the park boundary, with a population of 485—where he chatted up vendors, celebrating the region as one of the most successful examples of a pastoral landscape that still actually fed people rather than just attracted tourists and looked quaint in social media posts.

At the same time, since 1978, the Seashore has provided crucial habitat to dozens of threatened, rare, or endangered species, including the tule elk, which had nearly gone extinct until finding sanctuary in Point Reyes. In fact, the Point Reyes National Seashore has proved to be one of the only places on Earth that this imperiled subspecies has been able to thrive, flourishing alongside the cattle. If elsewhere in the United States people with an investment in the country’s natural landscapes have too often fallen into a set of antagonistic binaries—tree huggers versus loggers, conservationists versus hunters, vegetarians versus ranchers—the beef and dairy farmers and the wilderness lovers of Point Reyes achieved a rare peace. Their conviviality proved that ecosystem conservation and sustainable food production could, in fact, coexist, even on a warming planet teeming with evermore hungry humans.

But that accord collapsed a few months before my ride-along with Evans and now he suddenly pulled his truck over to the road’s shoulder so that he could point out to me a sign of the changing times. A tule elk buck, rack of horns and all, marched unimpeded through its new empire: a former cow pasture whose tenants had been moved out months ago. The animal was just a tawny speck trudging through a field of browning grass, overgrown because cows no longer grazed there, but even from the car I was impressed by the tule’s stature, its silhouette bringing to mind the dramatic and rare presence of a moose.

“Look at that beautiful buck,” Evans said tenderly. So tenderly, in fact, that I wondered if he’d momentarily forgotten that the elk—or their champions, in any case—had been the cause of the doom that had befallen the ranchers of Point Reyes.

The story of how and why exactly the tule elk and their defenders led to the ranchers being kicked off their land has more twists and turns than the road on whose shoulder Evans and I were presently parked, but the most important part to understand is that, one day in the summer of 2012, the tule elk had suddenly and mysteriously started turning up dead, their emaciated bodies found rotting into the ground as if they were on an episode of CSI: Animal Victims Unit. That’s when the forty-year peace between the ranchers and conservationists started to go cold. Some two hundred elk died over the following two years, nearly halving the population of the imperiled species. Animal rights and environmental activists blamed the ranchers’ resource-intensive presence on the Seashore, which forced the elk to be fenced into a preserve when instead, they argued, they should be free to roam. (The activists also blamed the National Park Service for letting ranchers operate on the park’s land in the first place.)

The specifics of whether the ranchers’ presence really was to blame for the elks’ mass deaths and the details of the lawsuits and countersuits and counter-countersuits that followed are yet more zigzags on the switchbacked road that leads to the present, but the outcome of it all is straightforward enough. In January 2025, the Park Service announced the results of a mediation settlement that evicted all but two of the local ranch operators from the Point Reyes National Seashore, leaving the farms and creameries vacant and nearly a hundred (mostly Latino) tenants and ranch hands without jobs or homes, and halting the annual production of roughly a million gallons of organic milk and tens of thousands of pounds of sustainable and pasture-raised beef. At the behest of conservation-minded environmentalists, in other words, the local food system was being eviscerated, with some environmentalist organizations in the area now cheering the eviction of their neighbors who had produced some of the most sustainably and humanely produced meat and dairy in America. “This agreement will finally free the park’s magnificent Tule elk, forever,” wrote one organization, In Defense of Animals, celebrating the departure of ranchers like Evans, whom they mocked as “sewers of the land.”

From afar—well, from my home in nearby Berkeley—I had watched the conflict unfold with a mix of skepticism and disbelief over some of the activists’ depictions of the ranchers as “greedy corporate monsters in overalls making a buck any way they can,” as one blogger put it. Environmentalists picking on small organic farms, for goodness’ sake? The whole affair seemed almost cartoonishly Californian, like an Onion gag skewering my home state’s love of litigating the absurd. The punch line to the joke came in the spring, when the kerfuffle attracted the attention of a group of Republican lawmakers on the House Committee for Natural Resources (led by Representative Ben Westerman of Arkansas, no less) who opened a congressional probe to challenge the legal decision. Along the way they made sure to milk the cow conflict for culture war clout by insinuating the ranchers’ removal was not only a Democrat conspiracy that had “muzzled” the cattlemen, per a letter penned by the lawmakers announcing their inquiry, but also evidence of what inevitably occurred if you let crazy environmentalists pass laws. When Chadwick Conover, a local surfer and wellness influencer better known as Ceadda, texted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for help fighting the supposed leftist plot, Kennedy declared he was working “full bore on a solution” and dispatched a member of the Department of Interior to visit Point Reyes. The absurdity had an air of slapstick to it, but the Republicans’ narrative about overzealous environmental legislation wasn’t funny, especially because it seemed to all too conveniently complement the unprecedented attacks that the second Trump administration has launched on wildlife and environmental protections—things like firing one thousand National Park Service employees, issuing five thousand new oil-and gas-drilling permits on public lands, and, of course, wiping out USDA funds that support organic farmers while dismantling federal regulations on the “certified organic” label. While clearly in bad faith, however, the Republican interlopers also sort of seemed to have a point. Was the war of Point Reyes yet another instance of liberals’ (decidedly non-vegetarian) lust for cannibalizing themselves? I hoped not. But even if it was, there still seemed to be something else afoot, some deeper conflict between differing visions of what “nature” even was, that had caused everything to unravel.

All of this clanged around in my head in time to the truck’s suspension as we continued our tour of the battlefields, Evans steering us through a swath of coastal prairie, the Pacific Ocean coming into view ahead. We passed his childhood ranch near Abbotts Lagoon, where his parents still lived and which his sister now operated; it would shut down and the family would all vacate before spring. We passed two closed ranches and one soon-to-close dairy. By April 2026, all of the ranchers and their workers would be gone.

Except Evans. He was one of the two ranchers staying, at least for now, the result of yet another one of those dizzying zigzags (in this case a legal one, his staying behind being the result more of an accident than defiance). But even though he’d been spared, he wasn’t sure for how long he’d be able to continue to make a living, or any kind of peaceful life, on his patch of land—what with the brutal costs of operating a small-scale ranch, the vicissitudes of his Park Service landlords, and the drone-wielding environmental activists who’d been surveilling the ranches, and his in particular, of late.

As if to underscore this newfound isolation, on the drive back to Evans’s ranch we came across a final sign of change: a large, southbound truck cresting a hill, followed by two more, bellowing toward us. It was the Nunes dairy ranchers hauling the last of their livestock out of the park. The cows were headed to Oregon, meaning the milk was leaving the local foodshed for elsewhere, where it may or may not stay in the hands of organic producers. Other evicted ranchers were setting up new operations in even farther-flung states. Others still had quit ranching altogether, taking more organic food out of circulation in not just the local economy but the United States at large.

Evans let out a long low. He still didn’t see why elk and cattle, organic ranchers and conservationists, couldn’t all just get along. The ranchers of Point Reyes had been stewarding this land for generations, but somewhere along the way, he felt, the Park Service—like many of his neighbors—had turned on him. “It feels like they’ve just left us out here to die.”

Prairie Shadows

If it wasn’t for the heroics of a cattle rancher named Henry Miller way back in 1878, there likely wouldn’t be a single tule elk left alive on Earth.

Prior to that—which is to say also prior to the Gold Rush and the arrival of scores of settlers to the West Coast—the tule elk had thrived in California for thousands of years. Along with bison and pronghorn, they had been a native keystone species, an animal that held the whole ecosystem together. The elk had been so plentiful that early European visitors noted that they covered the coastal prairie like a shadow. But the settlers who rushed west chasing gold or hitching rides on the new transcontinental railroad soon decimated the tule elk’s population, in part by turning so much habitat into farms filled with cows. So drastic and rapid was the tule elk’s decline that a California law banning all elk hunting was passed in 1873. The intervention came too late, however. By then, hunters, scientists, and government representatives all thought the elk had gone extinct.

So imagine Miller’s shock when, one day, at his vast ranch just west of Bakersfield, his workers discovered tule elk drinking from the tule marshes of Buena Vista Lake. (Tule, a staple of the elks’ diet, is a wispy, grass-like plant that thrives in shallow water.) It turned out they were part of a herd of thirty or so that had taken refuge on Miller’s land—the last thirty on Earth. Feeling responsible for the species’ survival and not wanting to attract the attention of trophy hunters, he fenced off a portion of his property, offered a $500 reward for reports of anyone coming after the elk, and—save for his workers and a local game warden—did his best to keep the herd’s existence a secret for decades, until it grew too large and began to trample his fences, causing him to reach out to state officials for help moving them elsewhere.

Fast-forward to 1971, a big year for the tule elk. With a population now numbered roughly five hundred alive on the entire planet, with a small herd still living at now-deceased Miller’s ranch and the rest scattered throughout different parts of California, the elk was added that year to the endangered species list, created under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 to provide the first federal protections for vulnerable species. That same year, the state passed legislation funding the relocation of the elk to suitable habitats with the goal of reaching two thousand tule elk statewide. One of the locations chosen was the newly created Point Reyes National Seashore, where, in 1978, the Park Service moved ten elk from the Miller ranch to a fenced-in 2,600-acre preserve on a former dairy in the northernmost tip of Point Reyes.

The elk arrived to a somewhat unorthodox landscape, especially for a national park. In addition to being home to hundreds of bird species, 18 percent of all of the plant species that grow in California, and aquatic life like octopuses, anemone, and gargantuan elephant seals, the Seashore was also home to more than a dozen family-run dairy and beef ranches that took up about half of the park’s total land. Among the eighty-five million acres of federally protected parkland in the country, Point Reyes was one of the few parks that hosted year-round commercial agriculture.

This peculiar arrangement was the result of the political compromise required to create the park. While Congress had recommended the creation of the Point Reyes National Seashore all the way back in 1935, the rising costs of land in the area, the machinations of local developers who saw big dollars in the landscape, and the ranchers’ longtime refusals to sell their pastures had successfully stymied that and every other attempt to seal the deal since. But in 1971, California politicians had come up with a unique financial and political proposal: buy the land from the ranchers below market value ($14 million back then, about $100 million in today’s dollars) and allow them to rent the land for years to come. It worked. Fourteen ranchers, among them David Evans’s great-grandfather, sold their land to the government in exchange for twenty-five-year leases (and, in one case, a life estate—essentially, a lifelong lease). They did so under the understanding—which was never explicitly enshrined into law—that they could ranch there in perpetuity as long as they kept their land dedicated to ranching activities that did not “upset the pastoral scenic effect of this particular area” and did not threaten the park’s fundamental purpose: to offer public recreation opportunities and preserve the cultural and natural landscape of the country’s wild spaces.

If the terms sound somewhat vague in practice, they were—almost ensuring, if inadvertently, dueling future interpretations. As one history of Point Reyes put it, “Legislators discussed and tried to resolve some of the land-use problems, which they knew would make life complicated for future administrators at the park. They ironed out some of the potential conflicts in their construction of the Point Reyes bill, but other problems were only temporarily avoided or swept under the rug in order to ensure the bill’s passage.” They kicked the can down the road, in other words, to ensure the park’s creation.

Because permanent ranching isn’t typically allowed in national parks, the architects of Point Reyes came up with another novel idea: the creation of a “pastoral zone” of some twenty-six-thousand acres to be privately managed by the ranchers with park oversight. Once the ranchers were officially operating on public land, the Park Service limited ranching activities in order to maintain the integrity of the ecosystem. Even within the pastoral zone, the service partially dictated which pastures could be grazed and when and which areas (erosion-prone hillsides, for instance) were off-limits. Only certain activities were allowed: a ranch couldn’t just start a pig operation without special permission and such permissions for expanded use were often denied. Park administrators conducted reviews, too, to ensure that no pasture was overgrazed, animals were being well maintained, and water contamination was being controlled. The Park Service strictures, while not formally prohibiting pesticides and other harmful chemicals, helped create an atmosphere that encouraged and incentivized ranchers to stay (or become) organic. Having the federal government as landlords meant a good deal of red tape for the ranchers—it could take days to get permission to build a new fence, for instance, let alone to build a new barn or dig a well—but the ranchers thrived.

The elk did, too, taking easily to the Point Reyes ecosystem that had generations earlier been the creatures’ home. They remained in a relatively small fenced-in area of the park, and tourists from all over the world came to behold the miracle creature in the semiwild. The purpose of the fence was to keep the elk out of the cattle pastures to the south, so as not to disturb the cattle or their forage and also to prevent the transmission of diseases from one species to the other. The ecological impact of grazing in Point Reyes is complex—ranch-ing, after all, had contributed to the displacement of the native ruminant foragers in the first place—but grasslands do still need ruminant grazers. Cattle ranching now served an important function in the ecosystem of the park’s pastoral zone, playing the role the tule elk had once done back when they’d been numerous enough to shadow the state’s prairies. By munching grass, they help maintain the health of plants and soil, encourage a diversification of native species, prevent fires, and provide habitats and hunting grounds for the numerous animals that live there. Even though cattle aren’t a native species to California like the tule elk, they, too, can accomplish these tasks extremely well when managed correctly. The Point Reyes National Seashore administrators saw it as a success of their experiment that their ranching tenants successfully helped maintain critical habitats for raptors, who need low grasses to hunt for voles, and other creatures like the endangered California red-legged frog, who thrived in the ranches’ stock ponds.

Still, even though cattle was now king, the elk population did so well in Point Reyes that the herd began to outgrow its sizable enclosure. To address this, and to encourage further growth and genetic diversity among the inbred elk, the Park Service introduced twenty-eight tule in 1998 to a wilderness area near Limantour Beach, far from the pastoral zone, where the herd roamed free. Within a few years, this group had split into two, as healthy, growing herds do: a signal that this free-range experiment was working. But there wasn’t enough space on the peninsula to set all the tule elk free—certainly not without risking angering the ranchers, who had reasonable fears that too many tule elk would cause competition for grass—and so the main herd remained hemmed in between the Pacific Ocean, Tomales Bay, and the fence that kept them off the pastoral zone.

Then came the drought in 2012. The two free-roaming herds fared fine, but the enclosed elk died by the dozens. Those fenced in were living without adequate year-round water sources, and in some cases thirsty elk had been found drinking from mud pits. As tule elk biologist Julie Phillips explained to an activist at the time, the social patterns of the elk are such that the dominant bucks will guard limited water sources and keep the others away, especially during mating season. “They are a captive species,” Phillips lamented of the herd behind the fence. To her and other activists, it seemed clear that the elk could have gone elsewhere to find better water and forage sources had there not been a fence—and had there not been cattle in Point Reyes, there wouldn’t have been a fence.

For their part, Park Service scientists dismissed concerns over the ongoing elk deaths as a cause for alarm. The drought was an adverse factor causing a “natural” population bust, just as it would in the wild: in favorable conditions, elk thrived, and in unfavorable conditions, they died. Water wasn’t the issue, the Park Service claimed, the deaths were instead the result of “overpopulation and poor nutritional quality of forage.”

It was true that the population had rebounded enough by now that the tule elk had been removed from the endangered species list. Indeed, the species’ reproductive success in Point Reyes had foreshadowed other success stories statewide, such that, by the time of the die-off, the nation’s total tule elk population had rebounded to about 3,200 animals. But this was still such a small number, and the population gains so recent and precarious, that, to the environmental groups and activists monitoring the situation, the dismissal of the mass deaths in Point Reyes as the acceptable result of overpopulation was an abdication of duty by the very agency entrusted with defending them. Even more enraging to some was the fact that the Park Service’s explanation didn’t seem to make much sense. The elk that were dying weren’t a free-ranging natural species but a captive herd unable to roam to find more favorable natural species but a captive herd unable to roam to find more favorable conditions, so deeming the deaths natural seemed odd.

As the elk body count kept rising, and the Park Service refused to reverse position and release the captive herd from their enclosure, local activists grew increasingly impassioned and numerous. Animal rights groups hitched themselves to the cause and began flying drones around ranchers’ properties looking for evidence of environmental harm. The elk’s advocates become almost as notorious as the animal they defended, and they began calling themselves “elktavists.” They demanded that the elk fence—which had now come to signal the emergent and growing divide between the ranchers and the Park Service on one hand and the wilderness conservationists on the other—be taken down and that the tule be liberated from the “elk prison.”

Prison Break

To Chance Cutrano, the elk enclosure was a violation both ecological and moral, and the fight to try to tear it down was a triumph of recent history.

“Can you believe how beautiful it is today?” he said cheerily despite the sagging gray sky overhead, as I met him near a hiking trailhead in the Seashore. He was going to give me a tour that would turn out to be almost identical to the one Dave Evans gave me but with very different points of emphasis. We ducked into his Tesla, remarkably clean for someone who spent so much time in the wild, where a “We Bought This Car Before We Knew” sticker was affixed beside the gearshift.

As we drove beneath rain clouds past abandoned ranchland in the direction of the elk fence, Cutrano was cheery. As one of three staffers for the Resource Renewal Institute—a scrappy local NGO that, along with two larger nonprofits, had filed all of the important lawsuits against the park and the ranchers, including the one that was ultimately successful—Cutrano had just won the fight of his life. To boot, the Park’s elk were doing well again after a period of ups and downs. When the drought eased in 2016, their population rebounded to upward of four hundred, only to see another die-off in 2020, with 152 new elk dead. Since then, the Point Reyes elk population had stabilized yet again, with a total park-wide population of roughly seven hundred elk—an almost record high. Life for them, Cutrano assured me, was about to get even better now that the ranchers were leaving.

His current optimism was a far cry from the way he felt in 2014, when he relocated to California from the Midwest at the age of twenty-one. The die-off was then ongoing; some of the first elk he ever saw were corpses. Huey Johnson, the head of the Resource Renewal Institute, hired Cutrano to collect evidence that would help the nonprofit challenge the Park Service’s narrative that so many elk had died suddenly of “natural” causes. If any species was suffering in a National Park, the organization felt, then they wanted to make sure that private interests weren’t being supported over public ones. He immediately got to work assembling the case, spending his days hiking around the park, documenting the perils the elk faced, filing FOIA requests, and poring over scientific studies and Park Service paperwork.

From his sleuthing, he learned that many of the tule elk suffered from Johne’s disease, a communicable bacterial infection that they likely contracted from the cattle (possibly from their manure). He obtained internal Park Service studies showing Point Reyes National Seashore administrators had known for years about the adverse impact the cattle had on the park’s water quality and terrain, including a comprehensive water-quality study from 2013 that showed high levels of fecal matter and other contaminants in areas of the park due to sewer discharges and agriculture.

Cutrano pulled the Tesla over at the old McClure’s Dairy with its now-vacant white clapboard barn. This dairy, he pointed out, was one of several positioned in a basin in the topography, meaning its runoff drained into key water sources like Kehoe Creek and Abbotts Lagoon and caused rampant fecal-contamination issues. Back on the road, he pointed out the Nunes ranch, where, in 2021, hikers found what was essentially a massive trash pit of oily car parts, rusted metal, and leaking engines—a clear violation of park rules about polluting.

Cutrano’s findings constituted the bulk of evidence in the first legal case against the Park Service and the ranchers, which began in 2016. Crucial to that case and the one that followed was his discovery that the park had been following an outdated set of guidelines for years. Every national park in the country has a “general management plan”: a master plan that establishes protocols for how the park manages the interests of the different species (including humans) under its authority. Cutrano’s crucial discovery was that the Point Reyes National Seashore still operated according to a general management plan from 1980—that is, a document that was then over thirty years old.

As a result, its guidelines and rules neglected to account for any impacts of climate change, any change in wildlife population that had occurred since Jimmy Carter was president, or any new impacts of the ranches on the park’s ecology. The Park Service did have a more recent tule elk management plan, which provided more detailed rules relating specifically to the species. But even these protocols hadn’t been updated since 1998, when there were hundreds fewer elk to manage. Even the 1998 plan, though, clearly outlined the problematic fact that the enclosure would soon become too small, as there was no reliable year-round source of drinking water for the elk in the preserve—just eight “water impoundments” originally built for cattle and seasonal creeks and low-lying marshes that turned to mud pits during dry spells—demonstrating that the park’s administrators knew about the potential dangers years before the die-offs occurred and did nothing to prevent them. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs sought to show that, with its outdated management plan, the park had prioritized the ranches over the wild areas and creatures it was entrusted to protect, alleging that the Park Service had not done its due diligence in studying the impact of the ranches.

The Resource Renewal Institute filed the lawsuit with the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project, two other environmental organizations that were considerably bigger, more experienced, and better resourced. Like Cutrano’s Resource Renewal Institute, these organiza-tions saw the fight in Point Reyes as part of a larger battle to protect the wild and keep it fully under the control of the public. In previous legal battles, these organizations had helped stall permits for the Keystone XL and other oil pipelines, blocked the opening of mineral mines throughout the West, and secured protective statuses and habitats for species ranging from gray wolves to spotted owls to the Florida bonneted bat. For them, the tule elk was yet another one of these fights.

As part of their efforts toward wilderness protection, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project had frequently targeted ranching on public lands. Roughly 80 percent of public lands in the West and 35 percent of public lands overall are used for grazing at some point during the year (most of this land is operated by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, not the National Park Service). Part of the organizations’ objections came down to the question of public versus private use. The Center for Biological Diversity believed that, by relying on public lands, where ranchers (including those in Point Reyes) were typically given lower-than-market lease rates, the cattle industry was getting a massive subsidy at great ecological expense. “The western livestock industry would evaporate as suddenly as fur trapping,” they claimed in one report, “if it had to pay market rates for services it gets from the federal government.” It was irrelevant, to these groups, that the subsidized ranchers in Point Reyes just happened to produce very sustainable food. (When asked on the tour whether driving organic ranches out of the area—and, in some cases, out of business entirely—was ultimately bad for the environment, Cutrano admitted that he wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to the concern. Feeding people, however, was simply not the job of public lands, and of a national park in particular.)

