Topline:

Los Angeles County is giving away free laptops to eligible residents who complete at least eight hours of digital skills classes (while supplies last) through its new Learn Basic Tech program. It’s part of an effort to close the digital divide in L.A. and get more people online. Residents can choose from more than two dozen online courses or in-person trainings.

Why it matters: There’s a growing movement for the internet to be recognized as an essential public utility, like electricity or water. But some Angelenos don’t know how to start a computer, let alone navigate the internet. That’s why the county is targeting areas where more than 20% of households lack broadband service.

Why now: The county received a $3.3 million state grant to train 7,500 people. Eligible residents who complete eight hours of digital skills training by Dec. 13 will be entered for a chance to win a free laptop. Eligibility is based on need. There’s a limit of one laptop per household, according to the program’s website.

On January 7, 2025, a series of wildfires broke out across Los Angeles County, exacerbated by severe Santa Ana winds, drought conditions, and the buildup of vegetation from the previous winter. The most devastating among these were the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades and the Eaton Fire in Altadena. These fires collectively destroyed over 18,000 structures, including homes, schools, and businesses, and led to the evacuation of more than 200,000 residents. The fires resulted in at least 30 fatalities and caused an estimated $52.5 billion in damages.

The fires, which burned over 50,000 acres and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, inflicted a severe toll on the region’s cultural heritage. Among the historic sites lost are the Will Rogers Ranch House, a 31-room property listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Pasadena Jewish Temple & Center, a long-standing religious and cultural landmark in the region.

The L.A. Conservancy jumped into action and began collaborating with local partners to aid in recovery efforts that honor and preserve the communities’ histories, culture, and sense of place.

It has been eerily easy to find street parking in Los Angeles’s fashion district this week. In the nearby flower district, longtime vendors have locked up stalls. And in East LA, popular taquerías have temporarily closed.

Neighborhoods across LA and southern California have gone quiet since the Trump administration ramped up immigration raids in the region two weeks ago.

The aggressive arrests by federal agents have ignited roaring protests which the administration tried to quell by mobilizing thousands of national guard troops. Last weekend, Americans protested the raids and other administration policies in one of the biggest ever single-day demonstrations in US history. But immigration enforcement in LA has only intensified.

In downtown Los Angeles, Lindsay Toczylowski, the executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) was alerted on Wednesday morning that federal agents in masks and bulletproof vests had ambushed a man who was biking down the street, not far from her office, and had arrested him.

She and a colleague rushed outside, to see if the agents were targeting anyone else. Later, they puzzled over how and why agents had decided to target this man. Did they have a warrant? Did they even know who he was? Or was it just that he looked like he could be an immigrant.

“It feels so invasive. They’re everywhere,” she said.

It was the type of arrest that has immigrants across the region weighing if, and when, it will be safe to go outside.

In LA’s Koreatown, a dense, immigrant neighborhood just west of downtown, children were playing at Seoul international park, but not as many as usual. Outside Jon’s grocery, there were only a few street vendors who had set up shop – where normally there would be a dozen or more.

View image in fullscreen People eat at a Mexican restaurant partially empty, in Los Angeles, California on 17 June 2025. Photograph: Pilar Olivares/Reuters

Guillermo, 61, had come out, with his wife, to set up their small stall selling medications, vitamins and toiletries. “To be honest, we’re scared,” he said, nervously raking his fingers through his tightly coiled hair. They’d stayed home, stayed away, for days – but this week, they found out that their landlord would be increasing their rent by $400 starting next month. “We need to make money.”

Then again, he wondered if it was worth the risk to come out. There was hardly any foot traffic. No customers. “They’re all Latino,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re all scared to come out.”

In normal times, Lorena would be selling tamales nearby – at least until about 5pm. Fifty years old, with with slick black hair, she could pass for quite a bit younger. She’d spend the afternoon chatting with the other vendors – the frutero down the block, and the woman who sells candies and nuts.

Sometimes, she’d chat with the young unhoused men who camp out on the street and offer them some tamales. “They’ve had some bad luck, some [have] taken some bad steps,” she said. She’s known some of them since they were children – she used to sell tamales outside Hobart Elementary a few blocks away.

She’s been selling tamales in K-town for decades. The neighborhood has changed a lot since she first came here from Oaxaca, aged 20, she said. Still, most faces are familiar; she’s been selling tamales to generations of people out here.

In the evenings, she’d head home, get changed and head to the park for a walk. On summer days like these when her grandchildren are off school, she’d bring them to the playground, or maybe take them out to the movies, as a treat.

“Not this week,” she said. She has barely stepped outside her home in days. Neither has her husband, who normally works as a day laborer – soliciting short-term construction jobs outside of the nearby Home Depot. On the day agents flooded the megastore’s parking lot, indiscriminately cuffing laborers and vendors, a friend of her son had warned them not to come out, she said.

This week has felt a bit like the first few weeks of the pandemic, like the lockdown. “Well, now this is worse than the pandemic,” she shrugged. “Because we can’t even go out for a walk.” She can’t even put on a face mask and head to the grocery store – her kids, who have legal immigration status, have been going to the market and running errands for her and her husband.

View image in fullscreen People wait outside of a Home Depot store on Wilshire Blvd that was the site of detention of day laborers in Los Angeles, California, on 11 June 2025. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images

“We’re not really doing anything right now,” she said. It has meant that she hasn’t been able to send as much money to her mother in Mexico, and to her brother, whose health has been deteriorating rapidly because of liver cancer.

“I know he’s suffering. He’s suffering a lot,” she said. She cried as she tried to explain to him and her mother why she cannot send home any money this month. “It’s so hard, it’s so hard,” she said. She thinks about returning to work, but it’s too risky. “If they catch me, if they deport me, that’s not going to help them, is it?”

