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… 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.

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

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