In yet another of this story’s zigzags, this initial lawsuit gave way, in 2021, to yet another lawsuit, which was settled in a three-year-long mediation that ultimately determined the fate of the ranchers last year. The mediation by all accounts was brutal. The ranchers by now had intervened in the legal proceedings, having convinced a judge they had a stake in the matter and should have a seat at the table. Like many to follow, the first mediation session was held at the Bear Valley Visitor’s Center, a building filled with taxidermized local wildlife just inside the park boundaries, where tourists come to secure camping permits, plan their routes, and pee. In June 2022, the relevant parties and their lawyers filed into the conference room and took their seats around the table: Cutrano and his compatriots, the Park Service administrators, and various members of the participating Point Reyes ranching families. (This included every ranching operation in the park except the Nimans’ and the Evanses’. The Nimans opted out of the negotiations because they held a lifelong lease to their property and thus were largely insulated from the outcome of any lawsuit. The Evanses had two small kids and simply didn’t want the bother. They assumed some deal would be worked out and the drama would just go away.) Items up for discussion included the problem of competing uses (as between the elk and cattle), the appropriate stock pond rations given the increasing water shortages, the length and terms of ranchers’ leases, and, most importantly, whether ranching was in fact intended to occur in the Seashore in perpetuity.

Given the rancor that had preceded the mediation, the participants unsurprisingly struggled to make progress. Every participant was required to sign a nondisclosure agreement, barring them from even discussing the proceedings with one another outside the mediation room, which for some made finding consensus among their peers, much less their adversaries, challenging. About a year in, a powerful nonprofit called the Nature Conservancy, which had mediated numerous public-private land use matters in the past, offered to help the different groups navigate the conflict. But despite the Nature Conservancy’s guidance, the conflicts persisted. To help ease tensions, the Nature Conservancy held occasional group meetings in ranchers’ homes and met with individual ranching families to understand their perspectives and plight. One of the mediators told a local paper the disagreements were so intense that “I can remember times where I teared up on the drive back to Inverness after leaving a ranch.”

For his part, Cutrano had initially been disappointed and even surprised by how intractable the parties’ disagreements seemed to be. He had entered the mediation on the defensive—stung by the results of the first lawsuit, in which the Park Service seemed to side with the ranchers, not even considering the “no-ranching option.” But as the ranchers and environmentalists settled into increasingly deadlocked positions, he saw an opportunity: If the ranchers wouldn’t agree to any of the terms his team was suggesting, might they agree instead to sell their properties and vacate the Seashore entirely? The Nature Conservancy had a wealth of financial resources that might fund such a buyout, and Cutrano knew that a number of the ranchers were near retirement anyway.

Kevin Lunny, like many of the ranchers, had grown up on the Point Reyes National Seashore, and he’d always figured he’d die there. His family had been ranching its pastures since his great-grandfather’s generation. In the early 2000s, the Lunnys were the first ranch operators in Marin County to secure an organic-beef certification. But after suffering through years of lawsuits and attacks from the conservation groups (including a recent post entitled “Two Short Videos Expose Kevin Lunny’s Latest Lies” on a blog called The Shame of Point Reyes), the ever-increasing operating costs of ranching, the long odds of sustaining a small family farm, and arguing around a mediation table since 2022, Lunny was tired. He had entered the mediation hopeful for compromise, hoping above all to secure a reasonable lease length, preferably of twenty years, which would allow him to continue and even expand the activities that made his ranch profitable. He had also hoped that, by sitting face-to-face with the environmentalists, he might put an end to the idea that the rancher was an enemy to the ecological health of the land. But by now, Lunny had accepted that he’d been foolish to think that would happen.

Lunny wasn’t the only rancher who was tired. Of the twelve parties, some decided that they wanted out when presented with the possibility of a buyout—they were retiring anyway and were done fighting. But others didn’t want to go at all. Because the ranchers were coplaintiffs, however, and thus a unified team, the outcome would have to be an all-or-nothing deal: either every rancher took it or none would have the chance, trapping everyone around that mediation table for the foreseeable future.

Lunny was one of the last holdouts, he told me, until it became clear to him that, even if he somehow figured out a way to stay on his ranch, the rest of his life in the park would be mired in conflict, harassment, infuriating lease negotiations, and future lawsuits. “I didn’t have a gun to my head,” Lunny said, but in the end he, too, was forced to accept that there was really only one workable option: take the money and leave the ranch whose lease he’d inherited from his father, who inherited it from his father, who inherited it from his own, and whose lease Lunny had planned until now to pass along to his own children.

When the Nature Conservancy announced the results of the mediation in January 2025, people in Point Reyes were shocked. Clueless as to the proceedings because of the NDAs, the Nimans and the Evanses couldn’t believe that they were going to be the only ranchers left on the peninsula. Even Cutrano, who had been part of the proceedings every step of the way, was stunned by the outcome, a coup that he’d never imagined when the proceedings began. The plaintiffs had expected to win concessions from the Park Service, and maybe even a bid to eventually phase out ranching in the future, but given how entrenched historically and economically the ranches were in Point Reyes, they hadn’t expected a full-scale buyout. To Cutrano, the fact that the ranches were gone represented a historic victory for the ecology of the National Seashore—and a road map, perhaps, for the eviction of ranching off other public lands in years to come.

“We had no idea it would be this successful,” he told me now as he drove, struggling to suppress a grin as he gestured with one hand toward an abandoned dairy in the distance, the spoils of war.

In contrast to the moments of frustration and hopelessness he’d just told me about feeling in the years leading up to this point, his happiness now suddenly struck me as yet another sign of change in the park—though, perhaps, not as dramatic of a change as the one he was about to show me. Parking the Tesla and rolling the car’s windows down, he instructed me to look outside, pointing into the thick mist. I could make out a two-tone field. On one side, the grass was uniform, short and brown; on the other, the earth was wild and varied, a swirl of tall grasses and thickets of coyote brush. Down the middle was an eight-foot-tall wall of mesh tethered by hefty wooden posts: the elk fence. Cutrano beamed as he pointed toward a portion of the fence that had been removed, leaving the entire park open for the elk to roam. The rest, he said, would soon be dismantled.

We turned around and headed south again past the shuttered dairies. Just as with Evans, I spotted elk in the distance, an antlered trio also tramping through what had once been pasture for cows. It was mating season, Cutrano explained, and the elk that don’t win mates are sent away by the herd. “This is the farthest south I’ve ever seen bull elk,” he said. “We’re seeing in real time the change. Wildlife coming back to these areas.”

Future Primitive

Today, all the Point Reyes ranches that participated in the mediation are either on their way out or already gone. The Lunnys held their final cattle run in May. After that, they began to pack up their barn and their home. Even with the settlement money—which remains confidential but has been reported to be around $3 million per lessee—the Lunnys couldn’t afford to buy a place anywhere nearby that was big enough to hold their ninety cattle. In the end, they moved a few hours away to the foothills of the Sierra, bringing just three cows with them.

Of the other eleven departing or departed ranching families, one—the Nuneses—has moved to Oregon. Another ranch sold its cattle and got out of the business entirely. One dairy trucked all its cattle to Texas. Other families didn’t know where they were headed, or didn’t respond to my calls, or were unreachable—on the move and hard to locate or loath to talk about the whole affair.

“That’s not milk that’s going to be available in California anymore,” Albert Straus, founder of Straus Family Creamery, told me. Before the ranches shut down, the company sourced 15 percent of its milk from Point Reyes, about three thousand gallons of milk per day that had previously ended up in local grocery stores with the Straus name. When small ranches and dairies close in California, land prices being what they are, they often move out of state. When this milk goes out of local circulation, its market share goes to the larger organic conglomerates who use far less stringent environmental practices—or to large factory farms that aren’t organic at all. Straus Family Creamery is committed to sourcing all of its milk from local producers to reduce its footprint. Until Straus manages to find new sources, consumers will have to find milk elsewhere—maybe from nonorganic dairies, with far more deleteri-ous environmental practices, or from dairies farther away, increasing the carbon footprint of each pint sold.

The ersatz eviction of the ranchers so upset Straus that he had been the one to reach out to Conover, the wellness influencer, in April 2025—in turn leading to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s entrance into the affair. “Albert just kept getting more desperate,” Conover told Politico earlier this year. “I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I gotta just text [Kennedy].” Kennedy was—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the “food is medicine” pillar of his Make America Healthy Again agenda—sympathetic. “Everyone is involved,” Kennedy replied to Conover, according to reporting by the local North Bay paper the Press Democrat, “including [interior Secretary] Doug Burgam (sic) and [Agriculture Secretary] Brooke Rollins and the White House.” Burgum reportedly asked the acting deputy secretary of the Interior to help broker a solution that would have allowed ranching to continue in the park. But, as of now, like with the Republican probe led by Congressman Westerman, nothing concrete has come of the political theater—and the deal remains in place.

Others, too, are waging a fight—if not to reverse the deal itself, then at least to change its outcomes and implications. Local attorney Andrew Giacomini, himself a descendent of a prominent Point Reyes ranching family, filed a lawsuit on behalf of displaced ranch workers, alleging a conspiracy between the Park Service and the Nature Conservancy “that compelled the Departing Ranchers to accept the pay offs and terminate their leases with the National Park Service.” Financial restitution, the suit argues, must be given to the workers kicked out of their homes. David and Claire Evans also joined with Bill Niman and his wife, Nicolette, to file their own lawsuit, arguing that the pastoral zone is a congressionally designated space for ranching and that the Park Service has a responsibility to protect it as part of the region’s cultural heritage; thus, even if the former leaseholders are gone, those areas must remain available for active ranching. These cases are also still pending.

Meanwhile, though the Nimans are protected by their life estate, the Evans family is currently operating without a lease. After he got wind of the deal, David Evans sent a letter to the House Committee on Natural Resources, beseeching lawmakers’ help in negotiating a new lease. “We know that as the last (multigenerational) ranching family on the peninsula, we will be the next target for these green groups,” he wrote. “We will be harassed and pushed out, and family ranching on this peninsula will be gone forever.” Evans also went to the Park Service to negotiate a new lease. He wrote down twenty requests, many of them, he told me, in line with previous lease arrangements. The Park Service did not agree to a single point. “It wasn’t a negotiation,” Evans said, suspecting the agency wanted to make things as difficult as they could in hopes he’d eventually just roll over and close.

To add insult to injury to the ranchers, the Nature Conservancy—which is in charge of the transition implementation for Point Reyes—plans to season-ally truck in some 1,200 cattle each year for temporary grazing, acknowledging the importance of livestock grazing on public lands to maintain the health of the Point Reyes ecosystem.

Twelve hundred seasonal cattle, of course, aren’t enough to do the work of the more than six thousand that are being evicted. Theoretically, the tule elk could at some point take over the grazing work of the cattle—and without the environmental impact, like manure contaminating the waterways. At present, however, their population is nowhere near large enough to replace the departed cattle, either. Herds big enough to take over all grazing duties would cause yet another problem, however, as the tule elk no longer have real predators in Point Reyes. The Park Service would have to introduce predators as population control or bring back the wildly unpopular practice of culling the elk.

And anyway, as Grey Hayes, a biologist and coastal prairie expert, impressed upon me, even if the elk were the ultimate answer to this land’s future management, which he has his doubts about, the transition should have happened more slowly, replacing cattle with elk one by one. But now that the cattle are gone, he told me, whatever plan to replace them needs to happen “immediately.” Even six months without large ruminant grazers can cause enough environmental damage to a pasture to require years of remediation and restoration. “Every month counts,” he said.

“We are entering a critical first step in establishing a land stewardship program to support grazing and restoration efforts on the Seashore,” a representative for the Nature Conservancy wrote to me (they declined an interview). In collaboration with the Park Service and the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, whose ancestors managed what is now Point Reyes for millennia, the Nature Conservancy wrote that they will “develop a research and monitoring plan that will, when implemented, be the foundational science needed for the National Park Service and partners to adaptively manage the grazing and other restorative actions over time to get the best results.” It’s unclear when the temporary grazing is to begin; where these cattle will come from (in December, the organization released a request for proposals for ranchers seeking to run cattle in Point Reyes); where the 1,200 number came from (there were 6,000 cattle in the park); or how these cattle will be managed differently than those that were already here.

The future of the approximately ninety farmworkers and their families is also uncertain. On my last visit to Point Reyes, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, I met up with a former Point Reyes dairy worker and his wife, whom I’ll call Diego and Maria, in the town of Point Reyes, about a ten-minute drive from the Seashore.

At their suggestion, we met at Toby’s Feed Barn, a West Marin institution that hints at the region’s shifting demographics: a farming heritage store trying to survive in a context of increasingly extreme wealth. Toby’s sells feed in a towering old barn where birds nest in the rafters; the barn also houses an overpriced coffee shop (chai: $6.50), a yoga studio and art gallery, and a store selling fancy candles, food sundries, and nature-themed tchotchkes. As we spoke, a Latino employee stacked hay bales and pallets with a beeping pump truck while locals and tourists enjoyed their coffee in the sun.

Originally from Mexico, Diego and Maria had moved to Point Reyes with their three children in 2018 from Tulare County in California’s Central Valley. There Diego worked in a massive industrial dairy and Maria picked grapes. Their middle son, whom I’ll call Fredy, suffered from a rare genetic disorder that required frequent medical appointments and testing. When Diego missed two days of work to take his son to see a specialist hours away in Sacramento, his employer fired him. Maria’s cousin worked not too far from Point Reyes and managed to land Diego a gig at McClure’s Dairy in the park, which Cutrano and I had visited a few months prior. The whole family moved north. When McClure’s shuttered in 2021, Diego got a job working at another dairy in the Seashore. The pay was $16.50 an hour, and the family didn’t have to pay rent because, with average rents of $6,500 for a home in the area, ranch workers and their families were typically provided free housing.

Diego told me he found out about the ranch closures from his employer (he asked me to use a pseudonym, and not name his employer, for fear of retribution—especially because he is still living on the rancher’s land). One afternoon, when his shift began, his boss rounded up his three employees—Diego, another father with a young family, and a single guy, all of whom lived on the property in separate houses—and told them the news. Worse than the closures, perhaps, was the severance pay. While the Nature Conservancy awarded the ranchers $3 million settlements, the ranch workers each received a single month’s pay, around $1,000, which wouldn’t get Diego and his family a long weekend in a local Airbnb. “He was out there rain or shine, sick and healthy!” Maria told me. “A single month! He kept that place going. It’s ugly, what these ranchers have done.”

The family has been in something of a tailspin since then. The ranch shuttered last spring, but they are still living on the property—the only ones there, by permission of the former owner. The kids don’t want to leave. Their youngest, now in seventh grade, wakes up crying in the night. Maria was angry at the ranchers but also at the people who’d run the ranchers out of town. As we spoke, I detected an articulation of the view of ecology that had lost out in Point Reyes—the belief, shared by many of the biologists and ranchers I spoke to while reporting, that it’s a myth that a healthy environment is one that is untouched. Humans have always managed landscapes, something that California’s leaders have begun recognizing in transitioning to controlled burns of the kind that Indigenous communities once carried out, back when the prairies were still shadowed by grazers, to thin forests and underbrush. Restoration is, by definition, a human imposition on the land. Preservation is, too, as is, of course, the pesky human need for food.

“I don’t understand what environment they are trying to protect,” Maria said. From her perspective, the land was healthy, the cows part of the environment—mooing, shitting ruminants, grazing along the same zigzagging roads upon which the tule elk now run free.

This article was produced in collaboration with WWNO’s Sea Change podcast. It may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact info@thefern.org.

This is the second episode of a two-part series exploring the future of farming seafood in the Gulf. (Listen to part one.) We know this: Demand for seafood is soaring. We won’t be able to sustainably meet that demand from wild-caught fisheries. And there’s a growing global movement to farm more and more of our seafood.

The Gulf Coast is one of the last places in the world where there is still a major wild oyster harvest. Lately, though, that harvest is in trouble. In this episode, we ask: What can the downfall and resurrection of the oyster tell us about a future of farming the ocean?

Los hermanos estaban empezando a dudar si sus traficantes los habían abandonado a su suerte. Por más de dos días, Begaí y Mariano Santiago Hipólito habían estado escondidos con unas dos docenas de inmigrantes en una abarrotada casa de seguridad en la ciudad fronteriza de Laredo. El único cuarto de la casa no contaba con muebles y apenas tenía el espacio suficiente para que todos se acostaran. No había donde bañarse y el único inodoro era repugnante. Las escasas porciones de comida y las cajas de agua embotellada que los traficantes les habían dado tenían tiempo de haberse acabado. Ansioso y confundido, Begaí empezó a bombardear a Mariano con preguntas. ¿Por qué estaban atorados ahí? ¿Qué tan lejos estaban de su destino final?

Mariano había estado una vez en Estados Unidos, casi una década antes, pero este no era para nada como el primer viaje. La primera vez que cruzó, no estaban los enjambres de delincuentes de cárteles en el lado mexicano de la frontera, y no había tenido que soportar un prolongado encierro en una escuálida y caliente casa de seguridad después de cruzar el Río Grande. Ahora, empapado en sudor, se había quitado su playera para abanicarse con ella. De vez en cuando, dejaba salir un suspiro.

“Tranquilo”, le dijo a Begaí. “Tranquilo”.

Los hermanos habían sido inseparables desde niños, así que cuando Mariano le dijo a Begaí que se iba a ir de su pueblo en el sur de México para encontrar trabajo en Estados Unidos, en parte para pagar las facturas médicas de su esposa enferma. Begaí a regañadientes estuvo de acuerdo con acompañarlo. Alto y delgado con una barba de candado bien recortada, Begaí, de 33 años, era el hermano mayor, más serio. Un año menor, Mariano era más fornido, y siempre buscaba cómo pasar un buen rato. Pero Begaí notó que el buen humor de su hermano estaba empezando a desmoronarse.

Era la mañana del 27 de junio de 2022. Los inmigrantes con los que compartían la vivienda habían llegado de varios lugares de México, Guatemala y Honduras. Había unos cuantos niños y algunas mujeres entre ellos, pero la mayoría eran hombres en la edad ideal para trabajar. Todos habían pagado exorbitantes cantidades — hasta $15,000 dólares — para ser transportados a EE. UU. Ahora estaban esperando a alguien que los sacara de la zona fronteriza fuertemente patrullada y rumbo a San Antonio, en donde el grupo se dividiría y los inmigrantes viajarían por separado.

Algunos iban hacia ciudades cercanas en Texas y otros se dirigían a sitios más lejanos como Tennessee y California. Muchos tenían planes para reunificarse con seres queridos a quienes no habían visto en años, padres, parejas románticas, hermanos, primos. Casi todos ellos habían dejado sus casas con la esperanza de encontrar un empleo. Algunos tenían una oportunidad de trabajo específica que los esperaba en su destino. Otros tomarían cualquier cosa que pudieran encontrar. Begaí y Mariano tenían familiares en Atlanta, en donde tenían planeado trabajar en la construcción.

Preocupados de que alguna persona de la localidad pudiera verlos y avisar a las autoridades, los traficantes habían prohibido a los inmigrantes salir de la casa de seguridad, no debían asomarse ni por unos minutos para respirar aire fresco. Su organización había perdido dos casas decomisadas por la policía local y la Patrulla Fronteriza a principios de ese mes. En Laredo ocurren redadas como estas todo el tiempo, a veces varias al día, que resultan en unos cuantos o en docenas de inmigrantes normalmente abarrotados en condiciones terribles. En la mayoría de los casos los operadores de las casas de seguridad escapan. En cuanto a los inmigrantes, estos son enviados de vuelta a México, pero muchos regresan a Estados Unidos después de unos cuantos días. De cualquier forma, las redadas son un costoso problema para los traficantes, quienes hacen todo lo posible para evitarlas.

Cuando un camión con caja blanca finalmente se presentó para recoger a los inmigrantes, Begaí y Mariano no se sintieron exactamente aliviados. Los hombres que los apresuraron a subir al camión usaban máscaras y gritaban órdenes, confiscaron sus teléfonos y las botellas de agua de algunos tuvieron que ser rellenadas con agua del lavabo. El área de carga del camión ya estaba llena de personas que habían estado quedándose en otro sitio. A pesar de sus dudas, los hermanos subieron y pronto el camión empezó a avanzar. Recorrieron cierta distancia traqueteando por unos diez minutos hasta que sintieron que el camión se detuvo. Cuando la puerta de atrás se abrió, vieron la parte posterior de un tráiler que se había acercado a la caja del camión. Sus puertas estaban abiertas, formando algo como un túnel entre los dos vehículos. Mientras avanzaban hacia el tráiler, Begaí dudó. “¿Qué probabilidad hay si no subimos?”, preguntó. “Ahí te quedas [en Laredo]”, respondió Mariano.

Fueron de los últimos en pasar al tráiler, y buscaron un lugar para sentarse en medio de la penumbra. Notaron una extraña combinación de olores, algo como un sazonador de alimentos mezclado con olores de más de cinco docenas de personas que habían estado viviendo en condiciones de inmundicia por días. Los hermanos se sentaron en contra de una de las paredes cerca de la parte media del tráiler.