For now, Lorena and her husband are staying afloat thanks to a grant from Ktown for All, a non-profit that has been raising funds to help street vendors who fear arrest and deportation. “At least the rent is covered,” she said. “I am so thankful. There is nothing more to do than be grateful. And hope all this will pass soon.” ‘

The flower district – the largest wholesale flower market in the US – has emptied out as well. On Wednesday, vendors and customers alike locked up their stalls, and headed home, following rumors that raids were coming.

In downtown LA’s garment district, where the surge immigration enforcement began almost two weeks ago, tailor shops, which normally would be bustling with clients adjusting the fits on their graduation and quinceañera outfits, were generally quiet.

At Fernando Tailorshop, which has been operating in the neighborhood for 54 years, owner Renato Cifuentes said he had never seen anything like the recent raids. “I see this as a persecution of the Latino more than anything else,” he said. “If you look like a Latino, the agents go after you – that’s not right.”

Most of his workers are afraid to come into the shop. His customers – citizens and immigrants alike – have been staying away as well.

Business is down by more than 50%, he said. “Most of my customers are Latin, and they are afraid. Some of my customers are Iranian – and they are worried about war,” he said, “It hurts me a lot. Everything, everything is affected.”

View image in fullscreen A pedestrian waits at a crosswalk in front of a boarded-up restaurant business in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

Meanwhile, families of those arrested in the first rush of raids earlier this month, including at clothing warehouses and wholesalers in the district, have been grappling with the aftermath.

“We had to change how we eat, how we sleep, how we live, everything,” said Yurien, whose father Mario Romero was arrested in a raid at Ambiance Apparel. “We’ve had to change everything.”

Two weeks ago, Romero had texted her, his eldest daughter, that agents had arrived at his workplace, and that he loved her. Yurien had rushed over, and watched as agents shackled her father, and shoved him into a van. Several other family members worked at Ambiance – and were arrested as well.

Normally, on weekends,Romero would bring home a huge haul of Mexican candy, brew up a big batch of agua de jamaica, and pick a classic movie for the whole family to watch. But last weekend, Yurien spent hours refreshing her search in the Ice online detainee locator system, hoping it would tell her where her father had been taken. “We went days without knowing, without any idea what had happened to him,” she said.

Later, she learned that agents had kept them in a van for more than eight hours, without food or water, or access to a restroom. Then Ice transferred them to the Adelanto detention center, in California’s high desert.

Local Zapotec community organizers were able to help her find him – and more than a week after his arrest, Yurien was able to put funds into his commissary, so he could call her from the detention center. “He sounded so sad, he was crying,” she said.

Yurien hasn’t really felt hungry since then. She had planned to matriculate at Los Angeles Trade-Technical college, but she deferred her plans so she could take over her father’s responsibilities – including the care of her four-year-old brother, who has a disability that requires close monitoring and regular doctors visits.

“It’s been so hard. I’ve always been a daddy’s girl,” she said. “But I can’t really show my emotions, because I have to stay strong for my mom, for my siblings.”

Lucero Garcia, 35, said she could relate. “I’m so overwhelmed, I’m so stressed,” she said. “I still wake up every day and act like nothing ever happened, because I feel like I’m the main person in our family that kind of keeps it together.”

Nothing has been the same for her family since her 61-year-old uncle, Candido, was arrested while working at his job at Magnolia Car Wash in Orange county, just south of LA. It was one of more than two dozen car washes in the region that have been visited by immigration agents, according to the Clean Carwash Worker Center.

Before her evening shift at work on Tuesday, Garcia put on her professional black trousers and white knit top, and drove more than 90 minutes north to the Adelanto detention center, and met with congress members who were seeking to meet with constituents who had been transferred there, to investigate reports of unsanitary and unsafe conditions inside. After local representatives confirmed that detainees had been denied clean clothes and underwear for days, she stood outside in the searing desert heat and shared some words about her uncle – who had lived with her family for years and has been like another father to her.

“This is just crazy,” she said. “I’ve never talked to the press before, to give speeches like this.”

She had to rush back home right after to wrap up errands, and head to work.

Garcia has her green card, and her sister has citizenship – so the two of them have taken shifts running errands for their entire family – picking up groceries and prescriptions, getting kids to and from playdates and activities – so that those without documentation don’t have to risk stepping outside.

At home, the conversations have been heavy. Some of her family members are meeting with notaries to arrange paperwork, so that she can take custody of their children, should they get arrested or deported. “I’m so glad it’s summer vacation, that none of our kids are in school right now,” she said. “At least we don’t have to worry something will happen while they’re at school.”

Out in her neighborhood, restaurants sit half empty, and there’s no more lines at the gas station. Inside her house, it’s been oddly quiet, too. Most all of Garcia’s family lives in Orange county – within 5 or 10 minutes from her – and most days a cousin or an uncle would swing by, unannounced, bringing a dish or even just ingredients to cook up. Garcia is famous for her beef birria and pozole.

These days everyone is staying confined to their own homes. Last weekend, they nearly forgot it was father’s day. “The vibe is not there to be celebrating,” she said. “And even with the smallest gathering, there’s a risk to leaving the house.”

And there’s guilt. “Like, how can you be having dinner when others are in detention without enough food? The guilt doesn’t let you move forward.”

The Guardian is not using the full names of some people in this article to protect them and their families.

The Trump administration plans to send special response teams of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to conduct immigration raids in four cities run by Democratic mayors, NBC news reported on June 11, 2025, citing two unnamed sources familiar with the planning process.

NBC reports that New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle are four of the five places that would be affected by this deployment, as well as northern Virginia. These cities are also among the other major metropolitan hubs – as well as more than 200 small towns and counties and a dozen states – that over the past 40 years have adopted what are often known as sanctuary policies.

