Tractors stand at the ready along rolling wild blueberry barrens Downeast, where fields of naked stems offer no hint of the glorious techno-color display to come. By late spring, roughly 47,000 acres across Washington and Hancock counties will be carpeted in white blossoms before bursting into tiny blueberries.
But new federal immigration policies and ramped-up deportations have businesses across the state — especially in rural, agricultural communities — concerned about migrant workers showing up to rake those fields — out in plain sight.
“Our producers are very careful about vetting their workforce to ensure that they all have the necessary and proper documentation if they are coming from outside of the U.S.,” said Eric Venturini, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission. “But I am concerned about a decrease in the agricultural workforce due to shifting immigration policies that could make it more challenging for farmers to get their crops.”
Wild blueberry farms aren’t the only businesses statewide that could be facing a labor shortage, compounded by escalating threats of deportation and revoked visas. Agricultural farmers of all types, as well as wreath factories, restaurants, hotels, fisheries, and other businesses have come to rely on the largely Latino migrant and year-round immigrant communities.
According to the most recent 5-year estimate reported in the American Community Survey, Maine’s foreign-born population is about 53,600. Among those aged 16 and over, 63 percent are in the workforce, or about 31,500 workers, according to Jessica Picard, communications director for the State of Maine Department of Labor.
Among those who employ foreign-born workers is the group of Whitney Family Companies, which owns and operates Whitney Wreath, Whitney’s Tri-Town Marina, Machias Glassworks, and Downeast Packaging Solutions, all located in Machias. Owner and CEO David Whitney employs an undisclosed number of seasonal migrant workers at his companies, workers he depends on to supplement his local workforce.
Whitney said he fully supports the Trump administration’s tightened immigration policies. In 2011 Whitney’s company became the first in the state to sign on to the federal IMAGE program, a voluntary partnership initiative between the federal government and private sector employers that strengthens hiring practices and monitoring of migrant worker documentation through an electronic verification system, regular audits, and payroll reviews.
“We’re under tremendous scrutiny, which is all the more reason that I continue to be motivated to follow the letter of the law. Always have,” Whitney said. “I sleep very well at night.”
But as federal immigration officials ratchet up surveillance around the nation, advocates say many immigrants — even those who are documented — fear deportation, with more of them choosing to lay low, avoiding school or work.
Along the shores of Englishmen’s Bay, sea spray wafts over the wild blueberry fields of Welch Farm in Roque Bluffs, owned and operated for more than a century by Lisa Hanscom’s family.
Everyone pitches in on this small but productive farm, including Hanscom’s 77-year-old father. But come harvest time, they still rely on a handful of migrant workers to help get the tender berries raked and crated before they rot in the field.
So far this season, Hanscom hasn’t heard from the two Mi’kmaq migrant friends from Canada and the young Guatemalan man who she’s counted on in past years.
“The young man was legal, working on his citizenship and everything. But I don’t know what that means for me this year, whether he’s even going to be around,” Hanscom said.
Hanscom chairs the volunteer Wild Blueberry Commission in addition to running the farm and her full-time job as director of the Washington County Emergency Management Agency. She knows the blueberry business and is used to dealing with unexpected crises. But Hanscom said it’s hard for farmers to come up with contingency plans to deal with such a rapidly evolving immigration landscape.
Nationwide arrests and detentions are up sharply since Trump took office, and worries are mounting among seasonal employers in Maine. In late March, the detention of a teenager on his way to work in Lewiston rattled the local community; he was reportedly taken to New York City, more than 300 miles away from his mother and three younger siblings, according to the Bangor Daily News. His family was told by a Border Patrol agent that he would likely be deported to El Salvador, according to Maine Public.
In early April, the Wells Police Department in southern Maine entered into a formal agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, allowing the police department to enforce certain aspects of federal immigration law. While ICE has similar agreements in place with other municipalities around the country, this is the first of its kind in Maine.
The Internal Revenue Department also struck a deal with federal immigration authorities to share the sensitive data of migrants who pay federal taxes under formerly shielded tax ID numbers. The exposure could make migrants reluctant to file taxes or share documentation with employers.
During an online presentation in February, Patrick Woodcock, the executive director of the Maine Chamber of Commerce, said that employers need to be aware of the potential ramifications on Maine’s workforce.