Entre los rostros apenas iluminados a su alrededor estaba un trío de jóvenes mujeres originarias de un pequeño pueblo de Guatemala, donde muchos viven en casas hechas de bloques de concreto y sin agua corriente, rodeadas por pequeñas parcelas de maíz. Una de ellas, una mujer de 21 años con largo cabello negro había trabajado duro para obtener su diploma como maestra, con enormes gastos pagados por sus padres. Pero debido al disfuncional gobierno del país no pudo encontrar trabajo como educadora. Determinada a pagar a sus padres, estaba en camino para unirse con una de sus hermanas en un pueblo dedicado al empaque de carne en Minnesota.

Los más jóvenes en el tráiler eran dos primos de Guatemala, de trece y catorce años, quienes tenían familiares en Estados Unidos y habían convencido a sus padres de que sus futuros serían mejores si lograban asistir a la escuela en ese país. El mayor de los dos era un fanático de Lionel Messi y soñaba con jugar fútbol soccer profesional algún día, pero en el entretanto quería ganar lo suficiente para ayudar a su mamá a cuidar de su hermana y su hermano menores.

El mayor era un trabajador de la construcción de 55 años y originario de Morelos, México. Él había vivido en un pequeño pueblo en el oeste de Arkansas por más de dos décadas, justo fuera de un condado en donde los hispanos son cerca de la tercera parte de la población. Había viajado a México para visitar a su familia a pesar de los riesgos del peligroso viaje de regreso. Ahora iba de vuelta a su casa, donde lo esperaban su esposa, sus tres hijos y sus cuatro nietos.

Cerca de las puertas traseras del tráiler estaban un hermano y una hermana de algo más de 20 años y originarios de un suburbio de Antigua, la colonial excapital de Guatemala. El par se hacía cargo del cuidado de una chica adolescente con la que se habían topado en varias de las paradas de su viaje hacia el norte. La chica estaba ahora asustada y llorando, así que cuando los hermanos se sentaron la pusieron en medio de ellos y trataron de consolarla. Un exsoldado mexicano y su primo también estaban cuidando de un joven compañero de viaje, un chico de dieciocho años de la Ciudad de México cuya madre les había pedido que lo cuidaran.

Cerca estaba una mujer hondureña de 27 años que tenía unas 12 semanas de embarazo y que hacía lo posible para mantenerse cómoda. Esa mañana, llamó a su madre, quien ya vivía cerca de Los Ángeles, para decirle que había logrado cruzar a EE. UU. “Nos vemos pronto”, le dijo.

Como pudieron, se repartieron e hicieron espacio para otra persona. La temperatura era casi de 100 grados Fahrenheit afuera (unos 38 grados centígrados), y el aire dentro del tráiler era insoportablemente caliente. Momentos después, las puertas se cerraron y escucharon el inconfundible sonido de los cerrojos asegurando las puertas desde el exterior. En una oscuridad total, sintieron cómo el tráiler empezó a moverse justo antes de las 2 p. m. Si todo salía como estaba planeado, estarían en San Antonio en poco más de tres horas.

“Estados unidos falló”

Nada salió de acuerdo con lo planeado. La catástrofe que ocurrió ese día se convertiría en el desastre inmigratorio más mortal en la historia moderna de Estados Unidos. Cincuenta y tres pasajeros fallecieron, incluyendo a 26 mexicanos, 21 guatemaltecos y 6 hondureños. El incidente capturó brevemente los titulares de noticias a nivel internacional, pero este reportaje — con base en más de dos años de investigación— es el primer recuento completo del terrible evento, sus complejas causas y sus devastadoras consecuencias.

Para hacerlo, viajé a varios lugares de México y Guatemala, para pasar tiempo con 16 familias de las víctimas. Eventualmente, también pude entrevistar a un sobreviviente, cuya desgarradora historia proporciona un recuento de primera mano sobre una operación de tráfico humano con terribles resultados.

A nivel forense, había un poco de misterio sobre lo que ocurrió dentro del tráiler. Las preguntas más urgentes eran: ¿Por qué ocurrió esto? ¿Y quién fue responsable? Durante el juicio de dos de los traficantes en una corte federal en San Antonio, los jurados escucharon el testimonio de investigadores, agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza, otros traficantes, y sobrevivientes, quienes revelaron la complicada operación interna de la organización traficante, el cartel que domina el lado mexicano del Río Grande, al sur de la ciudad de Laredo, y el formidable aparato de seguridad fronteriza en el lado estadounidense.

Acusados de conspiración para transportar inmigrantes indocumentados, lo que resultó en muerte, los acusados se enfrentaron a una montaña de evidencia incriminatoria. El abogado de la defensa — cuya larga barba de chivo, botas vaqueras de piel de lagarto y dramático estilo, contrastaba con el sobrio comportamiento y vestimenta de los fiscales— hizo varios intentos de acusar al gobierno de Estados Unidos de permitir que ocurriera el desastre. ¿Por qué el gobierno no desmanteló antes la red de traficantes? ¿Por qué los agentes permitieron que el tráiler cargado con más de sesenta personas pasara por los puestos de control de la Patrulla Fronteriza al norte de Laredo? “Estados Unidos falló”, dijo mientras contrainterrogaba a un agente de investigaciones del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional. “¿Estaría de acuerdo en que alguien cometió un error?”. El juez tuvo que recordar repetidamente al jurado que el juicio no era en contra del gobierno de Estados Unidos.

De hecho, tal y como el juicio lo reveló, una red de traficantes compuesta por personas comunes y corrientes, que a menudo eran imprudentes e incompetentes, había logrado burlar uno de los sistemas de vigilancia fronteriza mejor financiados y más sofisticados a nivel tecnológico en el mundo. Igual que con un sinnúmero de operaciones similares, los delincuentes se habían salido con la suya una y otra vez, teniendo más éxitos en sus operaciones que fracasos — hasta el día en que fracasaron de la manera más horrible.

Lo que ocurrió en el tráiler entre Laredo y San Antonio es la única parte excepcional en una narrativa que de otra forma sería un lugar común, y en los años desde el incidente, ningún progreso legislativo de importancia ha ocurrido para reducir los mortales peligros que los inmigrantes enfrentan en su camino hacia trabajos en Estados Unidos. Por el contrario, el Congreso ha continuado incrementando su presupuesto para muros y cercas, expansiones de puestos de control, tecnología de vigilancia, centros de detención y personal para agencias del orden público. Cada incremento en la militarización de la frontera aumenta el peligro para los inmigrantes, pero hay poca evidencia de que esto los desaliente a ellos o a los traficantes a largo plazo. El desastre fue el peor de su tipo, pero de ninguna forma fue el primero. Y, a menos de que algo cambie, no será el último.

Una misteriosa enfermedad

El viaje de Begaí y Mariano a la caja del tráiler inició en Tuxtepec, una bulliciosa ciudad localizada en los húmedos valles del este de Oaxaca, a unas cincuenta millas del Golfo de México. Habían crecido en Lázaro Cárdenas, una pequeña comunidad indígena chinanteca en las laderas de la Sierra Madre. Los hermanos y sus siete hermanos menores fueron criados en una casa construida con hojas de palma, cerca del ancho y tranquilo Río Usila, de donde sacaban el agua antes del amanecer y donde aprendieron a pescar con arpones para suplementar la escasa comida que su mamá ponía sobre la mesa. La familia subsistía principalmente de maíz y frijoles. No había calles que salieran del pueblo, solo un estrecho sendero de tierra por el que caminaban descalzos. Llegar al hospital requería un caro viaje en lancha a motor río abajo y a través del extenso lago Miguel Alemán. En cuanto tuvieron la edad suficiente para usar machetes, los hermanos se unieron a su padre y a sus tíos en los campos, talando árboles y excavando surcos con sus manos, regresando al final del día empapados en sudor, con las manos cubiertas de sangre debido a las espinas de los matorrales. 

Begaí, el mayor, dejó la escuela a los catorce años para ayudar a mantener a su familia. Dejó su casa por primera vez a los dieciséis años para trabajar en una plantación de caña de azúcar fuera de Tuxtepec, aproximadamente a una hora en lancha. Era un trabajo extremadamente agotador, pero su salario ayudó a que Mariano se convirtiera en el primer miembro de la familia en graduarse de la preparatoria.

Armado con su diploma, Mariano se fue a la Ciudad de México, pero sus esperanzas de ahorrar para el futuro y contribuir al bienestar de la familia pronto se vieron frustradas. El caos de la capital era desconcertante para Mariano, para quien el español era su segundo idioma (su familia hablaba en una variante de chinanteco) y nunca había estado lejos de casa. Estaba solo y el único trabajo que pudo encontrar fue en una pizzería en donde apenas podía ganar lo suficiente para pagar la renta. Después de unos años, regresó a Oaxaca con los bolsillos vacíos. Había puesto sus esperanzas en EE. UU., donde uno de sus tíos trabajaba en la construcción, era dueño de su propia casa y había sentado cabeza con una esposa estadounidense. Las metas de Mariano eran similarmente humildes: quería ahorrar suficiente dinero para construir una casa en México e iniciar una familia.

Alrededor de 2013, conoció a una mujer en un encuentro religioso en Tuxtepec, en donde él y Begaí tocaban la guitarra y cantaban en el grupo de alabanza. Luz Estrella Cuevas Remolino era devota, igual que Mariano, y le dijo que ella también tenía la esperanza de iniciar una familia. Pronto después de conocerse, él se fue a Estados Unidos, con dinero prestado de su tío para financiar el viaje, cruzó la frontera a pie por algún lugar del Desierto de Sonora, y eventualmente llegó a Atlanta. Mantuvo su contacto con Luz Estrella por teléfono, y la relación se tornó seria.

Después de tres años de trabajar como plomero seis días a la semana y de ahorrar casi cada centavo que no era destinado para su comida y su vivienda, Mariano se lastimó la mano en el trabajo. Estaba tan arruinado económicamente cuando partió a Estados Unidos que incluso tuvo que tomar prestado unos pantalones de uno de sus hermanos menores. Con el pago del seguro de compensación para trabajadores agregado a sus ahorros, Mariano no vio el punto de quedarse hasta sanar. Se apresuró para regresar a México para casarse con Luz Estrella.

En la boda, ella llevó un ramo de rosas blancas y lució un vestido blanco con un velo que arrastraba sobre el suelo tras ella. Él vistió un traje gris de tres botones, solapa metálica y una corbata de color rojo oscuro. Vivieron con los padres de ella en Tuxtepec mientras empezaban a construir una casa en una nueva subdivisión fuera del pueblo.

Begaí y tres de sus hermanos menores contribuían cuando podían y, después de casi un año, la casa estaba casi terminada. Pero el proyecto agotó los ahorros de Mariano, así que empezó a hacer algunos trabajos de construcción junto con Begaí. 

Para entonces, Begaí también se había casado. Lo hizo con María Antonia Torres Morales, a quien todos conocían como Mari y era cuatro años mayor que él. Mari no estaba buscando una nueva relación cuando él apareció en su vida, pero le atrajo su honestidad y su deseo de empezar una familia. Cuando tenía poco más de 20 años, ella tuvo una hija con una pareja que la abandonó. Le preocupaba que Begaí fuera a enterarse sobre su hija y también la dejara, pero cuando ella se lo dijo, él prometió criar a la niña como si fuera su propia hija. Se casaron en 2014 y Mari dio a luz a un niño posteriormente en ese mismo año. Lo llamaron Jafet, el nombre de uno de los hijos de Noé.

Begaí disfrutaba de la vida en familia con Mari y sus dos hijos. Vivían con los padres de ella en una casa con un frondoso jardín, árboles de plátano, pollos, cerdos y un pequeño arroyo que corría al lado de la propiedad. Él y Mariano tenían amplios conocimientos de carpintería y plomería, y en ocasiones conseguían un contrato a largo plazo juntos y trabajaban seis días a la semana, ganando unos $20 dólares al día. Pero las temporadas sin trabajo eran frecuentes, y aceptaban cualquier cosa que pudieran encontrar.

Un día, en junio de 2022, habían terminado de cavar una fosa séptica, cuando Mariano le comunicó a Begaí una preocupante noticia: estaba tan quebrado que apenas podía poner comida sobre la mesa. Las finanzas de Mariano nunca se recuperaron después de que gastó todos sus ahorros para construir su casa. Con una hija de cuatro años y un hijo de dos años, ahora se enfrentaba al mismo estrés financiero que había plagado a sus padres y que él había estado tan determinado a evitar.

Para empeorar las cosas, Luz Estrella necesitaba una cara prueba de diagnóstico para determinar la causa de un extraño dolor en su pecho. No costaba mucho para los estándares de Estados Unidos (unos $350 dólares) pero era más de lo que Mariano podía pagar. Luz Estrella también estaba recibiendo tratamiento para una piedra en el riñón y le habían dicho que posiblemente necesitaría una operación para removerla, lo que podría costar hasta $1,400 dólares, o el equivalente de tres meses de salario completo. Mariano ya había pedido prestado a sus tres hermanos menores que estaban trabajando en maquiladoras en Ciudad Juárez. No vio otra opción más que ir al norte. “Me voy a regresar a Estados Unidos”, le dijo a Begaí, “quiero que vengas conmigo”. 

Junto a la fosa séptica, sudoroso y cubierto de tierra, Begaí se sintió enfermo de la preocupación. Le dijo a Mariano que no sabía nada sobre cómo llegar a la frontera ni de cómo pagar por un viaje como ese. Mariano le dijo que él se haría cargo de todo. Ya había hablado con un amigo que todavía estaba en Atlanta, y quien estaba de acuerdo con prestarles el dinero para pagarle a los traficantes y cubrir el exorbitante impuesto que el cártel cobraba por cada inmigrante en la frontera. Los únicos gastos iniciales serían los boletos de avión para Monterrey y los boletos de autobús para Nuevo Laredo, la ciudad fronteriza al sur de Laredo, del otro lado del Río Grande. “Solo será por dos años, y luego me regreso contigo”, dijo Mariano.

El primer instinto de Begaí fue decir no. Sus finanzas estaban relativamente seguras — la madre de Mari operaba un puesto de comida que era una segura fuente de ingresos cuando el trabajo de construcción estaba lento — así que no tenía una razón urgente para irse. ¿Qué pasaría si le ocurría algo? ¿Quién cuidaría de Mari y de los niños? Begaí le dijo a Mariano que necesitaba pensarlo, pero Mariano dijo que él se iría de cualquier forma. “Ya tengo la fecha”.

Begaí habló del tema con Mari unos días después, y ella le rogó que se quedara en casa. “Puedes caer en manos de gente mala, y te pueden hacer daño. ¿Yo qué voy a hacer? ¿Cómo me voy a quedar?”. Begaí argumentó que quería ahorrar dinero para construir una casa propia y ayudar a la hija de Mari, que actualmente tiene 16 años, a terminar su preparatoria. Mari se enojó. Jafet solo tenía ocho años, ella pensaba que no era un buen momento para que estuviera sin su papá. “Aquí tenemos todo lo que necesitamos”, le dijo.

Begaí confesó que se sentía obligado por la más simple de las razones: “Yo no quiero que mi hermano se vaya solo”.

Unos días después, Mari estaba en casa preparando la cena cuando Begaí regresó de prisa de su trabajo y empezó a empacar ropa en una mochila. “Ya me voy”, le dijo.

“¿No vas a comer?”, le preguntó.

“Ya no me da tiempo”, le respondió.

Aturdida, Mari y los niños lo siguieron a la puerta y por la polvorienta calle, rogándole que regresara, pero él no se detuvo.

Fila de traficantes

Esa noche, Begaí y Mariano abordaron un vuelo a Monterrey. La comprensión de Begaí sobre el remolino al que estaba entrando era tan desconocida como la oscuridad que contemplaba por las ventanas del avión. No sabía que se precipitaba hacia una de las peores regiones sin ley en México, donde una poderosa organización criminal ejercía un control casi total, ni que un ejército de agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza respaldado por helicópteros, drones, cámaras de imagen térmica y perros entrenados para detectar olores, los esperaban al otro lado del Río Grande.

Esa noche, Begaí y Mariano abordaron un vuelo a Monterrey. La comprensión de Begaí sobre el remolino al que estaba entrando era tan desconocida como la oscuridad que contemplaba por las ventanas del avión. No sabía que se precipitaba hacia una de las peores regiones sin ley en México, donde una poderosa organización criminal ejercía un control casi total, ni que un ejército de agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza respaldado por helicópteros, drones, cámaras de imagen térmica y perros entrenados para detectar olores, los esperaban al otro lado del Río Grande.

El Cártel del Noreste tiene sus orígenes en Los Zetas, un grupo paramilitar fundado por exsoldados de las fuerzas especiales mexicanas. Los Zetas empezaron como un brazo armado del Cártel del Golfo antes de que sus líderes crearan uno propio, y con esto iniciaron una de las organizaciones criminales más brutales de la historia de México. Aproximadamente a partir de 2012, una serie de arrestos y asesinatos de líderes de Los Zeta desató una violenta guerra por el poder dentro de la organización. El Cártel del Noreste era uno de los varios grupos que se formó a partir de los fragmentos. Para 2022, dominaba el territorio a lo largo de la frontera en tres estados de la República Mexicana. Nuevo Laredo, la ciudad de casi medio millón de personas a donde Begaí y Mariano se dirigían, era la base para sus operaciones de tráfico de droga y de personas.

De la misma forma en que la Prohibición dio pie al auge del comercio ilegal de licor e incrementó el poder de las organizaciones de la mafia que lo controlaban, la guerra de Estados Unidos en contra de las drogas, lanzada en 1971 por el Presidente Richard Nixon, ayudó a crear las condiciones para que los cárteles de la droga prosperaran. Hoy en día, esos mismos cárteles y las organizaciones de tráfico humano que operan en sus territorios, están generando enormes ganancias debido a una prohibición casi total de inmigración a través de la frontera de casi 1,900 millas (más de 3,000 km) entre Estados Unidos y México. Las personas han burlado la frontera por generaciones, pero transportarlas nunca había sido tan lucrativo. A principios de la década de los 90, los guías, conocidos como coyotes, cobraban tan poco como $20 dólares para ayudar a un inmigrante a cruzar a pie. El auge del tráfico inició a principios de enero de 1994, cuando el Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte (NAFTA, por sus siglas en inglés) entró en vigor, inundando México con baratos productos agrícolas estadounidenses producidos a nivel industrial. Obligados por las circunstancias a abandonar sus propios mercados, los agricultores mexicanos empezaron a emigrar a Estados Unidos en cifras sin precedentes. Posteriormente, ese mismo año, una devaluación del peso arrojó la economía mexicana a una caída libre — el desempleo casi se duplicó y masas de trabajadores industriales se sumaron a los agricultores en los viajes hacia el norte.

El comercio libre no significaba libertad de movimiento para las personas y el Presidente Bill Clinton trató de reducir el flujo de trabajadores indocumentados al ordenar la primera gran militarización de la frontera sur de Estados Unidos. Una nueva estrategia conocida como “prevención mediante la disuasión”, que debutó el mismo año que el NAFTA y que involucraba el uso de cercas, puestos de control fronterizo, patrulleros armados y otras medidas para empujar a los inmigrantes lejos de las zonas comunes de cruce urbano y enviándolos hacia terrenos hostiles. La idea era que los inmigrantes entonces decidirían que no valía la pena enfrentar el riesgo y la incomodidad de tratar de cruzar un hostil estrecho de la frontera (por ejemplo, las escabrosas montañas y los candentes desiertos de Arizona) para llegar a la recompensa. Pero los inmigrantes siguieron intentando y el número de detenciones en la frontera sur de Estados Unidos siguió aumentando cada año, de 1 millón en 1994 a casi 1.7 millones en el año 2000. 

El presupuesto de la Patrulla Fronteriza en 1993, el año antes de que la política de prevención mediante la disuasión entrara en vigor, era de $363 millones. Tres décadas después, este presupuesto ha aumentado a más de $7,000 millones de dólares. Durante el mismo periodo, el número de agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza en la frontera sur aumentó de menos de 4,000 a cerca de 20,000. Sin embargo, ninguna cantidad de militarización en la frontera ha resultado en una reducción a largo plazo en el flujo de inmigrantes. Los arquitectos de la política y aquellos que continúan presionando por un incremento en la militarización bajo cada sucesivo gobierno, demócrata y republicano, han repetidamente subestimado la determinación de los inmigrantes y la creatividad de los traficantes, quienes han encontrado formas de burlar todo lo que la Patrulla Fronteriza pone en su camino.

Mientras tanto, la mano de obra inmigrante continúa siendo una parte vital de la economía estadounidense. El resultado es un perverso sistema en el que los trabajadores inmigrantes determinados a mantener a sus familias continúan viniendo al norte, y las industrias y los pequeños negocios en todo el país siguen dependiendo de ellos. En lugar de reconocer esa realidad y aprobar leyes para atenderla — como expandir el número de visas para trabajadores temporales para sectores que ya emplean grandes números de trabajadores indocumentados — el Congreso continúa invirtiendo dinero en un complejo industrial fronterizo y en la maquinaria de deportaciones.