Special response teams are tactical units under ICE that are trained to respond to extreme situations such as drug and arms smugglers. These units have been used to respond to recent immigration protests in Los Angeles in response to ICE raids. President Donald Trump has also deployed 4,000 National Guard troops, as well as about 700 Marines, to quell protests in that city. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have said the presence of troops is exacerbating the situation and are challenging the legality of these deployments in court.

While sanctuary policies often prohibit local participation in immigration enforcement or cooperation with ICE, if large-scale raids take place in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle, their designation as sanctuary cities offers little protection to immigrants living without legal authorization from deportation.

There is not a single definition of a sanctuary policy. But it often involves local authorities not asking about a resident’s immigration status, or not sharing that personal information with federal immigration authorities.

So when a San Francisco police officer pulls someone over for a traffic violation, the officer will not ask if the person is living in the country legally.

American presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, have chosen to leave sanctuary policies largely unchallenged since different places first adopted them in the 1970s. This changed in 2017, when President Donald Trump first tried to cut federal funding to sanctuary places, claiming that their policies “willfully violate Federal law.” Legal challenges during his first term stopped him from actually withholding the money.

At the start of his second term, Trump signed two executive orders in January and April 2025 which again state that his administration will withhold federal money from areas with sanctuary policies.

“Working on papers to withhold all Federal Funding for any City or State that allows these Death Traps to exist!!!” Trump said, according to an April White House statement. This statement was immediately followed by his April executive order.

These two executive orders task the attorney general and secretary of homeland security with publishing a list of all sanctuary places and notifying local and state officials of “non-compliance, providing an opportunity to correct it.” Those that do not comply with federal law, according to the orders, may lose federal funding.

San Francisco and 14 other sanctuary cities, including New Haven, Connecticut, and Portland, Oregon, sued the Trump administration in February on the grounds that it was illegally trying to coerce cities to comply with its policies. A U.S. district court judge in California issued an injunction on April 24 preventing the administration – at least for the time being – from cutting funding from places with sanctuary policies.

However, as researchers who have studied sanctuary policies for over a decade, we know that Trump’s claim that sanctuary policies violate federal immigration law is not correct.

It’s true that the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over immigration. Yet there is no federal requirement that state or local governments participate or cooperate in federal immigration enforcement, which would require an act of Congress.

What’s behind sanctuary policies

In 1979, the Los Angeles Police Department was the first to announce a prohibition on local officials asking about a resident’s immigration status.

However, it was not until the 1980s that the sanctuary movement took off, when hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans fled civil war and violence in their home countries and migrated to the U.S. This prompted a number of cities to declare solidarity with the faith-based sanctuary movement that offered refuge to Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Nicaraguan asylum seekers facing deportation.

In 1985, Berkeley, Calif., and San Francisco pledged that city officials, including police officers, would not report Central Americans to immigration authorities as long as they were law abiding.

Berkeley also banned officials from using local money to work with federal immigration authorities.

“We are not asking anyone to do anything illegal,” Nancy Walker, a supervisor for San Francisco, said in 1985, according to The New York Times. “We have got to extend our hand to these people. If these people go home, they die. They are asking us to let them stay.”

Today, there are hundreds of sanctuary cities, towns, counties and states across the country that all have a variation of policies that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Sometimes – but not always – places with sanctuary policies bar local law enforcement agencies from working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the country’s main immigration enforcement agency.

A large part of ICE’s work is identifying, arresting and deporting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. In order to carry out this work, ICE issues what is known as “detainer requests” to local law enforcement authorities. A detainer request asks local law enforcement to hold a specific arrested person already being held by police until that person can be transferred to ICE, which can then take steps to deport them.

While places without sanctuary policies tend to comply with these requests, some sanctuary jurisdictions, like the state of California, only do so in the cases of particular violent criminal offenses.

Yet local officials in sanctuary places cannot legally block ICE from arresting local residents who are living in the country illegally, or from carrying out any other parts of its work.

Can Trump withhold federal funding?

Trump claimed in 2017 that sanctuary policies violated federal law, and he issued an executive order that tried to rescind federal grants that these jurisdictions received.

However, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 2018 case involving San Francisco and Santa Clara County, California, that the president could not refuse to “disperse the federal grants in question without congressional authorization.”

Federal courts, meanwhile, split over whether Trump could freeze funding attached to a specific federal program called the Edward Byrne Memorial Assistance Grant Program, which provides about US$250 million in annual funding to state and local law enforcement.

These cases were in the process of being appealed to the Supreme Court when the Department of Justice, under Biden, asked that they be dismissed.

Other Supreme Court rulings also suggest that the Trump administration’s claim that it can withhold federal funding from sanctuary places rests on shaky legal ground.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1992 and again in 1997 that the federal government could not coerce state or local governments to use their resources to enforce a federal regulatory program, or compel them to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.

Under pressure

The first Trump administration was not generally successful, with the exception of the split over the Edward Byrne Memorial Assistance Grant Program, at stripping funding from sanctuary places. But cutting federal funding – even if it happens temporarily – can be economically damaging to cities and counties while they challenge the decision in court.

Local officials also face other kinds of political pressure to comply with the Trump administration’s demands.

A legal group founded by Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff in the Trump administration, for example, sent letters to dozens of local officials in January threatening criminal prosecution for their sanctuary policies.

The real effects of sanctuary policies

One part of Trump’s argument against sanctuary policies is that places with these policies have more crime than those that do not.

But there is no established relationship between sanctuary status and crime rates.

There is, however, evidence that when local law enforcement and ICE work together, it reduces the likelihood of immigrant and Latino communities to report crimes, likely for fear of being arrested by federal immigration authorities.

Sanctuary policies are certainly worthy of debate, but this requires an accurate representation of what they are, what they do, and the effects they have.

This is an updated version of a story originally published on May 28, 2025.

Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience.

KIRK, COLORADO

There was a saying he’d heard, about how every farmer rooted for all the other farmers to do well, too, until one of those others started farming next door. So JJ Ficken didn’t talk much about the grant money with other farmers.

