Abandoned by Trump, a Farmer and a Migrant Search for a Better Future
July 22, 2025 at 11:14PMEarlier this year, the Trump administration suspended billions in agricultural funding. Swept up in the freeze was JJ Ficken of eastern Colorado, a farmer who had agreed to hire an immigrant from Guatemala through a federal program intended to help fill jobs Americans won’t take. Suddenly, both men’s futures depended on the whims of Washington:
“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.
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.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/22/abandoned-by-trump-agriculture-immigration-farmers/
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