Desde 2003, Estados Unidos ha gastado unos $400,000 millones de dólares en las agencias involucradas en la aplicación de las leyes inmigratorias — más que todas las otras agencias del orden público federales combinadas. Los principales beneficiarios de este crecimiento incluyen a los contratistas para defensa que se beneficiaron de las eternas guerras en Irak y Afganistán. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman y General Dynamics, entre otros, han gastado decenas de millones de dólares en el cabildeo y contribuciones a campañas para ambos partidos políticos.

Bajo la actual administración de Donald Trump, el gasto para la aplicación de las leyes de inmigración se ha disparado y el número de tropas en la frontera sur casi se ha triplicado.

Y mientras que los cruces no autorizados de la frontera han disminuido significativamente desde el pico de Diciembre de 2023 — un hecho proclamado a viva voz por los funcionarios de Trump — es poco probable que la intensificación en la vigilancia sea la causa principal. Más de dos tercios de la reducción ocurrieron el año anterior a la toma de posesión de Trump, lo que parece haber sido provocado principalmente por una reducción en la demanda de mano de obra en Estados Unidos y cambios en la política para refugiados en los puntos de entrada oficiales.

El efecto disuasivo del aumento en la militarización es difícil de medir, pero una cosa es indiscutible: ha agregado capas de complejidad y riesgo, lo que ha hecho que el servicio de los traficantes sea de mayor valor. Un resultado es que el tráfico humano ahora compite con el tráfico de drogas en cuanto a ganancias. Otro resultado es que miles de inmigrantes han muerto tratando cruces más peligrosos y la frontera sur de Estados Unidos se ha convertido en el epicentro de la ruta inmigratoria por tierra más peligrosa del mundo. La Patrulla Fronteriza ha reportado más de 10,500 muertes de inmigrantes en la frontera desde 1994, pero la cifra real es probablemente mucho más alta. Tomando en cuenta a los inmigrantes que mueren en el lado de México y a los muchos que desaparecen y nunca son encontrados, algunos grupos de derechos humanos creen que ese número puede ser hasta 10 veces mayor.

Para cuando Mariano y Begaí hicieron su viaje, los días de los cruces por $20 dólares ya eran historia — los inmigrantes estaban pagando un promedio de entre $6,000 y $10,000 dólares, con algunos traficantes cobrando más de $20,000 dólares. Estas ganancias se distribuyen entre las redes que se extienden por todo Centro y Sudamérica y en todo el mundo, divididas entre reclutadores, choferes de todo tipo, beneficiarios de sobornos, falsificadores de documentos, operadores de casas de seguridad, propietarios de hoteles, guías o coyotes, y, claro, los cárteles. En 1997, la Organización Internacional para las Migraciones de la ONU indicó que la industria de tráfico de inmigrantes a nivel mundial era de $7,000 millones de dólares. Para 2021, el Centro de Análisis Operacionales del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional estimó que el tráfico humano por la frontera sur de Estados Unidos por sí solo estaba generando entre $2,000 y $6,000 millones de dólares al año.

Los cárteles que controlan el territorio a lo largo de la frontera no necesitan involucrarse en las logísticas de mover a las personas desde su punto de origen y por todo el territorio mexicano. Ellos dejan ese trabajo a organizaciones más pequeñas que tienen conexiones locales y que operan como contratistas independientes. El Cártel del Noreste simplemente se queda en Nuevo Laredo como un trol debajo del puente, extorsionando dinero de cada inmigrante que se aparece con el plan de cruzar hacia el norte. Cuando Mariano y Begaí llegaron a finales de junio de 2022, la tarifa del impuesto para mexicanos — conocida como “piso” en español y pagada directamente al cártel en efectivo o por transferencia bancaria — era de unos $2,000 dólares. Las personas que llegan de más lejos tienen que pagar más.

El cártel tiene cero tolerancia para los freelancers. Los vigilantes siguen de cerca a todos los que entran y salen de la ciudad, y todos los inmigrantes que llegan de una estación de autobuses fuera de la ciudad deben tener un código para probar que están enlazados con la maquinaria de tráfico y que están en buenos términos con el cártel. Los códigos son palabras simples —Diablo, Ferrari, Demon — que ayudan a los traficantes a dar seguimiento a sus clientes y que el cártel usa para mantener un conteo detallado de los traficantes. En ocasiones, los traficantes también dan a los migrantes brazaletes de colores o playeras iguales. Pasear por las calles sin un código, y ni se diga cruzar el río, puede resultar en un secuestro, una paliza o en la muerte.

Mariano había mantenido a su traficante informado sobre los detalles del viaje, enviando fotografías de sus tarjetas mexicanas de identificación, boletos de autobús, números del autobús, y actualizándolo conforme viajaban de Oaxaca hasta Nuevo Laredo. Los traficantes enviaron las fotos a su contacto en el cártel y un mensaje de texto a Mariano con su código personal — 050 Flaco — que necesitarían dar a los vigilantes del cártel en cada parada. Mariano escribió el código en tinta roja en un pedazo de una hoja de un cuaderno a rayas, junto con el nombre del hotel en donde el traficante le había indicado quedarse.

Tan pronto como los hermanos llegaron a la estación de autobuses en Nuevo Laredo, un vigilante del cártel se acercó y le pidió su código. Una vez que salieron, tomaron un taxi al Hotel Calderón, un edificio de cinco pisos a unos trescientos metros del Río Grande. Era obvio que este no era un hotel normal. Begaí y Mariano se sorprendieron de la inmundicia y de las actitudes desinteresadas del personal. Había una mesa cerca de la recepción llena de pertenencias dejadas por previos migrantes que habían pasado por ahí — ropa, zapatos, mochilas. Tenían la orden de su traficante de no salir más que para comprar comida y, en ese caso, de regresar inmediatamente. Los hermanos registraron su llegada y se instalaron en un cuarto con un colchón delgado sobre una base de aluminio y barras de metal en las ventanas. En un punto, un hombre mayor toco a su puerta y les dijo que tenía miedo. Los tres hombres rezaron juntos. “Anímese”, le dijo Mariano. “Todo va a salir bien”.

El cártel otorgaba a cada organización de traficantes autorizada el acceso a un segmento de la ribera, cada uno de estos segmentos clasificado de acuerdo con el código. Los guías locales en el lado mexicano se comunicaban con los vigilantes en el lado estadounidense quienes monitorizaban los movimientos de la Patrulla Fronteriza. Amplias secciones de la ribera estaban sin desarrollo, cubiertas con palmas y densa vegetación que ofrecían un escondite justo a la orilla del agua. En la noche del 21 de junio, Mariano y Begaí siguieron al guía hasta el río para su primer intento de cruzar.

El guía preguntó a todos en el grupo compuesto por cerca de una docena de personas si sabían nadar. A pesar de que el nivel era lo suficientemente bajo como para caminar por el agua, el Río Grande tiene peligrosas corrientes y agujeros profundos que causaron la muerte por ahogamiento de 172 migrantes solo en 2022, de acuerdo con datos de la Patrulla Fronteriza para ese año. Los hermanos, habiendo crecido cerca del Río Usila, dijeron que eran buenos nadadores. “Cada uno tiene que ayudar a los que no saben nadar”, dijo el guía.

Cruzaron sin incidentes, arrastrándose en el lado estadounidense hacia un espacio que olía a ganado y que le pareció a Begaí ser un corral para animales. Apenas tuvo tiempo para mirar a su alrededor cuando la luz de reflectores inundó el área, cegando su vista. Escuchó gritos y casi echó a correr, pero Mariano lo detuvo. “Ya te vieron. Ya no hay que correr”, dijo. 

Los agentes esposaron a los hermanos y los subieron a una camioneta junto con cerca de otros veinte, luego los fotografiaron y escanearon sus huellas dactilares usando un dispositivo móvil. Cerca de la una de la mañana, la Patrulla Fronteriza los dejó en uno de los puentes internacionales de Laredo y los observó caminar de regreso a México. Empapados y exhaustos, encontraron a unos cuantos hombres de apariencia sospechosa en el otro lado del río que les preguntaron por su código. Tomaron un taxi de vuelta al Hotel Calderón.

Menos de 24 horas después, hicieron un segundo intento. Nuevamente fueron aprehendidos y dejados en el puente. Un tercer intento también fue frustrado. La experiencia es típica —cerca del 60 por ciento de todas las detenciones en la frontera ese año fue de personas que volvieron a intentar el cruce. Fallar es tan rutinario que los traficantes garantizan múltiples intentos sin cobrar una cuota extra. En el cuarto intento, los hermanos exitosamente burlaron a la Patrulla Fronteriza y lograron llegar al encuentro con el chofer designado quien los llevó a una casa de seguridad de un solo cuarto, donde esperaron por el camión que los llevaría a San Antonio.

Evadir a los perros

050 Flaco — el código que Mariano y Begaí habían usado — estaba relacionado con dos traficantes: Felipe Orduña Torres, quien vivía en San Antonio, y José Martínez Olvera, cuya base estaba en Houston. De los dos, era Orduña Torres el que mantenía contacto directo con el cártel. Ambos eran mexicanos indocumentados que habían estado en el negocio de tráfico de personas por años. Estaban al frente de operaciones separadas, pero habían formado una asociación en 2019 para capitalizar en una táctica que la Patrulla Fronteriza califica como tráfico a gran escala, es decir, mover grandes cantidades de personas en vehículos comerciales, normalmente tráileres. 

El tráfico a gran escala surgió primero como respuesta al explosivo crecimiento del tráfico de camiones de carga entre México y Estados Unidos con la entrada en vigor del NAFTA. Se convirtió en una opción más atractiva cuando el cambio de la manufactura de China a México — que empezó a ganar auge en alrededor de 2012 — causó un incremento sin precedentes en el tráfico fronterizo. Laredo es el puerto terrestre más ocupado de Estados Unidos, y registró más de 5.5 millones de cruces de camiones en 2022. Cada día de ese año, los camiones transportaron alrededor de $800 millones de dólares en productos agrícolas y manufacturados a través del Río Grande, y unos 6,000 de ellos pasaron por un mismo puesto de control que se encuentra en la autopista Interestatal 35, a unas 30 millas al norte de la frontera. La Patrulla Fronteriza la llama Puesto de Control 29, o C29. Para los traficantes, este es el punto más estrecho en el cuello de botella. Mezclarse con los otros grandes transportes es la mejor forma de pasar.

Tan intimidante como era, el viaje en tráiler a través de los puestos de control fronterizo al norte de Laredo se promocionaba a los inmigrantes como una opción más segura y cómoda que la de ir a pie a través del desierto por las zonas menos pobladas. El calor es la principal causa de muerte entre los inmigrantes en la frontera sur de Estados Unidos, en donde cerca de 900 personas indocumentadas murieron debido a la exposición al calor extremo entre 2018 y 2022; durante ese mismo periodo, menos de 200 perdieron la vida en incidentes relacionados con vehículos. Los inmigrantes pagan cuotas mucho más caras por un viaje que incluye un lugar en un tráiler una vez que llegan al lado estadounidense, lo que los traficantes llaman la opción VIP.

C29 ha estado en operación desde 2006 y cuenta con quince acres (6 hectáreas), con un centro de detención en el lugar, una zona de inspección secundaria y máquinas de rayos X que permiten a los oficiales detectar si hay seres humanos escondidos dentro de tráileres cerrados. A pesar del tamaño del puesto de control, desde hace mucho tiempo el volumen de tráfico ha sobrepasado su capacidad. En 2022, solo había dos carriles dedicados para camiones de carga, lo que significaba largas filas de camiones con remolque hacia el sur de la autopista I-35, demorando el flujo comercial e incrementando el riesgo de accidentes. Mientras peor es el tráfico en el puesto de control, mejores son las condiciones para los traficantes, quienes mantienen una vigilancia en la actividad de camiones comerciales y programan sus movimientos para llegar al puesto de control cuando está atascado y cuando los agentes, bajo presión, permiten que el tráfico fluya.

Traficantes como Martínez Olvera y Orduña Torres se hacen cargo de falsificar convincentes manifiestos de embarque, los documentos que describen los contenidos de los tráileres. Si hay una amenaza que les preocupa más que cualquier otra, son los perros detectores de olores. Los traficantes usan detergentes, café y sazonadores de carne para tratar de ocultar el olor de los pasajeros escondidos, pero es casi imposible engañar a los perros. La única manera segura de evitarlos es pasar inadvertidos cuando los humanos que los controlan están ocupados en otro lugar. Normalmente había de seis a ocho perros en C29, pero solo dos trabajando en un momento dado — uno cubriendo tres carriles de automóviles de pasajeros y otro para los dos carriles de camiones de carga. Debido al riesgo de agotamiento y de los efectos del calor, cada perro trabajaba turnos de 40 minutos, seguidos por 80 minutos de descanso. Saturados de trabajo y rebasados por los números de vehículos, seguían siendo un obstáculo formidable. De las 16 cargas en tráileres que Martínez Olvera y Orduña Torres habían tratado de mover desde noviembre de 2021, seis habían sido detenidas por los perros. Nunca era una pérdida total para los traficantes: tendrían que remplazar el camión y el tráiler, y tendrían que encontrar a otro chofer, pero a diferencia de una detención de drogas, la valiosa carga no se confisca de forma permanente. Los inmigrantes detenidos — que normalmente pagan la segunda parte de la cuota al llegar a sus destinos finales — estarían de vuelta en México en cuestión de horas y listos para volverlo a intentar. 

Una noche en vela alimentada de metanfetamina

Para cuandolos hermanos llegaron a la casa de seguridad, Martínez Olvera y Orduña Torres ya habían movido exitosamente a más de mil personas en tráileres a través de los puestos de control fronterizo al norte de Laredo. Habían subcontratado a personas para librar la mayoría de los peligros, y supervisaban un equipo de subordinados que asumía los riesgos directos del tráfico, a menudo trabajadores con salarios bajos atraídos por la oportunidad de ganar dinero extra.

El hombre del que dependían para mantener la flotilla de camiones y tráileres, que estacionaban en un lote de almacenamiento rodeado por pequeños ranchos y terrenos baldíos al este de San Antonio, era un inmigrante indocumentado mexicano de 48 años llamado Juan D’Luna Bilbao. Él había estado viviendo en Texas por más de una década después de quedarse por más tiempo del permitido por su visa de trabajador temporal, y trabajaba como mecánico en un taller local. Había llegado al negocio del tráfico de personas más o menos por accidente, después de que un amigo le encontró un trabajo extra para reparar el vehículo personal de Martínez Olvera.

Durante los días de las operaciones para el tráfico de personas, Martínez Olvera y Orduña Torres a menudo asignaban a D’Luna Bilbao con el movimiento de un semitráiler desde el lote de almacenamiento hacia una de las dos paradas de camiones en la intersección de las autopistas I-35 e I-410, al sureste de San Antonio, a la vista de una bodega de Amazon y una concesionaria de Toyota. Posteriormente, cuando el camión regresaba de Laredo, D’Luna Bilbao iba a recogerlo. Por cada operación exitosa, los traficantes le pagaban $500 dólares.  

Alrededor de las cinco de la mañana del 27 de junio de 2022, sonó el teléfono de D’Luna Bilbao. Martínez Olvera quería que llevara un tractor rojo jalando un tráiler blanco de 53 pies (16 metros) de largo a unas de las usuales paradas de camiones. “El conductor ya está en camino”, le dijo Martínez Olvera. D’Luna Bilbao manejó el lote de almacenamiento, donde realizó los chequeos normales de mantenimiento y espolvoreó sazonador para carnes dentro del tráiler. Luego tomó las fotos de los números de identificación del camión y del tráiler que sus patrones necesitaban para falsificar el manifiesto de embarque.

D’Luna Bilbao tenía una gran preocupación sobre el tráiler que estaba preparando esa mañana: la unidad de refrigeración no estaba funcionando bien. Había comprado el tráiler para la organización seis meses antes por cerca de $8,000 dólares y había tenido problemas con este desde el principio. Sin importar lo que intentara, la unidad no enfriaba. Este era un problema por dos razones: la primera era que el conocimiento de embarque especificaba la configuración de la temperatura para el tráiler, y una discrepancia entre los documentos y la temperatura podría ser una señal de alarma en el puesto de control. El año anterior, la Patrulla Fronteriza había detenido cuatro de las cargas de la organización, en parte, por discrepancias en la temperatura. Pero el problema más grande era el mes de junio en el sur de Texas, y sin una unidad de refrigeración en funcionamiento, los pasajeros en el tráiler estarían en gran peligro.

D’Luna Bilbao le había estado advirtiendo a Martínez Olvera sobre el averiado compresor por meses, diciendo que no tenía las partes ni el conocimiento para arreglarlo. Justo tres días antes, el 24 de junio, le envió un mensaje de texto a Martínez Olvera con un video de la defectuosa unidad. El jefe le dijo que conseguiría a alguien que lo revisara, pero nunca lo hizo. Se le había dicho a D’Luna Bilbao que no cuestionara las órdenes, así que a pesar de sus preocupaciones entregó el tráiler en la parada de camiones ubicada en la tienda Love’s al suroeste de la ciudad en donde llenó el tanque con diésel y se fue caminando.

Minutos después, una aporreada camioneta Chevy Tahoe llegó, y un hombre en una playera de golf con rayas blancas salió del asiento del pasajero y subió al tráiler. Este era Homero Zamorano, quien había sido asignado para mover la carga de inmigrantes que estaba en Laredo ese día.

El conductor de la Tahoe, un hombre de más de 600 libras (270 kilos) de peso llamado Christian Martínez, había estado trabajando para Martínez Olvera y Orduña Torres desde marzo del año pasado. El rol principal de Martínez era encontrar y contratar a conductores con licencia comercial que fueran ciudadanos estadounidenses o residentes permanentes, ya que debían poder pasar por los puestos de control interiores de la Patrulla Fronteriza. Algo muy importante era que tenían que estar dispuestos a tomar el riesgo de ser arrestados con una carga de inmigrantes, lo que podría significar una larga sentencia en prisión. Para cada operación, Martínez enviaba a uno de los choferes a la parada de camiones designada, donde un tráiler vacío esperaba. Luego manejaba las comunicaciones entre el chofer y sus jefes a lo largo de la jornada. (Martínez Olvera y Orduña Torres no confiaban en los conductores y preferían no comunicarse con ellos directamente). 

Temprano esa mañana, Martínez había recogido a Zamorano cerca de Palestine, un pequeño pueblo ubicado a unas 300 millas (482 km) de San Antonio, en Piney Woods, en el este de Texas. Cuando llegó encontró a Zamorano fumando metanfetamina con su novia. No había nada de raro en eso. Ambos hombres usaban estimulantes para mantenerse despiertos durante los viajes de noche. Martínez prefería la cocaína. Zamorano era la tercera persona reclutada por Martínez y este era su cuarto viaje como socios. 

Martínez, quién se crio en Palestine, sufre de profundas discapacidades cognitivas y nunca aprendió a leer. Debido a su peso, Zamorano le llamaba Gordito. Antes de relacionarse con los traficantes, lo más cerca que Martínez tuvo a un empleo estable, fue un trabajo con su primo vendiendo helados. A menudo estaba sin casa, viviendo en su Tahoe. De pronto, estaba ganando cantidades de dinero que nunca antes había visto. Cada vez que un chofer llegaba con éxito a San Antonio con una carga de inmigrantes, los traficantes pagaban a Martínez $5,000 dólares. En menos de cuatro meses había ganado $35,000 dólares.

Las cosas no habían salido muy bien para los choferes que había contratado. El primero fue un amigo de la infancia de Palestine. En su tercer viaje, fue capturado en un puesto de control de la Patrulla Fronteriza con 107 inmigrantes en su tráiler. El segundo chofer contratado por Martínez también había sido detenido en su tercer viaje. Por ahora, la suerte de Zamorano parecía estar estable.

“Aquí nos mataron”

Cerca de las 11 a.m.,Zamorano había completado el viaje a Laredo, se había estacionado en una parada de camiones al norte del pueblo y ahí esperaba instrucciones. Como regla, los choferes no recibían información hasta el último momento posible. En lugar de enviarlos directamente a las casas de seguridad — lo que podría llamar la atención y dar información a los choferes que podrían revelar a las autoridades si eran detenidos — la organización tenía a personas en el lugar que reunían a los inmigrantes en otro vehículo y los movían al sitio en donde serían subidos al tráiler. 

Justo antes de la una de la tarde, Zamorano recibió un pin de localización en Google Maps enviado por Martínez y dirigiéndolo a una calle lateral frente a una bodega de suministros de acero en un área industrial al este de la ciudad. Cuando llegó ahí, encontró un camión de caja blanca, lleno, como sabía, con los inmigrantes que llevaría a San Antonio. Nervioso y agotado por su noche en vela alimentada de metanfetamina, Zamorano batalló para dar la vuelta al tráiler y colocarlo justo contra el estrecho espacio en donde el camión de caja blanca esperaba, flanqueado en un lado por una cerca de malla ciclónica bordeada por mesquites. Cuando finalmente paró, los hombres que estaban en la calle abrieron rápidamente los compartimentos de ambos vehículos. A unos 50 metros, fluía la corriente del tráfico sobre la autopista. Cualquier transeúnte hubiera visto solo sombras sobre la grava mientras más de sesenta personas se movían entre dos camiones que no tenían nada de especial. El proceso de carga tomó alrededor de diez minutos.