But his bills had mounted, and his ambitions had unraveled, and in Kirk, a town of 61, it was easy to feel alone. Now on that afternoon in mid-April, JJ, 37, unstrapped the bags of seed corn on his trailer for a customer.

Story continues below advertisement Advertisement

“How are ya?” JJ said, extending his hand to a man he’d known all his life. They’d played ball together, shared in family trips. So JJ decided to tell him.

The federal government had promised JJ a $200,000 grant, spread across two years, to cover the cost of a seasonal farmhand from Latin America. In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment. It was an opportunity that could transform his family’s future, but, JJ explained to his friend, President Donald Trump had frozen the money.

“Good,” the man said, grinning. “Too much spending here and there. I’m okay with a little hurt.”

JJ took a breath.

“It needed to be done,” JJ said, softly, because he was also a Republican who, like nearly every farmer he knew, thought the country wasted too much money.

“But not all of it,” JJ said, because he rejected the notion that his grant was a waste.

“I guess,” JJ said, because he didn’t want to argue.

JJ Ficken plants corn on a sunny day in April.

Hurt was something JJ already understood. It had been part of the landscape long before Trump took office. JJ was an American farmer, perpetually subject to weather, labor, loans, overhead, markets, health, politics. None of it was predictable, and all of it was a threat. The industry’s survival has long depended on the deals made between millions of Americans willing to brave all that uncertainty and a federal government willing to sustain them, through grants, subsidies, insurance, financing, payouts and disaster relief.

But then Trump, in the earliest days of his second term, threatened to break tens of thousands of those deals, suspending billions in agricultural funding and decimating the staffs that managed it. Swept up in the freeze was JJ and the $50 million grant program he’d signed up for along with 140 other farmers across the country. All of them had agreed to hire and, in many cases, house domestic workers or lawful immigrants willing to take jobs that Americans would not, but with the reimbursements in doubt, farmers worried they’d miss payrolls, default on loans or face bankruptcy. Many feared the checks would never come.

“I tried to do things right,” JJ said, because he could have taken on an undocumented laborer at any time for $14 an hour, as many of his neighbors had, but he didn’t believe in supporting illegal immigration. Almost nothing mattered more to him than his word, and he’d kept it to the U.S. government: He’d committed to buy a plane ticket for a 24-year-old from Guatemala named Otto Vargas. He’d rented him a single-wide. He’d bought him an old pickup to use. He’d spent tens of thousands of dollars to do what the grant required, covering most of it with a line of credit at 8.5 percent interest.

Now, he didn’t know if Otto would ever get here, or if the government would ever pay him back.

Deep reads The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing. Each Deep Reads story is narrated so you can listen on the go. This one is read by the author and includes audio gathered in reporting, original music and sound design. Previous Next

JJ had joined 81 percent of Yuma County’s voters in supporting Trump, whom he considered the better of two bad options. He wanted to believe that the president would honor his many pledges to do right by people like him.

“The USA will PROTECT OUR FARMERS!!!” Trump had posted to Truth Social that very day.

JJ needed that to be true as he climbed into his Dodge, turned onto a gravel road and drove toward the horizon, where eastern Colorado’s parched brown canvas converged with a cloudless sky. Nothing else was within view. No people. No cows. No homes or barns, pickups or tractors. Out here, it was just JJ and the dirt.

It was the fall of 2023, and an ad urging farmers to apply for the grant program had been playing for months on the radio when JJ’s wife finally brought it up.

“Why not?” Kassidee asked.

Larger farms paid specialists to handle the paperwork, but Kassidee, 36, believed they could take on the applications themselves, and they did, slogging through 40 hours of maddening federal bureaucracy. Each night, they put their two kids to bed and sifted through hundreds of pages of guides and forms in JJ’s basement office. Taped to his walls were bits of motivation and financial advice. “Stay the Course,” read a line at the top, bolded and underlined.

JJ was a fourth-generation farmer but had been handed no wealth, land or expensive equipment from his parents, who divorced when he was about 6. To make a living, he had baled hay and helped raise neighbors’ wheat, soybeans, pinto beans, great northern beans and alfalfa. Now he rented and farmed his mom’s two circles of corn, each about 125 acres, and partnered with his dad to sell seed corn.

He and Kassidee, a dental hygienist, married in 2012 and slipped into debt in their early 20s. They dug themselves out with advice from Dave Ramsey’s books: Save for big purchases and live below your means. The couple paid off their home early, opened investment accounts, bought a small rental house. They’d avoided serious debt since, but the promise of a grant and another worker inspired JJ to make a bigger bet on himself.

Vivian Ficken, 7, and her brother, Henry, 4, play on bags of seed corn. Henry rides on his father’s lap in the tractor. JJ pours a mixture that prevents the seed corn from clumping as it’s planted.

In the months after applying, he bought a 2012 combine, a 2013 planter, a 2013 corn header, a 2000 Dodge pickup meant for Otto and a second hay stacker, the only new piece of equipment he’d ever owned. JJ paid cash as much as he could but still owed more than $380,000. At the time, it didn’t scare him, because with Otto, the grant money, the farmhand he already had and the extra margin he’d pocket from owning his machinery, JJ figured he could pay it all off in three years.

His investments spoke to the value that even one dependable worker can bring to today’s farms, where more than 40 percent of the workforce is undocumented. To address the critical shortage of labor and stem the flow of undocumented immigrants, the U.S. Agriculture Department unveiled the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program in 2023. With the grant, farms could bring on foreign workers through the H-2A visa program and, in exchange, provide good working conditions.

“I’ve employed Americans, and they quit after a few days,” said Tracy Vinz, assured $400,000 for her organic farm in Wisconsin. “They quit after a few hours.”

