In Idaho, Those Who Voted for Him Fear for Their Farms - The Rethinking Begins …

A survey from Idaho, where two out of three voted for him, shows a broad majority against the raids and in favor of a path to legal status. While the government pushes nearly three million people out and the fields begin to empty, even its own people are saying no.

In Trump’s second term, the country has seen mass deportations and a tightening of immigration enforcement unlike anything in decades. The Department of Homeland Security says the crackdown drove nearly three million people out of the country in the first year of his return. For the first time since the 1960s, the number of immigrants living in the United States is shrinking, and because most field workers are foreign born, farms feel it first. Eighty six percent of the nation’s field workers are foreign born, forty five percent without papers. The government announced in 2025 that farms would not be targeted, and yet workers hardly dare show up anymore. Between March and July of that same year, agricultural employment fell by seven percent, and farms reported labor shortages in states that voted for Trump, such as Pennsylvania, and in states that did not, such as California. The fear that appears on no household ledger has become the real policy, and it threatens the country’s food supply.

Idaho’s hard right Republicans suffer heavy losses in the primaries.

Across the country, support is beginning to crack. The Pew Research Center reports that half of respondents oppose the government’s course on immigration, and more than half say Trump is doing too much on deportations. Among Republicans, the share is smaller, twenty percent, but it is growing. Idaho is the clearest test case. Agriculture accounts for twenty percent of the state’s annual economic output, and dairy is its foundation, because Idaho is the fourth largest dairy producer in the country, and nine out of ten workers in its dairies are foreign born. At the same time, it is deeply red, around sixty percent of voters are registered Republicans, and sixty seven percent voted for Trump in 2024. Nowhere is it easier to see how national rhetoric and stricter enforcement collide with those who have the most to lose.

“Federal cuts are also hitting food assistance recipients in Idaho — and the farmers who feed them. The mood is slowly but steadily beginning to shift.”

The eleventh annual Idaho Public Policy Survey, conducted by social scientists at Boise State University, surveyed one thousand adults in the fall of 2025. Because immigrants commit crimes less often than people born in the country, the question focused on long term residents without criminal records, on dairy workers and their families who had lived in Idaho for more than ten years. The result was unmistakable, eighty five percent supported a path to legal work status, fifty six strongly and twenty nine moderately, only nine percent opposed it. And the finding cut across party lines, seventy nine percent of Republicans supported it, eighty eight percent of independents, and ninety five percent of Democrats.

When asked whether a stronger presence of ICE would help or hurt Idaho agriculture, fifty three percent said it would hurt, nineteen said it would help, eighteen saw no effect, and ten were unsure. The strongest judgment came where it mattered most, in the areas that live from agriculture. Republicans were more likely than others to say ICE helps, and yet only thirty five percent of them said so, compared with eleven percent of independents and fewer than three percent of Democrats.

There is a distance between the word immigrant as it appears in speeches and the man milking cows before sunrise. In the word, an enemy can be invented. In the man, it cannot. What the survey from the reddest agricultural state shows is not that people have changed their politics, but that they know the neighbor the politics wants to drive out. A government that pushes nearly three million people out and empties the fields is acting here against the stated will of the people who elected it, and it continues to do so. That is the disturbing part, not that power is harsh, it often has been, but that it remains deaf to those in whose name it claims to speak, and blind to the person who puts bread on the table.