Aproximadamente una hora después de salir, Zamorano salió de la autopista y hacia el cobertizo del C29. El aire dentro del tráiler ya era sofocante, pero Begaí y Mariano, y los otros, habían sido advertidos de guardar silencio, ya que incluso el sonido más tenue podía advertir a los agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza. Mientras Zamorana esperaba en la fila para el puesto de control, sintieron las vibraciones de los motores de otros camiones y el rechinido de los frenos de aire. Cuando el camión paró brevemente, escucharon al chofer hablar con alguien afuera.

No había ningún perro trabajando en el carril de Zamorano cuando fue su turno de hablar con un agente. Portando una gorra negra con la palabra “H-Town”, Zamorano sonreía mientras se asomaba por la ventanilla del camión. De acuerdo con los documentos falsificados, Zamorano estaba cargando trece toneladas de arándanos azules y la temperatura del tráiler tenía que estar por debajo de los 66 grados Fahrenheit (19 grados centígrados). El agente hizo una señal con la mano para que el tráiler avanzara sin antes revisar el control de la temperatura, y Zamorano pasó para continuar rumbo a San Antonio.

Conforme el camión continuó hacia el norte, el calor dentro del tráiler se intensificaba. Sin ventilación y con el calor de los cuerpos de 64 personas sudando a galones, es posible que la temperatura haya subido a más de 140 grados Fahrenheit (60 grados centígrados). La compostura de los inmigrantes pronto se rompió.

Mariano y Begaí escucharon los desesperados llantos en la oscuridad, en todo su alrededor. Sus ojos ardían, la piel les picaba por el sazonador que D’Luna Bilbao había espolvoreado.

Las personas empezaron a moverse y a caer uno sobre los otros mientras trataban de encontrar una entrada de aire, pero dentro del contenedor sellado solo estaban generando más calor y agotando el preciado oxígeno. En un punto, Mariano se puso de pie y empezó a resbalarse sobre el suelo cubierto de sudor. Begaí lo alcanzó y trató de hacer que se volviera a sentar. “No te levantes, quédate quieto”, pero Mariano se le resbalaba con el sudor. El hermano menor llegó al frente, donde con sus puños golpeó las paredes del tráiler, desesperado para tratar de captar la atención del chofer. De alguna manera, encontró el camino de regreso al lado de Begaí. “No me escuchó”, dijo.

De hecho, Zamorano había escuchado ruidos dentro del tráiler. Alrededor de las 3:20 p. m., llamó a Martínez para decirle que su teléfono se había quedado sin batería y que había parado para comprar un cargador. Hizo por lo menos dos paradas más, diciéndole a Martínez en cada ocasión que había tenido que parar porque había escuchado gritos y golpes en las paredes del tráiler. Trató de reiniciar la unidad de refrigeración que estaba montada sobre el exterior del tráiler, pero sin saberlo empeoró las cosas — la unidad empezó a soplar aire caliente.

Los inmigrantes escucharon a Zamorano mover cosas en el exterior y sintieron una ráfaga de aire caliente. “¡Ya casi llegamos!”, gritó. En un punto, también escucharon a alguien moviendo los cerrojos de las puertas traseras, pero las puertas permanecieron cerradas.

Cerca de las 5:30 p. m., Zamorano se encontró con una camioneta pickup en la autopista I-35 que lo guiaría al sitio designado de entrega en la calle Quintana Road, en el sur de San Antonio. Llamó a Martínez nuevamente, agitado. “Están gritando y golpeando muy fuerte”, dijo. Le preguntó qué debía hacer. Unos minutos después, Martínez volvió a llamar con un mensaje de los patrones: “Lo que se hizo ya se hizo. No vuelvas a parar”.

Adentro, los inmigrantes estaban desesperados. Algunos arañaron las paredes y arrancaron pedazos del aislamiento de espuma amarilla, en un inútil esfuerzo por alcanzar el aire fresco. Un grupo de mujeres en medio del tráiler formó un grupo de oración, sus voces se levantaban por encima de los estruendos. Alguien que logró llevar un teléfono escondido a bordo hizo una llamada desesperada, pidiendo a la persona al otro lado de la línea que los rescatara. Un hombre rogaba por agua para su moribunda esposa. El hermano y la hermana que habían puesto a la pequeña chica en medio de ellos trataban de consolarla, el hermano abanicándola con su Biblia de bolsillo. Una mujer que había desobedecido las órdenes de los traficantes de no regalar su agua compartió sus últimas gotas con ellos. 

Uno por uno, empezaron a morir.

Al momento en que la deshidratación extrema apareció, dejaron de sudar, sus pieles estaban calientes al tacto. El agotamiento de electrolitos puede dar pie a una serie de síntomas: calambres musculares, inflamación cerebral, náusea, pérdida de coordinación, delirio y convulsiones. Después, conforme las temperaturas corporales rebasaron los 105 grados Fahrenheit (40.5 grados centígrados), sus células empezaron a morir y los órganos empezaron a fallar. Sus momentos finales antes de perder el conocimiento fueron agonizantes.

Mariano apretó la mano de Begaí. “Ya no puedo, me duele mucho el pecho”, dijo. Begaí sentía como si estuviera sumergido bajo el agua, como si cada difícil inhalación fuera un breve asomo a la superficie. “Aquí nos mataron”, le dijo a Mariano. Su boca y sus extremidades se torcían de forma involuntaria. “No vinimos a morir aquí”, Begaí repetía una y otra vez.

“Aguanta hermano”, le dijo Mariano.

La última cosa que Begaí recuerda escuchar de Mariano fue una oración: “Dios mío, mira mi corazón, mira mi corazón. Mira mi alma”.

Una sombra enorme apareció sobre Begaí. Ya no estaba en el tráiler rodeado de los muertos, sino que estaba solo, debajo de un cielo abierto sobre una vasta planicie. Sintió una inmensa presencia escuchándolo y ofreció su propia oración: “Padre mío, dame una oportunidad, solo una oportunidad”. No hubo respuesta.

Alcanzó a escuchar el inconfundible ruido de un tren que venía de algún lugar cercano.

Un bolsillo lleno de tarjetas de oración 

El tramo lleno de bachesde Quintana Road que pasa hacia el norte desde la I-410 y corre de forma paralela a las vías férreas de Union Pacific Railroad, era conocido por la policía local y los traficantes como una zona para dejar basura y carros robados. Sus bordes estaban cubiertos por densa vegetación y números pintados con pintura en espray sobre cercas averiadas marcadas identificando depósitos de chatarra y de artículos para construcción. 

Estacionado en el punto de entrega y todavía sentado en la cabina del tractor rojo, Zamorano miraba por el espejo lateral mientras los varios conductores que habían llegado a recoger a los grupos de inmigrantes se reunían en la parte posterior del tráiler. Uno de ellos abrió las puertas del tráiler, pero en lugar del usual tumulto — formado por los conductores gritando códigos y separando a sus respectivos clientes — todos corrieron de vuelta a sus vehículos y se fueron de prisa.

Zamorano tenía órdenes estrictas de nunca salir de la cabina durante el proceso de carga y descarga. Invadido por el pánico, llamó a Martínez, quien le dijo que fuera a mirar dentro del tráiler. Con Martínez todavía en la línea, Zamorano bajó de la cabina y caminó hacia atrás. “Hay cuerpos apilados”, dijo, y luego colgó.

Con sus manos temblando, Martínez llamó a uno de los lugartenientes de Martínez Olvera y le preguntó qué debían hacer. “Ve a recogerlo”, fue la respuesta.

Cuando Martínez llegó unos minutos después, notó a una niña adolescente cerca del tráiler sollozando, su playera negra empapada en sudor colgando de su piel. Unos cuantos hombres que Martínez no reconoció parecían estar ayudándola. Cuando no vio señales de Zamorano — quien ya había dejado de responder a su teléfono y a los mensajes de texto — Martínez huyó de la escena.

Roberto Quintero trabajaba en una compañía de asfalto cercana al lugar, y cuando escucharon los gritos él y algunos compañeros de trabajo habían subido a un camión de la compañía para dirigirse a Quintana Road. Fue entonces cuando encontraron a la niña tambaleándose cerca del tráiler. Cuando Quintero se acercó al tráiler, justo antes de las 6 p. m., vio los cuerpos apilados adentro, sus rostros hinchados y sus labios azules. Algunos parecían haberse arrancado la ropa. Ninguno de ellos se movía. Horrorizado, llamó al 911. 

“Hay un tráiler de 18 ruedas con unas 20 personas muertas atrás”, dijo Quintero al operador, los gritos de la niña se escuchaban en el fondo. “Hay más de 20 personas”, dijo tartamudeando. “¡Hay 50 personas!” Mientras él y sus compañeros de trabajo le daban agua a la niña, notaron a un hombre con una gorra negra y una playera de golf a rallas que se escapaba corriendo por un lado del camión. La niña le dijo a Quintero que había visto a ese mismo hombre salir del lado del conductor de la cabina del tráiler. Algunos de los trabajadores de asfalto trataron de alcanzarlo, pero no pudieron.

Había una estación de bomberos a menos de una milla (1.4 km) de distancia y los equipos médicos de emergencia llegaron en unos cuantos minutos. Cuando se acercaron al tráiler, recibieron la brutal patada del nauseabundo olor a sudor y heces mezclado con el olor de sazonadores de cocina. Un grupo de cuerpos estaba cerca de las puertas traseras, las extremidades flácidas colgando sobre la orilla. El personal de las ambulancias arrastró los cuerpos por sus brazos y piernas, y los colocaron sobre el suelo de tierra al lado de la calle. Desde dentro del tráiler empezaron a escuchar gemidos y a personas tratando de tomar bocanadas de aire. “¡Hay uno vivo aquí!”, gritó alguien.

Dieciséis sobrevivientes fueron llevados de prisa a hospitales locales, cinco de ellos fallecieron más tarde. Después de que el tráiler fue vaciado, 48 personas yacían muertas debajo de carpas amarillas, incluyendo a dos que los oficiales de policía encontraron a varios metros del tráiler. Preocupados de que hubiera más víctimas regadas en el área, el personal de emergencia cuidadosamente revisó ambos lados de Quintana Road. Pronto encontraron a un hombre aparentemente inconsciente, tirado sobre la vegetación al lado de las vías férreas, con una gorra negra que decía “H-Town” y un teléfono Samsung Galaxy tirado junto a él. Primero asumieron que era una de las víctimas. Pero cuando uno de los policías levantó el teléfono, la pantalla no asegurada reveló un mensaje de texto en inglés, que había llegado solo unos minutos antes: “¿dónde estás carnal?”. El mensaje venía de un contacto identificado como Gordito.

Zamorano reaccionó con sorpresa cuando el personal de emergencia vertió un cubo de agua helada sobre él. La policía rápidamente determinó que coincidía con la descripción que los trabajadores de asfalto habían dado sobre el conductor, y lo detuvieron. Diagnosticado con intoxicación por anfetaminas y deshidratación, pasó la noche en el hospital bajo supervisión de la policía.

Esa tarde, D’Luna Bilbao escuchó lo que había pasado a través de uno de los socios de Martínez Olvera, mientras esperaba en el lote de almacenamiento para recibir la orden para ir a recoger el tráiler. El registro del tráiler llevó a la policía directamente a su casa. Paralizado por el miedo, él estaba ahí esa noche cuando la policía llegó a arrestarlo.

Martínez, estaba demasiado alterado para manejar, se había refugiado en un hotel de la cadena La Quinta Inn en las afueras de San Antonio. No sabía que la policía había visto su mensaje de texto y había descubierto que él era Gordito, pero una vez que vio la fotografía de arresto de Zamorano esa noche, no tuvo duda de que lo encontrarían. Regresó a Palestine el día siguiente, donde visitó a su madre y a su hermana, consumió lo que le quedaba de cocaína, y esperó que los policías llegaran. Los policías lo arrestaron en la mañana del 29 de junio.

La escala del desastre abrumó la capacidad de la Oficina del Forense del Condado de Bexar. Bajo los reflectores de los vehículos de emergencia, cinco patólogos forenses trabajaron durante la noche para procesar los cuerpos. Revisaron los bolsillos de las víctimas, el interior del tráiler, y las áreas aledañas en busca de documentos de identificación. Los agentes del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional identificaron a algunos con un escáner móvil para huellas dactilares. Nuevamente, como si fueran carga, los inmigrantes fueron subidos a la parte posterior de grandes vehículos y llevados — esta vez a la morgue.

Con la ayuda de refuerzos de Dallas y Austin, los funcionarios del Condado de Bexar tomaron cinco días para completar las autopsias. La causa principal de muerte fue la hipertermia —básicamente sobrecalentamiento — pero el forense determinó que también pudieron haber sufrido asfixia al ser sofocados, aplastados por el peso de otros cuerpos, o simplemente incapaces de sobrevivir dentro del aire sin oxígeno.

Los oficiales cuidadosamente recopilaron y fotografiaron los objetos personales que los difuntos tenían en sus bolsillos, lo que no era mucho. La mayoría no tenía más que algunas monedas, y algunos viajaban sin nada de dinero. En total, el grupo tenía menos de $2,500 dólares. La mujer guatemalteca que aspiraba a ser maestra y una de sus acompañantes tenían tarjetas mexicanas de identificación falsas para facilitar su tránsito por ese país, en donde es sabido que los oportunistas toman ventaja de los inmigrantes centroamericanos. Un adolescente de la Ciudad de México llevaba tres desgastadas tarjetas de oraciones. Uno de los hombres que había prometido a la madre del niño que cuidaría de él, también llevaba tarjetas con oraciones; él sobrevivió lo suficiente como para caminar a varios metros del tráiler antes de colapsarse. La mujer hondureña embarazada falleció con dos pruebas de embarazo en su bolsillo.

Un fornido hombre tenía un pedazo de papel arrugado y mojado de sudor en uno de sus bolsillos, con algunas notas en rojo, que incluían el nombre del hotel en Nuevo Laredo y el código de los traficantes: 050 Flaco.
 La identificación del hombre indicaba que tenía 32 años y que venía de Oaxaca. Su nombre era Mariano. Su hermano Begaí yacía inconsciente, pero vivo, en un hospital al otro lado de la ciudad.

El número real de víctimas

Las noticias sobre el desastre se esparcieron por toda la frontera sur. Familias de todo México y Centroamérica miraban la cobertura en los canales locales y leían detenidamente las publicaciones en redes sociales, preguntándose si un ser querido podría estar debajo de las carpas en Quintana Road. Tomaría días para que las familias de las víctimas fueran notificadas, y varias semanas más para repatriar los cuerpos. Sumergidos en las deudas en las que habían incurrido para pagar a los traficantes, algunas familias tuvieron que pedir prestado aún más para pagar los funerales. En algunos lugares — como en el pequeño pueblo en Guatemala en el que crecieron los dos pasajeros más jóvenes — comunidades enteras salieron de sus casas para acompañar a los ataúdes hasta el cementerio.

A pesar de que el forense del Condado de Bexar había concluido que la causa principal de la muerte era hipertermia, la forma de la muerte fue homicidio. La investigación cayó sobre la autoridad de la Fuerza de Trabajo Conjunta Alpha, un esfuerzo de varias agencias lanzado por el Procurador General Merrick Garland en 2021 para “mejorar los esfuerzos de cumplimiento con la ley de Estados Unidos en contra de los grupos más prolíficos y peligrosos de trata y tráfico humano”. Choferes de siete organizaciones estaban ya detrás de las rejas, incluyendo a Zamorano, y los teléfonos celulares confiscados a D’Luna Bilbao, Martínez y Zamorano contenían enormes cantidades de información relacionada con las actividades de la organización, pero tomaría todavía alrededor de un año para que las autoridades detectaran a los líderes. 

El 26 de junio de 2023, oficiales federales del orden público allanaron la casa de alquiler de Orduña Torres, ubicada en un modesto vecindario cercano a la Base de la Fuerza Aérea Lackland, a unos diez minutos de la escena del crimen en Quintana Road. Encontraron una camioneta Cadillac Escalade 2015 color perla, y una Ford F-350 modelo 2017, verde limón con rines de cromo personalizados y un kit para elevación tan grande que la hacía parecer casi una “Monster Truck”. Orduña Torres, que en ese entonces tenía 28 años, vivía ahí con su esposa y su hija. El interior estaba recién pintado, y en el patio trasero había instalado una pequeña piscina, pasto sintético y un patio cubierto. El gobierno valúo las mejoras en $41,000 dólares y concluyó que las había financiado con sus ingresos provenientes del tráfico. Ese mismo día, agentes federales arrestaron a otros tres hombres asociados con la organización, incluyendo al suegro de Orduña Torres. (Martínez Olvera logró evadir el arresto de alguna forma, probablemente fugándose a México).

“Los traficantes de personas se aprovechan de la esperanza de los migrantes de lograr una mejor vida, pero su única prioridad son las ganancias”, dijo Garland en un comunicado de prensa anunciando los arrestos. En la casa de Orduña Torres, los agentes encontraron una porción de esas ganancias — $30,000 dólares en efectivo guardados en el fondo de una caja de cereal Special K y colocada arriba de un refrigerador, y otros $29,444 dólares en varios escondites, incluyendo la cajonera de su hija.

De acuerdo con el gobierno, Orduña Torres había estado involucrado en entre 24 y 48 operaciones de tráfico humano durante un periodo de dos años antes del desastre, lo que significa que sus viajes de tráfico a gran escala con Martínez Olvera eran solo parte de su negocio. En total, el gobierno estima que Orduña Torres ganó entre $96,000 y $240,000 dólares en un periodo de dos años. La estimación más baja pondría a su familia un poco por arriba del ingreso medio para los grupos familiares de San Antonio. La cifra más alta lo pondría dentro de la clase media, pero lejos del tipo de riqueza que significa el estatus de capo en México, mucho menos en Estados Unidos.

De las siete personas arrestadas, todas, menos dos — Orduña Torres y su suegro que tuvo un rol menor — se declararían culpables a los cargos de tráfico humano. En marzo pasado, casi tres años después del desastre, Orduña Torres fue llevado a un juzgado de techos altos y paredes forradas con paneles de madera en el nuevo edificio de tribunales federales en San Antonio. Incluso con los grilletes, era visible la pronunciada cojera que le ganó el apodo con el que todos los otros traficantes lo conocían, “Chuequito”. Vestía traje y corbata, con su cabello peinado con gel y en puntas. Había bajado tanto peso para entonces, que D’Luna Bilbao, quien tomó el estrado a principios del juicio, casi no lo reconoció.

Dos sobrevivientes testificaron. El primero, Greysy Sanjay Bacajol, quien consolaba a la asustada niña que ella y su hermano habían conocido en camino hacia la frontera. El hermano de Greysy, Oswaldo también sobrevivió, al igual que la niña cuyo nombre era Sebastiana Morales Morales. Fueron sus gritos los que llamaron la atención de los trabajadores de asfalto.

El otro sobreviviente que testificó fue José Luis Vásquez Guzmán, el exsoldado mexicano que estaba cuidando al chico adolescente. El chico, Marcos Antonio Velasco Velasco, se dirigía a un trabajo en Ohio que originalmente había sido ofrecido a su madre, pero le rogó que lo dejara ir a él en su nombre. Marcos Antonio murió, al igual que el primo del soldado, Javier Flores López. Cuando los fiscales mostraron la foto de su primo en la pantalla del tribunal, Vásquez Guzmán lloró por varios minutos. Algunos de los jurados lloraron también.

Juan D’Luna Bilbao, Christian Martínez, y otro traficante acusado en el caso, dieron detallados testimonios sobre la forma en que la organización planeaba y realizaba sus operaciones de tráfico a gran escala. Los investigadores federales tomaron el estrado para revisar los montones de mensajes de texto, comunicaciones por WhatsApp, fotos e información de seguimiento que conectaban a Orduña Torres con varias operaciones de tráfico a gran escala, incluyendo el fatal viaje del 27 de junio de 2022.

Antes de enviar al jurado a deliberar, el juez les recordó sobre la mujer embarazada de Honduras que había muerto. El verdadero número de víctimas mortales, dijo, era 54.

El jurado encontró a los dos hombres culpables de todos los cargos, y el juez posteriormente los sentenció a cadena perpetua. Poco después de que los oficiales estadounidenses se llevaran al par de hombres esposados, funcionarios federales de alto rango dieron una conferencia de prensa para anunciar el veredicto. “Hoy es un día trascendental para la inagotable batalla del Departamento [de Justicia] en contra de los líderes, organizadores y principales facilitadores de las redes de tráfico humano”, dijo Matthew Galeotti, recientemente designado por Trump como el jefe de la División Criminal del Departamento de Justicia. “No hemos acabado — ni de lejos”.

Recientemente el gobierno federal se embarcó en más gastos monumentales para los esfuerzos de control inmigratorio. En julio, el Congreso le dio a Trump la cantidad sin precedentes de $190,000 millones de dólares para expandir el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional, efectivamente duplicando el presupuesto de la agencia en los siguientes varios años. Más de $80,000 millones de dólares han sido asignados para la frontera, incluyendo más de $50,000 millones de dólares para la construcción del muro e infraestructura fronteriza. El financiamiento ya ha sido asignado para la expansión que convertirá al C29 en el puesto de control fronterizo más grande del país.

Entre tanto, Martínez Olvera sigue prófugo, al igual que legiones de otros que son parte de la descentralizada economía del tráfico — operadores de casas de seguridad, guías, vigilantes, auxiliares del cártel y choferes de varios tipos. Mientras haya dinero que pueda generarse transportando a personas a través de fronteras, hay pocas probabilidades de que los rangos disminuyan.

¿Ya viste a mi hermano?