Story continues below advertisement Advertisement

“I’ve had a couple who didn’t even last a whole day,” said Mitch Lawson, a Georgia produce farmer who lost nearly two dozen American employees before he qualified for $200,000.

In Trump’s first term, he gave farmers $23 billion to cover the losses from his trade war with China, and he expanded support programs through a new Farm Bill, an achievement President Joe Biden’s administration would fail to match.

“Nobody’s done for farmers what I’ve done,” Trump, sitting before a pair of John Deere tractors, told a crowd in Pennsylvania this past fall.

Then, four months later, he halted the grant payments. On Jan. 20, his first day in office, Trump signed executive orders intended to block funding from Biden-era climate legislation and purge links to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” known as DEI. Baffled staffers at the Agriculture Department told The Washington Post they struggled to interpret vague directions dictating who should and shouldn’t be paid.

“The process is changing more than once a day,” Tricia Kovacs, a deputy administrator, told managers, according to a record of the meeting. Staff abandoned their normal work to defend programs that appeared to have nothing to do with DEI. Many were snagged in a broad search for key words branded problematic. Among the misfires was the widespread flagging of “biodiversity.”

JJ’s grant was frozen in late January as top administrators considered whether to cancel it. Over the next two months, more than 20 farmers requested $4 million owed to them, according to documents reviewed by The Post. None were paid.

Dozens of farmers in the program met in a virtual call to share updates and commiserate, later starting a chat group JJ joined. Some considered filing lawsuits.

“Why are you ignoring a military veteran?” Jason Harris, a Trump voter offered a $400,000 grant for his farm in Mississippi, wrote Republican senators in early April. “The longer these funds are not released it is starting to make me think that you do not care for people like me.”

Citing litigation, an Agriculture Department spokesperson declined to answer questions, including whether the agency intended to cancel the program. But the White House defended Trump.

“Farmers helped propel President Trump to victory in November because they knew he would negotiate better trade deals, cut red tape, and boost American exports,” spokesperson Anna Kelly wrote in a statement. “They were right — since January, President Trump has delivered a historic trade deal with the UK, with more deals on the way, and eliminated bureaucracy and bloat at USDA, which is why farmer sentiment has improved across the country.”

She cited a survey from April that showed farmers were increasingly optimistic about their future.

As that poll was conducted, farmers in Tennessee, Texas, Michigan, Minnesota, California and Georgia who’d signed up for the grant program told The Post they’d drained their savings or taken on debt. In Oregon, a pear farmer had to cash out her children’s life insurance policies. In West Virginia, a farmer who’d risked raising a dozen new fruits and vegetables feared she’d have to close if the money never came. In Maine, a broccoli farmer already contemplating bankruptcy doubted he’d last another year without it.

Pictures on the wall of a room the Fickens use as both an office and a home-school classroom.

Otto was the youngest candidate JJ interviewed, but he sounded eager. Through an interpreter, Otto told him he wanted to learn English, and JJ told Otto he wanted to learn Spanish. The language barrier didn’t concern JJ when he offered him the job. He already had another worker, a 21-year-old named Riggin Williams, who had grown up in the community. As long as he had Riggin, JJ wouldn’t have to ask Otto to deal with customers or operate the most technical equipment.

Then, one morning in mid-April, Riggin quit.

He had found a job with regular hours and didn’t want to spend another season baling hay. He gave JJ two weeks’ notice and told him he hoped the new guy worked out.

But the new guy was still in Guatemala, waiting for a visa. JJ couldn’t even apply for the first installment of his grant money until Otto arrived, which should have happened weeks earlier. He’d heard from a recruiter that the administration’s attempt to make the government more efficient had slowed the visa process throughout Central America.

JJ tried not to panic, but suddenly, for him to operate, Otto had to make it to Colorado, and if he did, he had to work out.

Tell us how people’s lives are being changed This story is part of an ongoing examination into how President Donald Trump’s overhaul of the federal government is reshaping the lives of Americans. The Washington Post wants to hear from people who have been affected. You can contact us by email or Signal encrypted message. John Woodrow Cox: john.cox@washpost.com or johnwoodrowcox.01 on Signal. Sarah Blaskey: sarah.blaskey@washpost.com or SarahBlaskey.25 on Signal. Read more about how to use Signal and other ways to securely contact The Post. Previous Next

The stakes were still on JJ’s mind that afternoon when a neighbor stopped by his shop and, as it often did, the conversation turned to Trump’s overhaul of the federal government.

“There’ll be some growing pains,” said Eric Smith, who had grown up in Yuma County, joined the Navy and returned to Kirk to raise his two daughters and work the family land. “There’ll be some caught in the fray that, you know, maybe shouldn’t have been caught.”

JJ handed cans of Michelob Ultra to Eric and Riggin, who was patching a tire.

JJ had voted for Trump in part because of the president’s promises to cut spending, but he’d never imagined the cuts would target a core Trump constituency. It made no sense to JJ, who said he didn’t know what DEI stood for, much less what it had come to represent. He didn’t hire Otto to promote an agenda, and he didn’t think the government owed him a handout. The Agriculture Department had sought out JJ and the other farmers promoting an opportunity intended to lift the whole country.

“I’d like to think a year from now, what’s being done now, we see the benefits from it,” JJ said of what Trump was doing and how he fit into it. “I would hope.”

JJ talks to his father, Kent Ficken, in front of a pallet stacked with seed corn.

He didn’t care much for politics, preferring parenting and self-help books to partisan podcasts. The fervor Trump inspired unsettled him — he’d hated trying to explain the “F— Biden” flag outside town to his daughter — but JJ found elements of the president’s rhetoric appealing. He, too, resented that the country sent billions of dollars abroad when so many people here needed support.

“So you’re bringing over help?” asked Eric, who understood why. The 47-year-old had taken on more than $800,000 in debt to manage his hayfields and buy equipment, and he flew commercial airliners to cover the bills.

