Up to 80% of women farmworkers experience sexual harassment in the fields, but reports have collapsed under the current administration because workers fear that contacting the EEOC will trigger deportation

Field surveys by Human Rights Watch, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and UC Santa Cruz consistently find that 80% or more of women crop workers have experienced some form of sexual harassment, ranging from verbal abuse and groping to rape. Women who are younger, indigenous, or on precarious visa status are the most vulnerable. The harassment typically comes from supervisors and crew leaders who control work assignments, hours, and — for H-2A workers — visa status. The fields are isolated. There are no witnesses who are not also dependent on the same supervisor for their livelihood. The problem has gotten measurably worse since January 2025. The Northwest Justice Project, which handles farmworker harassment cases in Washington state, recorded 16 cases in 2024 and 21 in 2023. In the first half of 2025, they recorded just two. The cases did not disappear because harassment stopped. They disappeared because farmworkers are terrified that contacting any government agency — including the EEOC, which handles employment discrimination — will draw the attention of immigration enforcement. Witnesses refuse to come forward. Workers endure abuse in silence rather than risk deportation. The downstream effect is that sexual predators in agricultural supervisory roles now operate with near-total impunity. When a crew leader knows that no worker will file a complaint, the deterrent effect of law enforcement vanishes entirely. This does not just harm the individual victim; it poisons the entire labor market. Women who would otherwise enter the agricultural workforce choose other options, exacerbating the labor shortage that growers already struggle with. This persists because the enforcement infrastructure requires the victim to come forward, and the victim rationally calculates that the personal cost of reporting exceeds the personal benefit. State laws protect everyone from sexual harassment regardless of immigration status, but a law on paper means nothing when the worker believes — reasonably, given current enforcement rhetoric — that interacting with any government office could end with ICE at their door. The structural fix would be a firewall between labor enforcement agencies and immigration enforcement, but no such firewall exists at the federal level.