New York Focus - ‘An Open Secret’: Sackets Harbor ICE Raid Shows the ‘Reality’ of New York Dairy Country

The detention of three children and their mother shocked the town. It also highlighted just how much the region’s key industries depend on immigrant workers.

Julia Rock · April 9, 2025



Residents of Sackets Harbor, a small New York town that looks at Canada across Lake Ontario, have been reeling since federal immigration enforcement agents raided a dairy farm there last month. Agents detained three students enrolled in the town’s 400-student K-12 school — a third grader, tenth grader, and eleventh grader — along with their mother.

The raid “shocked” Jaime Cook, the school principal. Cook grew up in California’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley, where many workers are immigrants and circumstances like this were more familiar, she said. “It’s so shocking that it happened here,” she told New York Focus. “We’re not an immigration hub.”

Sackets Harbor may not be an immigration hub, but it is in farm country — and more specifically, dairy country. More than half of the workers on New York’s dairies are foreign-born, some experts estimate.

The dairy industry is responsible for about half of the state’s agricultural output. Nearly 3,000 farms produce more than 16 billion pounds of milk a year — more than most other states. The industry is largely concentrated in Central, Western, and Northern New York, where it’s a major economic force in rural communities.

The raid there has foregrounded a fragile reality, which is that employers in some of the region’s key industries consider immigrant workers essential to their operations, but many are not legally authorized to work. While immigration enforcement has always loomed large over the industry, some farmers are anticipating a heightened threat to their workforces — and therefore to their businesses.

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