“Mm-hmm,” JJ replied, explaining that, like all businesses in the H-2A program, he’d first been required to advertise the job to U.S. citizens. None applied.

“People don’t want to work,” Eric said.

Riggin sipped his beer. The conversation was not about him, but that didn’t make it less awkward. He had originally committed to two more years, prompting JJ to buy the second hay stacker. But Riggin changed his mind. In the new job, as a field tech working on phone lines, he’d earn more money, get health insurance and make it home for dinner.

Eric, meanwhile, wondered what working in Kirk would feel like for an outsider.

“F—ing wind’s blowing all the time. It’s every shade of brown,” he said. “It’s hard. You can’t get people to do it.”

JJ took another swig. He hoped that wasn’t true.

JJ steps inside his shop as he prepares his equipment to plant corn.

In Guatemala, Otto was pleading with God.

From his rural hometown of Aldea Chispán, he’d prayed that he’d get a job interview, and when he did, he prayed he’d do well, and when he did, he prayed he’d receive an offer, and when he did, he prayed the United States would let him come.

Otto had made the six-hour round-trip drive to interview for his visa on April 15 — the same day Riggin quit.

Now, he waited, worrying he would be denied or JJ would back out. The two men had spoken during their video interview for just 17 minutes.

Each week Otto missed because of the delay cost him at least $700 in lost wages, and all of it mattered to Otto. His family’s 40-acre farm, he said, had struggled in recent years. Bad winters killed crops. A lost onion harvest squandered five months of work.

He had told JJ that nothing mattered more between a worker and a boss than trust, but he wasn’t certain he had the experience to earn that trust. He’d learned on his dad’s old tractors, nothing like what he expected to face in Colorado.

Otto Vargas, 24, pleaded with God to help him make it to the United States.

His earliest memories were on the farm, fetching his dad’s tools. His father would dig a little hole, and Otto would press fertilizer into the soil by hand. In the flatlands east of the mountains, he’d learned to tolerate temperatures that topped 110 degrees. During planting season, he and his dad would rest in the shade of their lemon trees, sweating and laughing and sharing his mother’s empanadas.

Now his dad was 64, and Otto dreaded leaving him. He relied on Otto to manage the land, but Otto also leaned on his dad, who had tried to prepare him for the United States, a place he’d never visited. In the months since Trump took office, Otto said, he’d seen videos on Facebook of immigrants being harassed and arrested.

“You get to thinking about all the people who are here for a better future, for their family,” he said in Spanish. “It’s very difficult.”

His dad insisted that if an officer confronted him, he should do what he was told, never argue. So, Otto made a plan: He would hurry to type a message into the translation app on his phone, asking if he could use it to communicate. He would offer documentation that proved he was legal. He would ask to call his boss, who he hoped could explain that everything was okay.

Story continues below advertisement Advertisement

JJ loaded his kids and their lunch boxes into the back seat of the pickup, and now, just after 8 a.m. on April 17, a Thursday, he pulled a trailer to his father’s place and made a list of the work ahead: Deliver 7,000 pounds of seed corn to a farmer an hour away. Prep his ripper for a neighbor who asked to rent it. Bring his corn header inside in case of rain. Fix a sprinkler and mow the lawn and finish installing the water heater.

Then JJ remembered. He glanced in the rearview mirror.

“Vivi, what’s your sugar at?”

In October, Vivian, who is 7, had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. The whole family changed diets, even her 4-year-old brother, Henry. She needed constant monitoring and frequent insulin shots and regular appointments two hours west in Denver, so the couple decided to home-school both kids.

In the pickup, Vivian reached for her phone, linked through Bluetooth with a monitor on her arm.

“It’s at 127,” Vivian said, passing the phone up to her dad. “See?”

She needed insulin. He sped up.

At his father’s shop, JJ figured out the dosage on her phone, and a bottle-cap-size pump on her leg injected the medication. “Did you hear it go beep beep on ya?” he asked.

Vivian eats lunch in a room at JJ’s shop. Henry plays with a tablet while sitting next to his father.

JJ had accepted that farm work would shape their life at home, and he made certain the reverse was true, too. The kids slowed him down, scaling stacks of corn bags and pretending the trailer was a pirate ship, but he still took them along.

He had come to think of himself as the sum of his commitments. First, to the kids and Kassidee and God. Then to his customers, whom he owed fair prices and honest answers. To the country, whose flag he’d pasted along both sides of his grain cart. To the land, so it might survive another generation. To Riggin, until he collected his last paycheck. And now to Otto, a stranger from a faraway place.

JJ sometimes faltered, but when he did, he tried to make it right. He expected the same of others, and that included the president, who he’d never believe in again if the grant didn’t come through.

“No way in hell,” JJ said.

After two hernia surgeries and hundreds of fitful nights, JJ hoped his children found a different path. He and Kassidee had already started saving for their college. The couple suspected Vivian would prefer city life — “She loves the light,” he said — but Henry was just like him.

Now, as JJ fired up the forklift, his son hurried over to sit beside him, legs straddling the levers. Henry had dressed to match his dad, in blue jeans, work boots and a hoodie. At home, in his bedroom, he’d carefully organized a collection of toy harvesters, grain bins, hay bales and seed boxes. JJ, who had dropped out of college before attending an automotive technology program, had rehearsed what he might someday pitch to Henry: “Why don’t you go be an architect, and then own you a farm — a hobby farm? Do it a different way. Do this for a tax write-off, not to feed your kids.”

Henry rides with JJ in the forklift.

JJ and Kassidee had been a year apart at the only high school in their community. She graduated in a class of eight. JJ, a class of five. Opportunities were scant.

The couple had once imagined the grant might allow JJ more time with the kids, freeing Kassidee to earn her master’s degree. She’d worked for years as a dental hygienist in rural offices that turned away people on Medicaid. She and a partner had started their own office, and turned away no one, but Kassidee needed an advanced degree to provide treatments their poorest patients couldn’t afford elsewhere.