“Regardless of the merits of the polic[ies], we really do want to ensure that employers understand how to be in compliance,” Woodcock said. “There may be employees that were authorized to work that may be affected by changes and may not be authorized to work now or in the coming months.”
The Trump administration has signaled that it is considering eliminating, scaling back, or revoking some visas that employers have relied on to augment their work teams for decades.
The Monitor reached out to more than a dozen business owners and managers to gauge concerns. Half of those responded, with only one business expressing concern about losing the visa program it uses to supplement its summer staff of about 30.
Victor Trafford, who owns the Fishermen’s Wharf Inn and Restaurant in Lubec, said the business typically employs 4-6 young women, mostly from Eastern Europe, each summer through the J-1 visa Exchange Student Worker Program.
“I think we’re going to be okay. But laws can change — can change without notice,” Trafford said.
The Trump administration has also revoked the visas of hundreds of international students and detained roughly a dozen others from college campuses across the US, often without any warning or recourse for appeals, according to a recent report by the BBC.
A J-1 visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows students to study, work, or conduct research in the United States for three months or longer, depending on the visa. It’s one of roughly 200 types of U.S. non-immigrant and immigrant visas that grant foreign nationals permission to stay in the country for residence, study, or work. Another category is the H-1B visa program, which allows highly educated foreign professionals to work in “specialty occupations.”
But the visas that most impact farmers seeking to boost their local workforce are H-2A agricultural visas, which allow foreign workers to come to the U.S. to perform seasonal agricultural labor. Employers in the service industry, meanwhile, often rely on H-2B visas, which allow workers to temporarily come to the U.S. to perform non-agricultural services or labor, such as hotel and restaurant work.
Last year in Maine, 41 agricultural companies each received anywhere between one and 140 H-2A visa approvals. Cherryfield Foods, Inc., a grower and producer of wild blueberries located in Cherryfield and Machias, received the most agricultural visas of any business in the state, a total of 140 H-2A visas.
A 2015 Maine Department of Labor 2015 survey, the most recent report available from the Department, found that 56 percent of migrant farm workers were from Mexico, with others from Haiti, Canada, Honduras, El Salvador, and the Philippines. A 2019 University Maine report found that Maine’s migrant workers also come from Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Guatemala and from elsewhere in the United States.
Ricker Hill Orchards in Turner was granted 33 agricultural visas in 2024. The tenth-generation small farming business has survived 200 years of challenges, including a slumping local workforce that began during WWII.
Although it’s bureaucratically burdensome and costly — north of $80,000 some seasons — company president Harry Ricker and his wife Nancy, who is the CFO, said H-2A visas have helped them hang on to the farm, allowing them to bring in dozens of hard-working apple pickers each harvest season, mostly from Jamaica.
“There are a lot less local people that want to do it, so we have to have this program,” Ricker said. “Without it, we’ll just be out of the industry. We go away.”
Since businesses foot the bill for all visa fees, travel, and lodging, Ricker sees no reason for the administration to tamper with the H-2A visa program.
Some critics, however, including authors of the controversial Project 2025, are pushing the Trump administration to cap and then phase out the program because they say it squeezes American workers out of the market. Nationally, DOL certified over 378,000 temporary H-2A jobs in FY 2023 — more than six times the number certified in 2006.
But H-2A visa advocates point to data that show persistent workforce shortages and the federal laws that tightly regulate migrant worker pay to make sure it doesn’t undercut the local market.
Employers must recruit U.S. workers, including posting jobs on the US Department of Labor’s seasonal jobs website, and give preference to U.S. workers over H-2A workers. The employer also must pay all workers at the same federally mandated Adverse Effect Wage Rates (AEWRs), which in Maine is $18.83 per hour, compared to the state’s current minimum wage of $14.65 per hour.
Non-agricultural workers also nervous
The authors of Project 2025 also have the H-2B non-agricultural temporary visa program in their sights, calling for the elimination of the visas that a host of industries depend on, from tourism and hospitality to restaurants and services at some national parks.
The H-2B program is capped at 66,000 each year for the entire country, with an additional number of visas typically added to the cap each year, including an extra 64,716 for 2025 announced earlier this month.