A Mari le tomómás de una semana llegar al lado de la cama de su esposo. Un representante de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores en México le informó que era elegible para recibir un permiso especial para visitar a Begaí en el hospital, pero primero tenía que llegar a Ciudad Juárez, en el otro lado de la frontera de El Paso. No podía pagar el boleto de avión, pero un hombre para el que Begaí había trabajado años antes, se puso en contacto con ella y ofreció financiar su viaje.

Alguien del consulado en El Paso estaba esperándola cuando aterrizó en Ciudad Juárez y la llevó al Puente de las Américas, donde caminó por encima del canal de seco concreto del Río Grande, pasando filas de carros esperando, y hacia la estación del Servicio de Aduanas y Protección Fronteriza de EE. UU. Explicó su situación al agente, quien le pidió llenar un formulario, tomó su fotografía, y le dijo que podía quedarse en Estados Unidos por 30 días. Cuando la dejó pasar, le dijo, “Dios la bendiga, señora”.

Viajó por el oeste de Texas en autobús durante la noche, preocupada durante todo su trayecto hacia San Antonio sobre lo que encontraría al llegar ahí: cómo reaccionaría Begaí cuando la viera, y si podría ella mantenerse fuerte.

Amós, uno de los hermanos de Begaí, quien trabajaba en una maquiladora en Ciudad Juárez, también había obtenido un permiso especial para cruzar y estaba en la estación de autobuses para recibir a Mari cuando llegó a San Antonio el 5 de julio. Otro representante consular los llevó al Hospital Christus Santa Rosa, en donde una enfermera los actualizó sobre la condición de Begaí mientras caminaban a su habitación. Para entonces, él llevaba nueve días en el hospital. La enfermera les dijo que Begaí estaba inconsciente cuando la ambulancia lo llevó a la sala de emergencias, y el personal pensaba que probablemente moriría. Sus órganos se habían marchitado, como fruta seca, y había tenido dos infartos cerebrales. Pero eventualmente, después de unos tres días en coma, despertó. Desorientado y con un debilitante dolor a lo largo de su columna vertebral, no recordaba haber salido de Laredo. “Lo primero que pidió fue una Biblia”, dijo la enfermera.

En el corredor, Mari escuchó la voz de Begaí antes de verlo, y reconoció las palabras inmediatamente: “El que habita al abrigo del Altísimo descansará a la sombra del Todopoderoso”. Begaí estaba recitando el Salmo 91:1, que ambos sabían de memoria. Ella secó las lágrimas de sus mejillas y, por un momento, escuchó. Recuperando la compostura, entró al cuarto en donde vio a Begaí, con su cabeza cubierta de vendas. Había una intricada red de cables y tubos conectados a sus extremidades y a máquinas parpadeantes y bolsas con líquidos. Su cara estaba pálida y triste, y miró a Mari con una mirada que parecía haber envejecido muchos años. “Alguien vino a verte”, dijo la enfermera. “¿Sabes quién es?”

Begaí la miró. “Perdóname”, fue la primera palabra que le dijo a Mari. “Porque no te escuché”.

No le tomó mucho darse cuenta de que la memoria de corto plazo de Begaí estaba muy dañada. Perdía el hilo de las conversaciones y olvidaba cosas que ella le acababa de decir. Pero la laguna en su memoria sobre el 27 de junio y su confusión sobre lo que había pasado ese día era lo que más le preocupaba. De alguna forma, Begaí creía que Mariano nunca se había subido al tráiler. “Está bien mi hermano, ¿verdad?”, le preguntaba. “¿Verdad que mi hermano se regresó (a México)? ¿Cómo está? ¿Ya lo viste?”

Al principio no encontraba el valor para decirle la verdad. Evitaba las preguntas y lo motivaba a que se enfocara en mejorar, pero le atormentaba no decirle la verdad. Cuando finalmente le dijo, Begaí gritó con tanta agonía, que a Mari le pareció que algo se estaba rompiendo dentro de él.

Bajo cuidado constante, Begaí mejoró poco a poco. El 12 de julio, el doctor lo dio de alta con una receta de opioides para el dolor y otra para antibióticos. Ese día, un agente del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional le hizo firmar a Begaí un formulario indicando que había sido arrestado y que estaba en el proceso de deportación, pero que se le liberaba en espera de su comparecencia frente a un juez de inmigración tres meses después en Atlanta, donde tenía planeado ir a trabajar.

El documento y todo el proceso era confuso para Begaí, quien estaba físicamente débil y cognitivamente afectado, y se le tenía que cuidar como si fuera un niño pequeño. Después, recibió un permiso temporal de trabajo del gobierno federal y un abogado de inmigración le ayudó a solicitar una Visa U — una categoría especial para víctimas de delitos que ocurren en suelo estadounidense y que fue creada en el año 2000 para motivar a las personas indocumentadas a cooperar con investigaciones policiales. Pero el abogado le dijo que la aprobación podría tardar hasta seis años y, en el entretanto, su estatus inmigratorio era incierto.

Mari viajó con él a un suburbio de Atlanta, en donde se quedaron con su tía y su tío. Durante esas primeras semanas, Begaí sufrió de dolor de espalda severo y en ocasiones se perdía cuando trataba de encontrar el baño. Mari lo llevaba a una clínica cercana en donde un doctor que hablaba español ofrecía servicios a bajo costo. Le ponía una pomada en su espalda y lo consolaba cuando despertaba desorientado en medio de la noche. Ella escribió una carta solicitando una extensión de su permiso provisional humanitario y la envió a la oficina del Servicio de Aduanas y Protección Fronteriza en Atlanta junto con una carta de respaldo del doctor de Begaí. Su solicitud fue denegada. Se apresuró a regresar a casa cuando su permiso de treinta días venció.

A Begaí le tomó ocho meses recuperar la fuerza para poder trabajar nuevamente. Le ayudaba a su tío con trabajos de plomería y en ocasiones hacía algunos trabajos de piso de mosaico que conseguía con un hombre que había conocido en la iglesia. Primero, solo podía trabajar unas cuantas horas antes de necesitar un descanso. Trabajando uno o dos días a la semana, no podía mandar mucho dinero a Mari, lo cual incrementaba su desesperación. 

Mientras tanto, la salud de la esposa de Mariano, Luz Estrella, se había deteriorado rápidamente. A pesar de que Mariano había decidido irse a Estados Unidos para pagar los gastos médicos de su esposa, en realidad sus ganancias no hubieran hecho una gran diferencia. Unos tres meses después de que Mariano murió, ella fue diagnosticada con cáncer de mama. Para pagar sus tratamientos, la familia recaudó unos $1,000 dólares vendiendo tamales en el vecindario, deshaciéndose de la motocicleta de Mariano y reuniendo los pocos ahorros que tenían. Pero el cáncer se propagó, llegando a sus huesos.

Antes de que la enfermedad invadiera su cuerpo, Luz Estrella decidió preservar un recuerdo para ella y para sus hijos. Vistió a su hija de cinco años, Jade, con un vestido rosa bordado y a su hijo de tres años, Mariano, con una camisa a cuadros con botones. Ella se puso un vestido color lavanda, peinó su largo cabello hacia atrás y posó con sus hijos frente a ella y colocó sus manos sobre sus hombros. Los niños, con sus pequeñas manos sostenían las de ella, quien mostraba una sonrisa. La foto ahora está en la pared de la cocina de su madre, junto a una foto de Mariano junto a Luz Estrella el día de su boda. Ella falleció el 31 de julio de 2023.  

El purgatorio estadounidense

Durante el año anterior, todos los 11 sobrevivientes del desastre seguían viviendo en Estados Unidos, pero sus paraderos exactos eran desconocidos. Encontré unas cuantas organizaciones sin fines de lucro y un bufete de abogados que ayudaron a algunos de ellos, pero todos se negaron a ayudarme a concertar una entrevista. Durante mi viaje de investigación a México y a Guatemala, logré hablar con algunos familiares de cinco sobrevivientes. En ese momento, ninguno estuvo dispuesto a ponerme en contacto directo con sus seres queridos. Aun así, yo tenía la esperanza. Solo los sobrevivientes podían describir los horrores de ese día y la dificultad de sanar en el país extranjero al que casi les había costado la vida tratar de llegar — y su estatus legal sigue incierto.

A lo largo de los meses, me mantuve en contacto con muchas de las familias a las que conocí, y durante el juicio hice un grupo de WhatsApp para actualizarlas sobre lo que estaba ocurriendo en el tribunal. Mari era parte de ese grupo, junto con la madre de Begaí y dos de sus hermanos, y ellos le pasaban mis mensajes a él. Luego, unos días después de que el juicio terminó, mi teléfono sonó. Era Begaí.

En un cálido día de abril pasado, nos reunimos en un parque público cerca de su casa, que estaba ocupado con personas disfrutando días de campo y caminando con sus perros. Begaí vestía pantalones vaqueros, una playera gris y zapatos de agujetas. Era reservado y hablaba con una voz tan baja que era casi difícil de escuchar sobre el bullicio del tráfico cercano y de los niños en el jardín de juegos. Le pregunté si tenía miedo de ser deportado. “¿Por qué voy a tener miedo?”, dijo. “De cierta forma, sería una bendición”.

Casi tres años después de despedirse de su esposa y sus hijos, Begaí sigue viviendo en Estados Unidos, solo y consumido por la pena. Sufre de dolor crónico atrás de su pulmón derecho y se cansa rápidamente con el trabajo pesado y la exposición al calor. Cuando Mari habla con él por teléfono, nota que en ocasiones se le olvida de lo que estaban hablando solo unos minutos antes. Con el tiempo, ha recuperado algunos de sus recuerdos sobre el 27 de junio, pero la memoria de los días previos y posteriores siguen siendo algo vagas.

Begaí trabaja ahora en un camión de comida, diez horas al día, seis días a la semana. Finalmente, está ganando suficiente para mejorar las finanzas de su familia, pero el dolor de estar separado de su esposa y de sus hijos lo ha llevado a un punto de quiebre. Su incapacidad de consolar y apoyar a los hijos de Mariano es una fuente constante de angustia. “Lo que más quiero es darles un abrazo”, me dijo. Begaí sigue confundido sobre su estatus inmigratorio. A más de la mitad del posible periodo de espera para la decisión de su Visa U, no hay señales de que las cosas estén progresando y no sabe dónde pedir información sobre su caso, o si hacerlo es una buena idea. A pesar de lo que dice sobre el posible aspecto positivo de la deportación, entiende que ser arrestado no significaría ser dejado en el puente y caminar de vuelta a México — probablemente significaría un largo periodo de detención en una prisión privada en Estados Unidos. 

Cuando estaba cerca de la muerte, Begaí rezó por una oportunidad de vivir, pero terminó en una especie de purgatorio. Frente a la espera de una visa que podría no llegar nunca, está al borde de darse por vencido. Si regresa a Lázaro Cárdenas a visitar a sus padres algún día, tomará el puente peatonal a través del Río Usila y pasará bajo el arco de árboles. Nuevas casas de concreto, la mayoría de ellas construidas con dinero de remesas de inmigrantes que trabajan en el extranjero, agrega ahora un toque de novedad a los que regresan.

Dentro de la casa de sus padres, llena del bullicio de sus propios hijos y varios jóvenes sobrinos, y el olor a humo de leña desde la cocina de su madre, Mariano será una presencia inquietante. Begaí verá los versos de la Biblia que su hermano pintó en las paredes, con una letra nítida y colorida. En la habitación sin ventanas, donde su madre duerme en un colchón sobre el piso, Mariano cubrió toda una pared con el Salmo 103. Las letras están ahora borrosas, pero todavía son legibles. Una línea puede parecer más enigmática después de la travesía de Begaí: “El Señor hace justicia y derecho a todos los oprimidos”. La noción de justicia divina puede ofrecer algo de consuelo a Begaí, pero es posible que tenga que esperar un largo tiempo por una reparación del gobierno de EE. UU., si es que llega.

El reportaje para esta historia fue apoyado por la organización periodística sin fines de lucro Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Despite having the most prolific remaining wild salmon runs on Earth, Alaska leads the world in salmon hatchery production. The state’s modern hatchery industry began in the 1970s as a way to boost commercial salmon harvests. Today, salmon hatcheries are a way of life here. Alaskans catch hatchery fish to fill their dinner plates and freezers. Commercial fishermen net hatchery salmon by the millions—providing one-quarter of the value of the state’s salmon harvests and generating more than $500 million annually in the process.

Hatcheries in Alaska—along with facilities mainly in Russia and Japan as well as Korea, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest—release around five billion young salmon into the North Pacific each year. This production comes at a cost. Hatchery salmon weaken wild fish genetics through interbreeding and compete with wild salmon for food. And there is evidence they are playing a role in reshaping ocean food webs from plankton to whales.

Trouble at Sea explores ecological ripple effects of salmon hatcheries and asks Alaskans to engage in hard conversations about the future of our changing oceans.

This documentary grew out of a story FERN produced in 2023 with bioGraphic.

In the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain depot where he picked up food for his four ranch dogs. Healthy adults that these people knew were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases and cancers that usually afflicted the elderly. “It was kinda grim,” Doherty says.

Sixty years old, broad-chested, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, Doherty had been running a cattle ranch business with his wife for 25 years when he entered public service in 2016, winning a seat on Morrow County’s three-person board of commissioners.

What stood out about those conversations was the way people connected them to a problem with water in the area. Doherty knew what they meant: The county’s underground water supply had been tainted with nitrates — a byproduct of chemical fertilizers used by the megafarms and food processing plants where most of his constituents worked.

The aquifer underneath Morrow County, known as the Lower Umatilla Basin, is the only source of water for as many as 45,000 residents in and around the county, the majority of whom rely on private wells that draw on the basin. Since 1991, regulators at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) have been collecting samples from the aquifer that show a slow and steady increase of chemical toxins in the water.

Water hadn’t really been a political priority for Doherty — he’s a Republican, and he focused mostly on economic development and transportation projects — until a couple of years into his second term, when the uptick of stories he heard about young women enduring miscarriages and middle-aged men with organ failure started making him uneasy. Scientists believe that excess consumption of even a small amount of nitrates can do significant harm to the human body; they can cause debilitating conditions in newborns and have been linked to increased risks of cancer. Doherty wasn’t familiar with the research at the time, but he wondered if there was a connection between the contamination in the water and those conversations he kept having.

In June 2022, he decided to do something about it. He went out and collected tap water samples from six homes he chose at random and sent them to a nearby laboratory. The lab called a few days later and explained that it was their policy to notify anyone with a sample that tested above the federal limit for the presence of nitrates in drinking water — 10 parts per million.

Doherty asked which family was going to receive the bad news about their water. But the lab tech corrected him. It wasn’t one of the homes he visited that had a toxic well. It was all six. Doherty says he picked up 70 more test kits and went back out a week later, this time knocking on doors across a wider swath of the county. The results were equally bleak. Of the 70 wells he tested, 68 violated the safety threshold, with an average concentration of nitrates close to four times the federal limit. 

When Doherty collected the water samples, accompanied by an official with the county health office, they’d taken an informal survey. Talking mostly to farmhands and factory workers who were reliant on well water, they asked if anyone in their household had one or more of the known medical conditions linked to nitrate exposure. According to Doherty, within the first 30 homes they visited, they heard of at least 25 miscarriages and a half dozen people living with one kidney. “One man about 60 years old had his voice box taken out because of a cancer that only smokers get,” Doherty says, “but that guy hadn’t smoked a day of his life.”

It never occurred to Doherty that his effort to fix the water problem would provoke the ire of a group of local officials who resented scrutiny of their role in the pollution. That it would end his political career, tank his cattle sales, and cause him so much stress he’d lose 50 pounds. He couldn’t have foreseen the multibillion-dollar political scandal submerged in that fouled water, the class action lawsuit that would rise from it, the intervention by the Oregon governor and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a civil suit from the Oregon attorney general, or sanctions from the state’s ethics commission and Department of Environmental Quality. He never thought parents in the area would be terrified that their children might sneak a glass of poisonous water from the kitchen sink. And he never imagined that one of the world’s largest tech companies — Amazon — could play a part in the crisis.

“The historical precedent here is Flint, Michigan,” says Kristin Ostrom, executive director of Oregon Rural Action (ORA), a water rights advocacy group. “In part because of how slow the response to the crisis has been, and in part because of who’s affected. These are people who have no political or economic power, and very little knowledge of the risk.”

Amazon opened Morrow County’s first “hyperscale” data center in 2011 — nearly 10,000 square feet of warehouse space filled with rows of computer servers. The facility services the company’s most profitable division, its cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon’s presence lent Big Tech cachet to the county’s industrial district and diversified its investment portfolio away from a reliance on agriculture. Amazon has generated commercial taxes for the county worth more than $100 million over the course of a decade.

Eager to compete with other rural communities looking to host data center campuses, local officials had offered Amazon a 15-year tax abatement for each hyperscale data center it built, which would be worth billions to the company. Amazon has since constructed seven such facilities in the area, with agreements for five more underway.

There was good reason for Amazon to set itself up in a place like Morrow County. With $107 billion in cloud computing sales in 2024, Amazon Web Services has the dominant position with 30 percent of the market. But the company faces stiff competition from Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and Google. In the third quarter of 2024, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft increased their investment in data centers 81 percent compared to the previous year, per the telecom market researcher Dell’Oro Group, and have already spent $360 billion on capital expenditures over the last 12 months. S&P predicts that demand for new construction is expected to double by 2030, most of it in rural counties like Morrow that are otherwise reliant on agriculture. Around the country, and the world, there is a land race among the big tech companies for sites for their data centers. The stakes of the game are high: A recent Goldman Sachs analysis found AI technology could unlock as much as $5 to $19 trillion for the American economy.

But data centers pose a variety of climate and environmental problems, including their impact on the water supply. The volume of water needed to cool the servers in data centers — most of which need to be kept at 70 to 80 degrees to run effectively — has become a nationwide water resource issue particularly in areas facing water scarcity across the West. This year, a Bloomberg News analysis found that roughly “two-thirds of new data centers built or in development since 2022 are in places already gripped by high levels of water stress.” Droughts have plagued Morrow County, occurring annually since 2020. But even areas with ample water reserves are vulnerable to the outsized demand from data centers. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency reported that data centers could consume 1,200 billion liters by 2030 worldwide, nearly double the 560 billion liters of water they use currently.

The volume of water isn’t the most pressing problem in Morrow County, however. The issue is pollution, which Amazon’s data centers have exacerbated since their arrival.

In response to a request for comment, Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski replied that “the apparent narrative” of this story “is misleading and inaccurate.” Levandowski went on to say: “The truth is that this region has long-documented groundwater quality challenges that significantly predate AWS’ presence, and federal, state, and local agencies have spent years working to address nitrates from agricultural fertilizer, manure, septic systems, and wastewater from food processing plants. Our data centers draw water from the same supply as other community members; nitrates are not an additive we use in any of our processes, and the volume of water our facilities use and return represents only a very small fraction of the overall water system — not enough to have any meaningful impact on water quality.”

Morrow is an unlikely location for an agricultural juggernaut. Essentially desert country, its porous, sandy soil is inhospitable to all but a few types of shallow-root crops. Yet over the last few decades, it was transformed by a group of entrepreneurial local officials and farm operators who leveraged chemical fertilizers to make the desert bloom.

To compensate for the dry conditions and create more capacity for large agricultural operations, vast irrigation systems were built in the 1990s by officials at the Port of Morrow, the county’s transportation and food-processing hub along the bank of the Columbia River. Increased water flow meant large agricultural companies could use fertilizers in fields year-round. That drew some of the Pacific Northwest’s largest dairy concerns and producers of onions and potatoes to Morrow County. Lamb Weston, which supplies virtually all of the potatoes for McDonald’s french fries, set up shop. So did Threemile Canyon Farms, one of the largest dairy operators in the nation.

The massive inputs of fertilizer to grow crops and feed for the animals came at a price: the contamination of the Lower Umatilla Basin. In 1992, DEQ measured an average nitrate concentration of 9.2 ppm across a cluster of wells pulling from the basin. By 2015, that average had risen 46 percent, to 15.3 ppm. For some wells, DEQ found nitrate levels nearly as high as 73 ppm, more than 10 times the state limit of 7 ppm.

Every day, the megafarms and food processing plants in Morrow County send millions of gallons of wastewater to the Port of Morrow. The Port in turn pumps it to one of several lagoons that hold tens or hundreds of millions of gallons of tainted water. Vast pools of this wastewater are covered in football field-sized tarps, which trap the solids that rise to the surface. Microbes metabolize some of the solids, expelling methane gas which then burns out of thin chimney pipes sticking up from the tarps, the flames flickering atop like birthday candles. Once the solid waste has burned off, the water under the tarp is laden with residual nitrogen chemicals — the remains of the fertilizers, animal manure, and plant material. At no cost to farm operators, the Port then pumps that nitrogen-dense water back out onto the farms, where nitrogen turns into nitrates when it interacts with the soil. It is a novel recycling process that alleviates the Port’s wastewater burden and offers farms a steady flow of highly concentrated fertilized water to expand their industrial-ag footprints.

When the Port sprays that water back over the farms, some of the nitrates are absorbed by the crops, but there’s a limit to how much the sandy soil and shallow-root plants can hold before it leaks all the way through the dirt, polluting the aquifer below. “The aquifer is basically one giant sandbox, and the water flows through there very quickly,” says Chad Gubala, a hydrologist who managed Oregon DEQ’s oversight of the Port of Morrow’s wastewater permit from 2018 to 2022. Once the crops have absorbed what they can, the rest of the nitrates “get flushed right through [to the basin].”