“Maybe next year,” she told her husband.

One night, in their kitchen, Kassidee prepared a meat loaf as she considered the relentless uncertainty their family navigated. How would the couple, who had no health insurance, pay for their daughter’s care if the administration and Congress gutted Medicaid? JJ never stopped accounting for the farming costs that would not quit climbing and the eastern Colorado drought that would not end. And now came the tariffs that could spike the price of equipment and the attacks on subsidies that protect commodity farmers when markets collapse.

Kassidee and JJ gather in the kitchen with their children Vivian, left, and Henry before a meal.

“There are so many variables in farming that things get turned upside down all the time,” Kassidee said. “Every part of it is a gamble.”

From 2017 to 2022, according to the latest Census of Agriculture, the country lost 141,000 farms and 20 million acres of farmland, an area about the size of Maine.

At dinner, Henry sat at the head of the table, beside JJ. Vivian, in a bunny-ears headband, crunched on a cherry tomato and opened a small box that read, “TALKING POINT CARDS.”

“What do you think it means to be,” Vivian read from one, pausing to spell out the last word. Kassidee helped her sound it out: “Suc-cess-ful.”

Vivian asked if making her bed counted.

“Successful people do make their beds,” Kassidee said.

“All of ’em,” JJ added.

His definition had evolved. Money would once have been the measure. Today, he said, it was the family in front of him.

Kassidee, back in the kitchen baking sugar-free chocolate chip cookies, mulled the question for another minute.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Success can mean just making it through the day.”

JJ rests in the living room as Henry plays with a farm toy on the floor.

Otto’s alarm sounded at midnight, 13 hours before the flight he hoped would change his life. But first he had to make it to the airport, nearly 100 miles away. It was April 28, a week since his visa had been approved, and a national strike was expected to shut down major highways.

Otto had slept only an hour or so. He’d worked late into the evening on his father’s farm picking loroco, an edible flower bud. Now he loaded two bags into his 2005 Honda CR-V and met a man who, for the equivalent of about $150, shuttled people to the airport. It could be dangerous to travel at that hour.

Story continues below advertisement Advertisement

If he reached Colorado, the money would make a difference, and not just for his father’s farm. Otto had applied for residency in the United States in 2023, the same year he married a neighbor from Guatemala who now lives legally in Rhode Island. They hoped to someday move in together and have children.

Otto never considered trying to work in the United States illegally, he said. He knew the abuses other undocumented immigrants endured and hated the idea of living under the threat of deportation.

He had tried to do things right. He hoped it would be worth it.

Otto reached La Aurora International Airport before dawn, but the government official with his approved passport had yet to arrive. In the mountains of Guatemala City, it was chilly, so Otto sat in his car. Every hour, he walked back to the terminal to ask for an update. Without the passport, Otto couldn’t board his flight.

Nineteen hundred miles north, JJ sat at his dining room table that afternoon and studied an instruction manual for a pair of $430 earbuds that translated other languages in real time. They’d just arrived.

“This might just save my life,” he said, six hours before Otto’s plane was scheduled to reach Denver.

“First use: place earbuds in charging case,” he read.

Henry, lugging an old drill, checked on his father’s progress.

“Are we going to need the tape measure, Dad?” he asked.

“You never know, bud,” JJ said. “There’s not much we do without a tape measure.”

JJ sets up translation earbuds that he hopes will help him communicate with Otto.

It was 1 p.m., and he didn’t even know whether Otto had left Guatemala. JJ, who had no social media accounts, had tried and failed to connect with Otto on WhatsApp, which he’d never used before.

He and Kassidee had fretted over whether Otto would settle into their community. Hispanics accounted for 30 percent of Yuma County’s population, but there was no easy way to make friends. It was 104 times the size of Manhattan but had 0.6 percent of its population — 4 people per square mile. Kirk had a lunchtime food truck, the Filling Station, but no restaurants or bars. The local grocery store, Super’s, closed at 6:30 p.m.

Otto loved soccer, so JJ, who knew nothing about the game, had Googled how to take him to a Colorado Rapids match in Denver.

At 5 p.m., JJ left for the airport, still with no idea where Otto was. An hour into the drive, JJ got a call from a Rhode Island number. The man asked for Jack, so JJ hung up. Then came two more calls.

“Hello,” a woman said, her accent thick and the connection spotty. “I talk with — from Guatemala.”

“Otto?” he asked. “From Guatemala?”

“Yes, because he lost — he lost the flight,” she said, and for a moment, JJ felt sick. He pulled onto the shoulder of the one-lane road.

Another relative called to explain that Otto missed a connection and would arrive late to Denver. The man said he’d connect JJ to Otto on WhatsApp, and a few minutes later, a photo appeared along with a message.

“Hi, Jace,” it read, referencing JJ’s full name. “I am Otto.”

“Hey guy! I don’t have great service to load your picture,” JJ wrote back. “But will be there to pick you up!”

Story continues below advertisement Advertisement

He stopped at a Mexican restaurant outside the city to eat a long, nervous fajita dinner and sip a margarita.

“I am scared to death,” he said. “It was just easy with Riggin.”

Two hours later, JJ pulled into the parking garage and considered what this experience might mean to Otto. By federal mandate, JJ would pay $17.84 an hour, and to get the grant, he’d agreed to offer overtime after 40. JJ intended to give him as much work as he could handle.

Sitting in the darkness, JJ tried to Google the minimum wage in Guatemala. He saw 33 “quetzals,” a word he couldn’t pronounce. Just more than $4 an hour. He shook his head.

Besides the rental, the truck and the $1,134 flight, JJ would cover Otto’s gas, internet, phone, household items and workers’ compensation.

By then, the grant had technically been unfrozen because of a court order two weeks earlier, on April 15, but an administrator from the Agriculture Department later told the judge it faced a massive backlog. More than 42,000 contracts had been stalled.

On April 23, a national group of nonprofits suing the Agriculture Department accused it of largely ignoring the order and rushing to cancel grants rather than unfreeze them. Government attorneys said that wasn’t true, but, according to documents and farmers in the chat group, no one in JJ’s program had been paid.

Inside the airport, JJ lingered by baggage claim, checking his phone, scanning faces.

At 10:13 p.m., he waved. Otto, in jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed his bag and walked over, grinning. They shook hands.

JJ greets Otto as he arrives at Denver International Airport.

In the SUV, JJ handed him an earbud.

“It can translate,” JJ said.

“Oh, okay,” Otto said, nodding.

After a few seconds, the words came through, so Otto detailed his flight trouble, eager to explain why he was late.

They talked about his wife, a hairdresser, and the protests back home and how there was lots of traffic in Guatemala but none where they were going. At McDonald’s, Otto, who hoped to one day become a U.S. citizen, asked for fries, Coke and a Big Mac.

“Do you have more workers on your farm?” Otto asked, according to the translation in JJ’s ear.

“I had one full-time guy,” JJ said, “and he just quit.”

“Okay,” Otto said, eyebrows raised.

JJ pointed at Otto, then himself.

“Just you and me.”

Otto walks with JJ outside the Fickens’ home as a storm passes in the distance.

‘Otto speaks Spanish, you guys,” JJ told his kids, strapped in the back seat of the Silverado.

Otto had made it to Kirk 29 days late. Now, at 10 o’clock the next morning, JJ was headed back to the rented mobile home to pick him up.

“He’s gonna be saying, like, ‘comprendo’ and stuff?” Henry asked. “To say ‘okay’ in Spanish, you say ‘comprendo.’”

So, JJ practiced: “Comprendo. Comprendo.”

By then, Otto said, he’d already been up for hours. He understood that thousands of people from his home country would have taken this job, and he wanted to prove to JJ, on this first day, that he’d made the right choice.

He took a shower and cleaned the glass with a squeegee. He got dressed, slipped on his sneakers, combed his hair, passed the sign on the wall that read, “Dream the impossible.”

He made the bed.

As JJ pulled up, Otto walked outside.

“How are ya?” JJ asked, and Otto nodded and smiled.

JJ and Otto use the translation earbuds to talk about the work to be done. Otto, sitting on a lawn mower, listens to JJ discuss the farming equipment.

That afternoon, they went to JJ’s house to plant a row of young Rocky Mountain junipers. It was a laborious, low-pressure task, a good way to ease Otto in.

JJ ran a line of twine on stakes to keep the row straight. Otto raked sticks into piles. Henry lugged them to a trailer.

They had just unfurled a black weed tarp when JJ’s phone rang. It was a woman from Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, a national organization that provides seasonal workers in the grant program with a “know your rights and resources” training. Until Otto attended a session, JJ couldn’t request the first half of his money.

He dropped his shovel.

“How are you, ma’am?”

It would take time for Alianza to arrange a training near Kirk for just one worker, but the woman said Otto could join a session north of Denver, 165 miles away.

“What day?” he asked.

“Tuesday.”

Story continues below advertisement Advertisement

“Ahhh, Rosa. I can’t do Tuesday,” he told her, aware that Kassidee had to work that day. “I’ve got the kids.”

But he would do Tuesday, because he would do whatever it took, even a six-hour round-trip drive with Otto and the kids. He’d already accepted that he needed to ask for an extension on the $46,000 hay stacker payment due the next month. JJ leaned against the hood of his pickup and bowed his head.

He didn’t know it then, but in early May, a few people in his grant program who’d waited since winter for installments would finally receive them. That did little to calm the fear that political appointees running the agency would kill the program. Already, they had canceled the research component of the grant, which was intended to show whether the program helped farmers or curbed illegal immigration. “DEI,” officials called it.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins would announce a “Make Agriculture Great Again” initiative on May 19 that proposed her department address the labor shortage in the same ways JJ’s pilot program already did: by working with other government agencies and relying on the H-2A visa process. A month later, at least three farmers yet to receive installments would say they’d soon be unable to make payroll. JJ, who’d send eight emails to the Agriculture Department pleading for answers, would still be waiting for his check.

Vivian and Henry watch JJ and Otto organize seed corn containers at Kent Ficken’s shop. JJ and Otto prepare the ground before planting trees together near JJ’s house.

Now, in Kirk, the tree line had been set and the sticks cleared, and JJ was trying to say, in Spanish, that they would stop in 45 minutes, at 5 p.m. He figured Otto must be exhausted from the day before.

“So we’ll work ’til,” he said, pausing to count, “cinco — de la noche?”

“La tarde,” Otto corrected, and they laughed.

“We’re all still pretty tired,” JJ said. He picked up a posthole digger and spiked it into the hard, dry earth, and when he was done, Otto planted the first tree.

Vivian listed all the words she knew in Spanish. “The trees are verde,” she said.

Otto, now digging the holes, pointed to his jeans.

“What is the color?” he asked her.

“Azuuuuul.”

Story continues below advertisement Advertisement

JJ knelt to plant the next tree. He looked up at his daughter.

“This is going to be good for us, Viv.”

About 4:45 p.m., a white pickup sped past on their dirt road. It was Riggin, who honked and waved. He was finished for the day, headed home. JJ waved back.

Ten minutes later, he picked up the tape measure and dropped it into the toolbox. He told Otto they could finish later.

“I’m beat,” JJ said.

Otto asked how many more trees they needed to plant.

“Probably 20,” JJ answered.

Otto reached for the posthole digger. “No problem,” he said.

So JJ grabbed another sapling and followed him back to work.

JJ and Otto work late into the afternoon planting trees near JJ’s home.