Experts say Amazon’s arrival supercharged this process. The data centers suck up tens of millions of gallons of water from the aquifer each year to cool their computer equipment, which then gets funneled to the Port’s wastewater system. All of the data center water gets mixed into the dirty lagoon wastewater, which only increases how much water the Port must then discard over the fields. As Greg Pettit, who served at the DEQ for 38 years and led the development of Oregon’s Groundwater Quality, explains, “the more water you put on, the faster you’re going to drive the nitrogen through the soil and down into the aquifer.”

Gubula is likewise critical of how the Port historically has dealt with the overwhelming volume of wastewater, which included spraying the fields during the cold winter months, even when no crops were planted. “This idea of winter irrigation was the goofiest thing on God’s green earth,” he says. “The farmers and the Port facility folks argued that maintaining irrigation during a non-growing season was a reasonable thing to keep the soil ‘in appropriate condition’ they called it, so it’d be ready for spring seed sowing and early growth. Well, it was functionally a load of shit, a way to maintain year-round discharge of wastewater from their facilities.” (In an Oct. 30 press release, the Port pledged to end the practice this winter. The Port’s executive director, Lisa Mittelsdorf, told Rolling Stone in a statement, “The Port and DEQ have worked together to ban non-growing season land application of industrial wastewater.”)

The nonstop spraying during the winter months helped the Port and Amazon manage the incredible volume of wastewater coming out of the farms and data centers, but it raised alarm bells for DEQ rank-and-file analysts. The winter irrigation practice “provides a significant risk to … to groundwater,” Larry Brown, a DEQ Environmental Health Specialist, wrote in an email in 2023, summarizing concerns he had shared with DEQ administrators a year earlier. “[It] must be phased out as soon as reasonably possible.” The warning signs were ignored.

As the underground aquifer became tainted with more nitrates, even the ostensibly clean water that the Port pulled from the aquifer’s deepest wells — which it used to service its large industrial customers like Amazon — became polluted. Soon, Amazon was using water to cool its data warehouses with nitrates as high as 13 ppm — above the federal and state limits.

When that tainted water moves through the data centers to absorb heat from the server systems, some of the water is evaporated, but the nitrates remain, increasing the concentration. That means that when the polluted water has moved through the data centers and back into the wastewater system, it’s even more contaminated, sometimes averaging as high as 56 ppm, eight times Oregon’s safety limit.

On June 9, 2022, Jim Doherty called a public hearing for the county commission to vote on a state of emergency for the county’s drinking water. As word spread about the meeting, some residents were angry — and not necessarily about the health threat. Many feared an emergency declaration would expose the county to intervention by the Oregon DEQ or the federal Environmental Protection Agency, whose regulators might shut down businesses to halt the contamination.

Local residents and farm managers packed the hearing at the county courthouse in the town of Heppner, with dozens more watching the livestream. “Our legacy will be what we are doing now,” Doherty said of the emergency decree. The county, he argued, needed to unlock emergency funds to buy bottled water for anyone living with tainted wells and provide test kits to the thousands of residents who didn’t yet know if they were drinking polluted water.

Melissa Lindsay was one of Doherty’s fellow county commissioners, elected the same year as him. She said she had reservations about the state of emergency, because it would mean giving broad authority to the governor over resource allocation, emergency services, and communication about the crisis to the public. Doherty disagreed. He had received a phone call from then-Governor Kate Brown a few days earlier, and she’d offered emergency assistance without strings attached. “She did not say they would come run our county,” Doherty said.

That was enough for Lindsay, but not everyone at the meeting was swayed. The agricultural operators who accounted for the $2 billion local economy remained wary. Doherty says one farm manager spent 15 minutes at a second meeting telling him “what a godawful person I was for trying to shut down farming and the local ag industry.”

The tensions laid bare the economic realities of Morrow County, a place where the gap between rich and poor is extreme. Roughly 30 percent of the county lives in mobile homes — the vast majority of which rely on well water — and 40 percent live below the poverty line. Meanwhile, the top 5 percent earn an average income of $374,000, more than 20 times the bottom 20 percent. These farm managers and factory executives tend to live in McMansions scattered around the countryside or in manicured developments in Boardman. In sharp contrast to the potholed gravel roads and slanted bungalows where the workers live, the new developments have freshly paved streets and sidewalks, and they drink and cook with water from city water pipes that go deep into the aquifer, where the water is less concentrated with nitrates — although the contamination levels for even the deepest wells are starting to rise.

At the end of the June 9 meeting, commissioner Lindsay endorsed the declaration — a move that would free up county funds for bottled water and prompt the state to open up its own emergency response coffers. “The safe drinking water of our constituents is  number one,” Lindsay said. Her vote, along with Doherty’s, was enough. The third commissioner, Don Russell, who had worked at the Port before winning a seat on the county board, did not show up to the emergency hearing.

With the initial $250,000 in emergency funds, the county hired water trucks for well users to fill large jugs. Health officials began distributing bilingual flyers that warned wells could be tainted, advising that “residents who have a high level of nitrate in their well water should not boil their water. Boiling does not get rid of nitrate.” By the end of the summer, the county had spent $500,000 addressing the water problem, including additional deliveries of bottled water to residents’ homes. Despite the concern about the state’s involvement, the county received little help from state agencies and lawmakers.

Doherty was particularly upset that Gov. Brown didn’t release a statement supporting the county. He pressured her office about the $4 million in emergency funds he’d requested, but the county only received $881,000 from the state for testing and home water-filtration kits. Doherty suspected that the lobbyists representing Morrow County business interests were working behind the scenes to thwart an aggressive state-level intervention. “That was the mafia mentality at work,” he says. “‘We’re going to take care of it, don’t you worry about it. Just keep it in the family.’” (Former governor Brown declined to directly address these allegations, instead suggesting Rolling Stone file a public records request.)

Other state agencies seemed to fall in line with farm operators’ assertion that this wasn’t much of an emergency, and if it was, the burden of solving the problem lay with the agriculture industry and not the state. “[To] move the needle on reducing contamination to healthy levels…it’s going to take work and creative solutions from farmers, ranchers, homeowners, really anyone who uses water or land in this area,” a DEQ spokesperson said that June.

By September 2022, 248 additional homes had been found to have nitrate levels above the state’s safety limit. At another packed town hall meeting, “county leaders and people with contaminated wells expressed growing frustration at the lack of direct intervention from the state in public testimony,” one local newspaper wrote in its coverage. Despite several invitations, Gov. Brown did not attend, nor did any representatives from DEQ or Oregon Health Authority.

Speaking to the crowd, Doherty emphasized the significance of raising awareness among the worker enclaves. Some immigrants in the area, many of whom are undocumented, were reluctant to seek help. According to several sources with direct knowledge of the incidents, managers at several of the food processing plants and farm operations were telling employees that the emergency declaration was a bad-faith campaign that would endanger their jobs. Gathering at town halls or speaking about the pollution to reporters was tantamount to inviting the shutdown of your place of employment. Doherty tried to counter the disinformation: “We need you. We need you to walk across the street and talk to your neighbor,” he told the crowd. “You need to talk to your friend or, better yet, make a new damn friend, tell them to test their water.”

But as word continued to spread across the county that residents had potentially been drinking contaminated water for years, if not decades, Doherty was besieged with emails, texts, and Facebook messages from concerned residents who encouraged him to fight the pollution. “Out of the kitchen sink is the way we all get our life,” one local wrote to Doherty. “Make it right. You’re the man to do it.”

Another person contacted him who had just moved away. “My husband had kidney cancer in his early 40s. His doctor thought it was due to exposure to herbicides and pesticides. He lost a kidney but he lived,” she wrote. “We had acceptable levels of [toxins in our] drinking water when we first moved there. After my husband’s cancer we realized they went up and up through the years. It’s very sad.”

Some of the larger agriculture operators in the area, including Tillamook Creamery and Lamb Weston, offered financial support to people who needed water. But they stopped short of acknowledging that they might have played a part in the water crisis. (Tillamook did not reply to multiple requests for comment on this story from Rolling Stone. Lamb Weston replied in a statement that “while only a very small percent of nitrates, as confirmed by the Oregon DEQ, are attributable to the land application of food processing water, we are committed to doing our part to protect safe drinking water in the region. Among other actions, we are improving water treatment to reduce the nitrogen content in our process water and taking steps to reduce water use, including the amount of process water ultimately land-applied as irrigation.”)

The Port, which is overseen by the county, issued its own anodyne statement at the time, never conceding any role in the problem. “The Port of Morrow welcomes the County’s emergency declaration on groundwater,” the statement read. “This has been a community issue for decades and it is past time to address the issue on a regional basis. The Port is eager to play its role in finding workable solutions.” Lisa Mittelsdorf, executive director of the Port, said in an email to Rolling Stone that the “DEQ has consistently acknowledged Port operations have had minimal effect on nitrate levels in the basin’s groundwater.” Since 2011 Oregon DEQ has issued more than a thousand violations and more than $3 million in fines against the Port for excessive spraying of nitrate-laden water over farmland.

Amazon pitched in money as well, “to help neighbors, families and workers impacted by the water emergency,” as the company put it in a press release. Behind closed doors, however, members of Amazon’s legal, communications, and AWS teams debated the cost of being associated with the industrial agriculture operators who, in the public imagination at least, were the cause of the pollution.

“Is there any risk in having our name in this, or any reason why we wouldn’t do this?” one staffer wrote, according to a review of hundreds of internal emails obtained through a public records request.

“There is always potential for some risk of affiliation with the causation,” Amazon director of public policy Roger Wehner wrote, though he underscored how the company’s donation would “also offer an opportunity to position AWS [as] an engaged corporate citizen doing good for the community.”

Being seen as an “engaged corporate citizen” would be helpful to Amazon as it negotiated for the next round of multibillion-dollar tax abatements from Morrow County’s business development committee for building out five new data centers. “This is a rare, highly impactful opportunity (could critically help influence $2b incentives) in our 2nd largest region globally. … We simply cannot miss the window given high risk/impact to the business,” AWS economic development principal Hillary Lambert wrote in the email thread.

“Our absence … will be noted not only by the public but also very important stakeholders who 1) hold the keys to $2B of tax abatements currently in negotiation for the business 2) gate keep for key land acquisitions to meet supply needs, and 3) facilitate our permitting and water/fiber infrastructure approvals,” wrote one AWS team member. “All of which are very critical for our continued success.”

Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski characterized the use of these quotes from the emails as “misleading,” adding, “We have been investing and creating jobs in eastern Oregon since before the launch of our data centers there. Any suggestion that our support during this emergency was connected to tax negotiations or regulatory approvals misrepresents the facts — our response was driven by our commitment to the community’s wellbeing.”

Doherty wasn’t surprised by the corporate messaging and philanthropic support by Amazon and the other major industrial players in Morrow County. It was in their interest to curry favor with the public, particularly if it meant they could avoid any commitment to altering the wastewater management practices that continued to exacerbate the crisis.

But it wasn’t just the C-suite executives who were keeping a close eye on Doherty’s emergency declaration. Behind the scenes, powerful local officials were coordinating their own response.

Morrow County’s transformation from a rural backwater into an agricultural powerhouse is, in many ways, the work of a single man. Gary Neal was elected general manager of the Port of Morrow in 1989, when the waterfront terminal was still a modest operation. Built in the 1960s as a rail and shipping hub to distribute the county’s crops and dairy products, it had one dock and only a few food processors.

That’s where Neal came in. Over the course of more than 30 years, utilizing grants and revenue bonds to finance infrastructure investments, Neal built miles of rail track at the Port to ship exports out to the Union Pacific line. Hundreds of acres of land owned by the Port were rezoned for industrial use, hooked up to new water and waste pipes, and powered by substations installed near the Port after Neal lobbied the local utilities. Creating plug-and-play spaces for new industrial tenants allowed Neal to court increasingly larger businesses to sites that had “all the services” they could need, he said during one board meeting. (Neal did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)

Neal also built roads and irrigation systems, constructed fiber optic internet connections for business offices, and expanded a network of pumps and pipes that collected the wastewater from the food and dairy operators. By 2017, the Port was doing $2.8 billion in annual business. In 2019, state lawmakers passed a resolution honoring Neal, noting that when he had taken over the Port “the local economy was in rough shape with high unemployment” and that through his “vision and leadership,” it was now “one of the most productive areas in the State of Oregon.”

Neal’s pumps and pipes were an essential part of the vision. It was Neal who built the massive lagoons that effectively recycled the fertilizer used by the farm and food operators. This created another incentive for industrial expansion, as the wastewater was free in exchange for taking it off the Port’s hands, and it significantly reduced how much farm operators had to spend on fertilizers. “[We] beneficially reuse approximately 3.6 billion gallons per year of industrial wastewater generated by the food processing and other industrial facilities,” the Port wrote in a 2022 statement touting their wastewater program. The chemical-laced water “provides the local farmers with a valuable service,” delivering “nutrient rich wastewater…in this water-deficient region.”

In 1989, Neal took a seat on the Columbia River Enterprise Zone (CREZ), a committee that decides which areas are designated for business development incentives. Handing out tax breaks on the committee made him popular with businesspeople. Major additions to the Port during his tenure included Lamb Weston (the largest frozen potato producer in North America, with a more than $9 billion market cap) and Tillamook Creamery (a $1.2 billion operation that produces 180 million pounds of cheese annually). By the beginning of the 2010s, the Port employed around 8,450 full-time workers, a 36 percent increase from 2006. 

“He took sand and sagebrush and turned it into the second-largest port in the state,” wrote Oregon representative Greg Smith, a co-sponsor of the resolution honoring Neal. Smith had worked with Neal at the Port before his election to the statehouse in 2001. “I don’t think many people would have the foresight like Gary,” said J.R. Cook, an agriculture industry consultant, when he spoke to the county commission about how Neal utilized his zoning authority. “Looking back on it now, it was a stroke of genius.”

Neal developed a reputation as an adept bureaucratic salesman, but one with a sometimes combative style. “It became widely known that you didn’t speak out against Gary or anyone on his committees,” says Jim Doherty. “Folks out here started to call them the mafia. He wanted to build up the Port and do his deals, and by and large he did them. If he needed approval from the state to build pipes under the highway, or whatever it was, he’d rather do the crime and pay the fine before he wasted the time and effort to go through the proper channels. That was his mindset.”

Those tactics became apparent in the deals to expand Amazon’s data centers. Amazon initially came to the county in 2008, three years before it opened its first data center. The company agreed to pay $1.6 million for 80 acres along the Port’s waterfront on the condition that no one involved in the deal could publicly acknowledge Amazon’s involvement, according to Don Russell, who was on the county commission at the time. (Amazon spokesperson Levandowski called the company’s use of nondisclosure agreements “an industry-wide common practice.” Russell did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Using strict nondisclosure agreements, Amazon required Neal, who effectively led negotiations with the tech giant, and his colleagues, to refer publicly to the Silicon Valley giant as VAData, a holding company. Jerry Healy, a Port commissioner involved in the deal, would later tell an investigator at the Oregon Ethics Commission that no one was “permitted to use the word Amazon.” (Healy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) But it wasn’t long before news of Morrow County landing business with one of the world’s largest companies leaked out. “Everyone knew who they were,” Healy said.

By the time the first data center opened in 2011, Neal and his team were already lobbying state legislators for better tax incentive packages that would benefit Amazon. In 2015, those efforts bore fruit: The state passed Senate Bill 611, which exempted data centers from central assessment taxation. Amazon state public policy adviser Eileen Sullivan testified before the Oregon Senate Committee on Finance and Revenue that the bill made it possible for the company to build at least 11 new data centers. “It goes back to jobs and stability,” Neal told reporters. “This helps us round out our economy.”

In 2017, with these new tax breaks in his pocket, Neal began negotiating with Amazon in secret CREZ executive sessions to bring in five more data centers that were each worth $1.9 billion, with footprints twice or triple the size of the first. The tax abatement rules would allow the county, the Port of Morrow, and the city of Boardman to trade tax abatements worth between $1 and $2 billion to the tech giant over the next 15 years.

The question was what the county would get in exchange for that trade. As the negotiations got underway, Melissa Lindsay joined Jim Doherty as a freshman board member on the County Commission. A fourth-generation farmer with 12,000 acres of rolling hills about 25 miles south of the Port, Lindsay was aware of Neal’s success on the waterfront. “The economy that he essentially created here brought him a lot of power and respect,” she tells me.

She’d been eager to work with Neal on the CREZ committee that was in talks with Amazon. Her goal was to win commitments from the company to provide funds for the school district and emergency services in exchange for the tax breaks. But in CREZ meetings — which along with the three county commissioners included the elected leaders of the city of Boardman, plus Neal and his deputies, who’d been appointed to their roles by the elected Port commissioners — she was struck by how deferential everyone was toward Neal, and seemingly supportive of every one of his ideas and decisions. “He came across as this steward of the county,” Lindsay says. 

With everyone following Neal’s lead, Lindsay realized that other than her and Doherty, no one was interested in wringing much out of Amazon. The deal, it seemed to Lindsay, was already done, and Amazon would give up little to secure the tax abatements.

Lindsay raised her concerns with Marv Padberg, a commissioner working under Neal at the Port. According to Lindsay, Padberg urged her to avoid meddling and let Neal and his team work with Amazon behind closed doors. “Melissa, you just need to figure out the easy button,” she says Padberg told her. (Padberg did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Lindsay says she also spoke to Sandy Toms, the mayor of Boardman, who represented the city on the enterprise committee and who frequently made the first or second motion for Neal’s proposals. Toms, Lindsay says, brushed off her concerns. (Toms died in 2024.)

“I kept pointing out that we’re negotiating billions of dollars,” Lindsay says. “But I was just laughed at, or accused of being jealous, or described as being hard to work with.”

She noted that her attempts to bring in outside financial advisers or attorneys to negotiate on behalf of the committee were dismissed as unnecessary. Eventually, she was no longer included in talks about the deal with Amazon. That year, Amazon broke ground on the first of the five data centers, a 200,000-square-foot facility with the energy demand equivalent of 30,000 homes and a 15-year tax abatement worth nearly $200 million.

In 2018, after 29 years as the Port director, Gary Neal stepped down. His son, Ryan, was chosen by the elected members of the Port commission as his successor — a selection process that included Gary’s input on potential candidates, according to sources familiar with the appointment. Gary stayed on with the Port as an informal advisor, frequently traveling with his son to meetings with representatives of Amazon and other industrial clients. (Ryan Neal died of Covid complications in 2022 and was succeeded by Lisa Mittelsdorf.)

Melissa Lindsay, for her part, could never understand why Neal was so willing to give in to Amazon’s demands. “It was brutal to watch how we got nothing for it,” she says of the deals. “But you couldn’t stop it. No matter what idea you brought up for a better deal, you were met with extreme pushback.”

In 2008, Pat Lauritsen moved to Heppner from Tri-Cities, Washington, to join a struggling fiber optic company called Windwave. An experienced telecom salesperson, Lauritsen would eventually take over Windwave’s operation as CEO to “try to make money with the company instead of just losing it all the time,” she says.

Some of those losses were born of Windwave’s unusual corporate structure. Windwave was a for-profit subsidiary of a nonprofit called Inland Development Corporation. Inland’s mission was to provide much-needed fiber optic internet to remote rural hospitals and schools, which didn’t pay well; Windwave was a commercial pursuit, hooking up internet to industrial clients and private businesses in eastern Oregon. But for years after Windwave was founded in 2004, the profits didn’t materialize.

Lauritsen answered to two distinct boards of directors that shared several members and largely functioned as one oversight body. The board members — who included Gary Neal, Don Russell, Jerry Healy, and Marv Padberg — always seemed skeptical that Windwave would survive. “Gary Neal at every board meeting told me that it’d be a zillion years before we’d become a viable company,” Lauritsen says. “They didn’t expect that we would ever make it.”

None of the board members had experience in commercial telecom. Instead, they’d been selected by Lauritsen’s predecessor for their influence in the region’s agriculture-dominated industry. “I don’t know a thing about putting fiber in the ground,” Healy, who had served on the Port commission since 1994, later told an investigator from the Oregon Ethics Commission. He said that Neal and the other board members focused instead on “financial performance, income statements, balance sheets, cash flows, [and] to set policy.” Often, at board meetings, the public officials would evaluate the real estate tied to fiber optic projects for potential disposal of the Port’s wastewater. “Right from the beginning I thought, ‘Oh, this doesn’t look good,’” Lauritsen says.

In 2010, Amazon signed a nearly million-dollar deal with Windwave to install and service miles of underground fiber optic lines for its first data center. Suddenly, Lauritsen noticed, the board members viewed Windwave in a new light. “When we turned the corner and were making a real profit, Don Russell said to the board, ‘Oh man, we need to look at this, there might actually be some money in the company.’”

For Amazon, there was terrific efficiency to doing business in Morrow County. Gary Neal and his fellow public officials negotiated lucrative tax breaks for new data centers from their positions on the CREZ board, while at the same time Neal and the others oversaw Windwave’s board of directors, hammering out what would become dozens of contracts as Amazon’s primary fiber optic service provider. Likewise, in his role as the general manager of the Port, Neal ensured that Amazon had no problem dispensing with tens of millions of gallons of its nitrate-laced wastewater. Morrow County, it seemed, had become a one-stop shop for Amazon’s data centers. (Amazon spokesperson Levandowski told Rolling Stone, “We work with local officials in their official capacities as representatives of their communities and jurisdictions. Economic development discussions, utility planning, and infrastructure services are handled through standard procurement and regulatory processes with appropriate oversight and transparency.”)

Lauritsen says she wasn’t aware that members of the Windwave board were negotiating tax breaks with Amazon or managing the data center wastewater as they were making deals for Windwave fiber optic. She was too busy working 60-hour weeks trying to install enough underground concrete vaults and wire conduits to keep up with the demand from the Amazon campuses. Indeed, according to Lindsay, much of Amazon’s dealings with Morrow County officials were kept secret, with those officials often citing NDAs with Amazon as a pretext to move public discussions into private executive sessions.

In 2016, Gary Neal and his associates embarked on a campaign that would transform Windwave and line their own pockets: an effort to spin off Windwave from Inland and set it up as a stand-alone company — with Neal and the other officials as owners and equal partners. Lauritsen assumed the idea was Neal’s: “No decision was ever made that Gary didn’t say what he thought first and then the other ones would follow suit,” she says.

Lauritsen says she was the only member of the Windwave board who objected to slicing up the company into equal portions shared by Neal, Healy, Padberg, Russell, and Blake Lawrence, another board member who’d helped Lauritsen manage construction. (Lawrence did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) She suggested instead that it should be an employee-owned operation as a reward for the loyal crew that had spent years building the fiber optic network that became the backbone of Amazon’s data center enterprise. “I thought they deserved to have that money go to their 401k’s and not to the board members who didn’t even believe in the company,” she says. “I asked Gary why did he think that they deserved to have the company and the money it would make, and his comment back to me was, ‘They got their wages, didn’t they?’”

The tension between Lauritsen and the other board members sharpened as she declined an offer to join them as a part owner. “The Inland papers of incorporation write it out fairly clear at the top: No board member is allowed to make or do anything with the company for personal profit,” she says. The hostilities weren’t always subtle, with Padberg at one point warning her to “be careful,” she recalls, which she took as a threat. (Padberg did not respond to requests for comment.) Lauritsen resigned from Windwave in 2017; Lawrence replaced her as CEO, and the five men completed the buyout of the company in May 2018.

News of their financial maneuvering did eventually come to light. An explosive investigation published by The Oregonian in September 2022 accused Amazon of “benefiting mightily from the deals it cut with local officials.” The article quoted Lindsay and Doherty. “Incentives were given,” Lindsay said. “It wasn’t always clear what other benefits people at the table might be receiving.” Doherty alleged that Neal and the others had been “working these deals behind the scenes…[setting] themselves up for a windfall.” (An attorney for Neal submitted a letter to the Oregon Ethics Commission claiming Neal recused himself from two discussions of Amazon business and that “all the objective information…demonstrates that no offense or violation occurred during the period at issue.” Russell told The Oregonian that his investment in Windwave was his “private business” and defended his approval of tax breaks for Amazon based on the company’s economic contributions to the region.)

There was no accountability for anyone involved until this past July, when Oregon’s Attorney General Dan Rayfield sued the men (and three “disinterested directors” recruited by the owners to approve the sale from the Inland board) in circuit court, alleging that these “established community leaders” had “abused their authority and breached the public trust for their personal financial gain.” In a press release announcing the lawsuit, Rayfield said “this nonprofit was created to connect eastern Oregon communities — not to quietly enrich a handful of officials behind closed doors.”       

In the lawsuit, Rayfield describes in detail how Neal and the others went about taking Windwave. Their first step was to arrange for a sale price that was well under the actual value of the company. To do that, “the Insiders” — which is how Rayfield described Neal, Healy, Padberg, and Russell — had to get around the Cogence Group, a financial forensics and business valuation firm, which was brought in to conduct a valuation of Windwave.

According to Rayfield, the men did this by withholding important financial information about Windwave, namely the lucrative deals they were negotiating with Amazon Web Services. Without that information, Cogence put Windwave’s fair market value at $1.8 million. But Windwave’s new owners knew the company’s value was about to soar, thanks to the Amazon contracts in the pipeline.

In March 2018, a change in federal tax law led Cogence to increase Windwave’s valuation to $2.6 million. The board members purchased Windwave at that price two months later. But that figure was still far below the firm’s actual value. The AG estimated that at the time Windwave was worth “at least $9.5 million.” All told, they’d reaped $6.9 million in savings by keeping information from Cogence.

But these insiders did more than just hide the company’s value, according to Rayfield. They also ignored the advice of Inland’s attorneys to seek what’s called a “fairness opinion” before the purchase, to ensure an organization is treated fairly by its directors. And they used their seats on the board to approve two loans to themselves from Inland’s nonprofit coffers to cover the entire $2.6 purchase price. What’s more, those loans, according to the AG, had “sub-market interest rates [that] required a one-time balloon payment of the loan’s balance after five years.”

The sale of Windwave did not end its financial relationship with Inland — it sweetened it. Inland hired Windwave to continue “its charitable mission of serving rural Oregonians” with fiber optic connections for “schools, libraries, hospitals, courts, law enforcement, and veteran’s services.” Only now Inland would have to pay Windwave $200,000 a year over the next five years, ensuring another million-dollar stream of revenue beyond the Amazon data centers. (Windwave later almost doubled the fees it charged its former parent company, earning $350,000 from Inland in 2019, according to the nonprofit’s IRS filings.) Before the sale was complete, Healy sought one final concession, massaging the terms of the sub-market loan so that Windwave wouldn’t have to repay the balloon payment “for at least another 5 years,” according to emails cited in Rayfield’s filing.

The sequence of events is complex, but worth summarizing for its audacity. Gary Neal and his partners wrested control of Windwave from its nonprofit parent and sold it to themselves, hiding insider knowledge of lucrative deals with Amazon to keep the price low. They financed the purchase from Inland with money from Inland itself, with below-market loan terms, and made sure that Inland continued to pay them for fiber optic services. They also ensured that they wouldn’t have to pay that money back to Inland for a decade, even as they made millions as Windwave’s new owners.

The AG’s civil suit seeks a minimum of $6.9 million in damages from Neal and the other Windwave owners, the difference between the falsely undervalued original sale price and the actual estimated value at the time. It also seeks to void the sale itself and return Windwave to Inland. “It’s incredibly clear that their motivations were based on profit, and they were willing to use insider information to facilitate their desire to make money,” Rayfield says. “These were elected officials, people in positions of trust in the community, who were cutting deals with Amazon. At the same time, they knew those deals they were sitting on would cause the profits of this company they wanted to purchase to explode.”

News of the lawsuit ripped through Morrow County in July. Many residents were outraged, and relieved that powerful public officials were finally being held to account for at least some of their misdeeds, even if it wasn’t for the water pollution. On local Facebook groups, commenters expressed disgust at “the cloud of corruption and exploitation behind it all,” as one person wrote. “They were sitting on boards and commissions meant to represent the public while secretly enriching themselves — using insider knowledge of Amazon’s data center expansion that was never shared with the public.” Another person wrote, “Justice rides a slow horse, but it does eventually arrive.”

Rayfield has not ruled out the possibility of pressing criminal charges, including fraud, if the evidence he uncovers during discovery can be pursued under existing statutes of limitations. He’s also left open the possibility that he could add Amazon as a defendant to the civil suit. “Amazon was benefiting from the business deals they were getting,” he told The Oregonian. “It created an economic incentive to be in the area. They chose to make those internal business decisions and be in the community based upon those things.” (In September, attorneys for the Windwave defendants sought to have the suit dismissed, citing in part the state’s approval of the sale of Windwave; days later the attorney amended that motion, acknowledging that Windwave board members had not been transparent about their forthcoming business with Amazon while the deal was underway.)

When reports of the Windwave deal reached Melissa Lindsay, her confusion over Neal’s softball negotiating tactics with Amazon disappeared. “They literally gave up taxpayer money for the sake of putting money into their own pockets. They knew from the get-go how big Amazon would become in Morrow County,” she says. “They knew it, they planned for it, and they watched it all happen. It’s wild.”

Melissa Lindsay and Jim Doherty would pay a stiff price for speaking out publicly against Neal and the Windwave owners in their dealings with Amazon. In October 2022, a month after The Oregonian investigation was published, several of Neal’s longtime political allies launched a recall campaign against both commissioners. Annetta Spicer, a former district attorney in Morrow County and a longtime associate of Neal, filed the petition. She framed Doherty’s efforts around the water emergency as a way to gain votes among the area’s Latino voters. (Spicer did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) “I don’t have a problem with the Hispanic citizens being treated appropriately,” she told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “But [Doherty is] not following through and solving the problem for them.”

Public officials and business leaders with close ties to Neal and his Windwave partners supported the recall campaign, with aggressive attacks at public events and on social media against Doherty and Lindsay’s character and motives. The campaign corresponded with decreased sales for Doherty’s cattle business. Lindsay says, “It was horrible for myself and my family. It was very painful. They’d gotten away with it for so long. They thought they were untouchable — and they were.”

In November 2022, the votes were cast. The 165- and 21-vote margins against Doherty and Lindsay, respectively, were enough to remove them from the county commission, effective immediately.

Doherty and Lindsay weren’t the only ones facing consequences for their actions. With the two commissioners out of office, the advocacy group Oregon Rural Action stepped up its efforts to lobby Oregon lawmakers and Brown’s successor, Governor Tina Kotek, to intervene in Morrow County. In November 2023, they hosted a group of state representatives for a tour of homes where wells had nitrate levels as high as 45 ppm.

During the tour, Kaleb Lay, ORA’s research and policy director, said one of his colleagues got a call that his truck was on fire. The ORA member rushed to the vehicle and discovered it torched. Flyers explaining how residents could receive free nitrate tests had been removed from the truck and ripped up, lying in pieces on the street just a few feet away.

The fire department — some of whose members had publicly griped about Doherty and Lindsay — initially suggested the fire was an act of arson, with one firefighter stating so via the company’s dispatch and later noting the presence of turpentine, a flammable solvent. But the fire marshal, Marty Broadbent, told me in November the arson designation “was an internal glitch on our part  . . . something you should never say on the radio.” The identification of turpentine, he said, was also a mistake. He attributed both errors “to one of the firefighters who didn’t have any fire investigation skills,” adding, “We’ve since changed our protocol.” Ultimately, the department ruled the fire an accident and closed its investigation. 

In November 2024, I sat down with a woman named Kathy Mendoza at her home in Boardman. She’d prepared a plate of cookies she baked that morning, set atop the red tablecloth of her dining room table. With us were members of ORA. Mendoza is 71 years old and had worked for the county’s workforce development program for 36 years. She said she’d been forced to retire in 2019 due to a debilitating joint and muscle condition that she believes was caused by exposure to nitrates. “When Jim declared the emergency, I told him I’d been sick for the last three years, and he came out the next day and got my water tested and it was 50.9 ppm. This summer it’s up to 55.7 ppm,” she said. “If it wasn’t for these people here,” she added, referring to ORA, “and Jim Doherty exposing it all, I don’t know that we would ever have been told.”

Mendoza relies on a biweekly water delivery of five five-gallon jugs for cooking all her meals and to drink. Every eight weeks she goes for an infusion of drugs that calms her inflamed immune system. “How can you live with yourself knowing that the water you put in people’s houses is causing miscarriages or cancer, or God only knows how it stunts the growth of a kid? How could they do that? Then these people go out and show their faces in public. And they’re still making money with it, every time those deals get cut for new data centers.”

“There are so many bad actors all at once,” says Lay. “Each of these polluters bears direct responsibility for the pollution that they’re putting out there and they should be held responsible. But also, at some point, you got to blame the cop for not pulling someone over for speeding every day of their lives for the last 34 years. Every one of these agencies, from the DEQ to the Oregon Department of Agriculture, they all have regulatory authority and they haven’t used it.”

In April 2024, the DEQ hit the Port of Morrow with a $727,000 fine for 880 permit violations incurred for spraying excess contaminated water over winter fields between November 2023 and February 2024. But the Port carried on with its winter application until its announcement this fall that it would suspend the practice. “There is no alternative short of closing processing plants,” Port director Lisa Mittelsdorf told a reporter last January.

The Port has pursued several strategies to mitigate the water crisis, including the purchase of a 5,300-acre dairy farm last year to expand its wastewater dumping. The DEQ allowed the Port to modify its permit in October 2024 to proceed with winter application on the new property, but the crop farmer who still holds a lease on the land from the previous owner had not granted the Port the permission it required to spray on the fields.

In December 2024, the Port gave the governor’s office a dramatic ultimatum: If the governor didn’t step in with an emergency order suspending the DEQ from levying fines for the illegal dumping of contaminated water during the winter season, the Port would stop accepting wastewater from industrial operators. Citing concerns that the move would lead to “furloughs of potentially thousands of workers resulting in substantial economic harm to the region and the State of Oregon,” the governor granted the Port’s request, allowing it to spray contaminated water without fines for a six-week period starting in January 2025. “We must balance protecting thousands of jobs in the region, the national food supply, and domestic well users during this short period of time,” Gov. Kotek explained afterward in a statement.

The Port is now waiting for approval of a $432 million federal grant that could allow the construction of additional wastewater storage as well as new facilities to eventually reduce wastewater nitrate levels. Meanwhile, Amazon has been paying the Port to help offset the expensive burden of its permit violations and making contributions to the community, including $850,000 to the SAGE Center, a local museum that features an Amazon learning environment called the AWS Think Big Space.

Since the public declaration of the water emergency in 2022, a growing number of residents in Morrow County have become frustrated at a lack of accountability. The attorney general’s lawsuit was a step in the right direction, many locals feel, but it was about fiscal self-dealing, not the water that created the opportunity for those actions. In 2024, before the AG suit, investigators from the Oregon Ethics Commission recommended that Neal, Padberg, Healy, and Russell be penalized for failing to disclose their conflicts of interest while negotiating Amazon transactions on behalf of the public. The penalty for the men was $2,000 each, although that did not include Neal. Commission rules limit the scope of any inquiry to the four years prior to the investigation’s opening — which in this case stemmed from a whistleblower complaint. This meant that all but a few months of Neal’s tenure at Windwave and the Port fell outside the ethics panel’s inquiry.

Still, staff investigators stated that they found an October 2018 meeting discussing Amazon’s tax break deal that appeared to warrant Neal being sanctioned. It was during that meeting where “Neal may have engaged in a prohibited use of position and may have failed to disclose his conflicts of interest,” the commission investigators found in their preliminary review. In the end, however, the ethics board overruled its staff and rejected its own investigators’ findings, on the grounds that Neal didn’t substantially influence the meeting about Amazon, as they wrote in a report. Amazon and the new owners of Windwave were able to continue operating as before.

That could all change, however, because of an attorney in Seattle named Steve Berman. A class action specialist, Berman rose to prominence in the 1990s during the landmark big tobacco lawsuits by winning the largest single settlement of those suits ($260 billion) on behalf of a consortium of states, and more recently as the lead attorney on behalf of NCAA athletes who can now make money off their own names and likeness competing in college sports.

In February 2024, representing a group of six Morrow County residents, Berman filed a federal suit against the Port of Morrow, Lamb Weston, and three other large agriculture operators for their role in causing and perpetuating the region’s water crisis. Berman tells me that on Dec. 1 he will add Tillamook and Portland General Electric, a local utility, to the list of defendants. (A representative for PG&E confirmed the utility received “a notice of intent to sue” and added that the water used “at its Coyote Springs plant [is] for non-contact cooling operations and does not add nitrates to the water supplied by the Port of Morrow.”) Crucially, Berman’s suit also lists unnamed John Doe defendants, which several sources close to the case believe to be a placeholder for Berman’s biggest target: Amazon.

On March 7, 2024, Berman and his local co-counsel, Michael Bliven, sent what’s known as an RCRA Notice, a reference to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, to Amazon. Such notices warn of a pending civil lawsuit and offer potential defendants the opportunity to remediate harm within a given timeframe. Berman and Bliven’s RCRA Notice demanded that Amazon “immediately cease all improper storage, transferring, and disposal of the hazardous industrial wastewater and to remediate the harm your company has caused” within 90 days. Berman says Amazon took no action.

(When asked about the RCRA Notice, Amazon referred Rolling Stone to its original response to this story. The company stressed in that response that its data centers do not add nitrates to the water supply and touted its job creation and an investment of “$39.2 billion in the community since 2011.”)

“It’s considered a basic civic right in the U.S. that the water you drink from your wells or that you get from your town should be clean and not contaminated,” Berman says. “And that right is currently being violated here.”

Should Berman include Amazon, it would seem to be in the company’s best interest to hammer out a pretrial settlement, if only as a strategy to contain the public relations blowback that would result from a lengthy, high-profile class action trial. Weeks of media coverage unpacking the data center public health threat would complicate matters for Amazon as it continues its aggressive rollout of new data centers in rural farming communities across the country. Amazon’s connections to Windwave only make the situation more acute: Their representatives engaged in negotiations with public officials in violation of state ethics rules while at the same time paying millions of dollars to a company whose officials are now being sued by the state attorney general.

A week before the Oregon attorney general filed the Windwave complaint, I heard from sources in Boardman who are close to Berman’s case. They had been told that Berman’s office was in advanced talks with Amazon to settle for $100 million before a trial begins.

When I spoke to Berman earlier this month, I asked him if Amazon was seeking a settlement. Berman demurred on the record, saying that he could not comment on any negotiations or discussions with current or past defendants while the case was still pending. Amazon did not respond directly to questions about a pending settlement. Should a settlement be in the final stages, the court would issue sealed orders for a federal settlement judge to oversee private hearings for the terms of the deal, a process that could take several months, at which point the court’s findings and all of the submitted evidence would be released to the public.

“The people whose rights are being violated don’t have a lot of power, and the people responsible for the pollution are huge mega corporations with a lot of power,” Berman says. “And they’ve been getting away with this for decades now.”

A legal outcome would provide a measure of relief for Morrow County. But some damage is hard to undo.

Situated on 40 acres along a long, quiet blacktop road, Jim Doherty’s ranch home, where he lives with his wife, Kelly, has windows looking out to the pasture where their cattle graze. The Dohertys are in close proximity to dozens of properties with tainted wells. When I visited in November 2024, it had been more than a year since the Dohertys’ water had tested “hot,” as Jim described the contamination. Still, Kelly periodically dunks a rapid-test strip in her morning coffee just to be safe. “There’s 14 people that live on my road,” Kelly says. “I think nine of them have cancer right now.”

The Dohertys’ son, Bryce, lives a few miles away. He and his wife bought their land in 2018, built a new house, and drilled a well that hadn’t tested positive for nitrate contamination at the time they moved in. They were eager to start a family. But two years after moving in, they suffered a miscarriage. When that happened, Kelly says, she told Bryce to have their water checked. “And he’s like, ‘Mom, we just built the place, it’s all undetectable,’” she recalls. “I told him, ‘Bryce, check the goddamn water.’ Finally, he tested it. It came back 27 ppm, nearly four times the Oregon limit.

“They feel guilty that they might have lost that baby because they didn’t go back and check the water,” she says.  “I told him look, you didn’t know. No one knew.”

This article was produced in collaboration with WWNO’s Sea Change podcast. It may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact info@thefern.org.

The world now eats more farmed seafood than we eat from the wild ocean. That’s turned farming fish into a massive business, one that American consumers have benefited from. We get the vast majority of our seafood from overseas, at cheap prices — and about half of what we import is farmed. But here in the U.S., we have very few fish farms. Now, though, that might start to change. There are proposals to build massive fish farms in U.S. federal waters. And the Gulf of Mexico is where some of the early action is unfolding. In the first of two episodes on the future of seafood farming in the Gulf, reporter Boyce Upholt explores how the shift from wild-caught to farmed is affecting the connection residents of the region have with the ocean. What will these new, offshore fish farms look like? And how should those who love the Gulf, and want to eat fish in a way that’s healthy for themselves and environment, feel about them?

This article was produced in collaboration with Radio Café’s podcast Down to Earth. It may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact info@thefern.org.

In this postscript to FERN’s special issue of High Country News, Food and Power in the West, Mary-Charlotte Domandi, host of Radio Café’s Down to Earth podcast, goes deep with writers Rick Bass and Laureli Ivanoff about their essays in the special issue. Domandi also gets the issue’s backstory from HCN Editor-in-Chief, Jennifer Sahn. Be sure to check out all the Food and Power extras on our YouTube channel @FERNnews, and at REAP/SOW, the home for all of FERN’s audio.

When we released this story, as a podcast and text feature, back in February, President Trump was threatening to rescind Temporary Protective Status (TPS) for more than 200,000 Haitians working in the U.S., and force them to return to Haiti, which has been consumed by gang violence and instability. FERN senior editor Ted Genoways investigated how JBS, the world’s largest meat producer, had come to rely heavily on those Haitian migrants and other refugees—a vulnerable but legal workforce—at its plant in Greeley, Colorado. His reporting shined a light on a burgeoning food economy in the United States, one that is shifting away from undocumented labor and relying on immigrant workers with legal, but often tenuous, status.

Despite a series of legal challenges, TPS for Haitians is now set to expire in February 2026, and JBS has already begun firing workers—as many as 400 in the last nine months, according to union officials. In this podcast update, produced in partnership with Reveal, Genoways describes a scramble by some Haitian workers to remain in the country, and JBS’s efforts to replace them with Somali refugees, a population whose TBS status is still active.