Although Trump recently signaled support for businesses that rely on H-2B temporary workers, the release of the supplemental visas was delayed this year. According to a recent U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services press release, only employers who will “suffer irreparable harm,” will be approved for additional H-2B workers, and must attest to that harm in writing on a new form as part of their petition for the workers.
There are never enough visas allotted to meet demand, requiring employers to compete in a lottery system, according to Kathryn Ference, director of Workforce Development for the Maine Tourism Association.
“The programs are incredibly important to the [tourism] industry in Maine and making sure that we have what we need to make this industry run, which brings so much economic value to the state, adding $16.3 billion to the Maine economy in 2023, [is very important.]” Ference said.
Downeast’s largest tourism draw, Acadia National Park, doesn’t use any visa-permitted workers at the park. The seasonal National Park Service jobs all have U.S. Citizenship as a condition of employment, according to Perrin Doniger, vice president of communications and marketing for the Friends of Acadia.
But in neighboring Bar Harbor, 99 lodging facilities and 66 restaurants rely heavily on H-2B visas, including five of the six Witham Family Hotels, said Managing Director Jeremy Dougherty .
According to Dougherty, the Witham chain employs roughly 500 people, with about 200 at the Bar Harbor Inn alone, including about 82 foreign nationals working on temporary H-2B visas. Dougherty said many are from Jamaica, as well as El Salvador, Haiti, and other countries. He said they are some of his best workers and that some have returned for 15 summers — if they are lucky enough to secure a visa lottery slot.
Dougherty said the visa process is arduous for both the company’s human resource department and for the migrant workers, requiring months of applications, interviews, waiting, and then travel and housing arrangements before they even get to their first day on the job. This year, he said, some of the migrants are a little nervous, and not just about the possibility of being confronted by ICE agents.
“Some of our staff have asked how to best handle it if somebody were to say something that would maybe be inappropriate,” Dougherty said. “In the last few years, people are a little more emboldened to say things to people of color than they used to, and it just puts us more on alert, a little more protective, you know, like protective parents.”
TURNER, Maine (WGME) — The Maine Human Rights Commission is adding a sixth school district to their lawsuit over transgender policies in schools across the state, that’s according to our media partners at the Sun Journal.
Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at keeping transgender athletes out of girls’ sports, arguing it protects fair opportunities under Title IX.
In a board meeting on Thursday, MSAD 52 voted to align Trump’s polices with the district.
Shortly after, the district was added to the list of schools being sued.
“I think it comes to a point where it goes against the state, but we gotta do what’s right. And I think it’s right to support female athletes,” Board Chair Peter Ricker said. “I think there are potential lawsuits regardless on the issue until the state makes up their mind and until the feds make up their mind.”
The board voted 5-4 in favor of passing a policy to keep transgender athletes out of girls sports.
Evan Ipsaro scored 24 points to lift Miami of Ohio to a 93-61 win over the University of Maine in a non-conference men’s basketball game on Saturday in Oxford, Ohio.
Keelan Steel scored 14 points for Maine, which has lost 11 straight games to start the season. The Black Bears trailed 28-6 just over 10 minutes into the first half.
Eian Elmer added 16 points and six rebounds for the RedHawks (8-0).
Sara Bronin is the founder of the National Zoning Atlas, a George Washington University law professor and author of “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World.”
Over the last few years, the nonprofit National Zoning Atlas team has set out to map every zoning code in America to do one simple thing: let the public see how their communities regulate land. We developed this goal because zoning rules can have big impacts: they dictate to property owners what they can do with their properties.
Before we started work in Maine last spring, we would have never guessed that Maine’s codes would be the most bureaucratic and convoluted of the 30-plus states we’ve worked. We thought that Maine’s relatively small population and few urban centers — not to mention its proud commitment to property rights and personal freedom — would mean the codes would be short and straightforward.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
We can say authoritatively that Maine’s zoning is far out of the norm because we’ve analyzed zoning conditions in nearly 9,000 cities, towns and counties across America, and we’ve read over a million pages of zoning codes. We’ve become experts in analyzing the arcana of minimum lot sizes, setbacks, height caps and parking mandates.
In Maine, we started first in Washington County. More recently, through a partnership with GrowSmart Maine, we’ve completed analysis of zoning in and around Portland.
Well, mostly completed. Of the 123 jurisdictions we have reviewed so far (of Maine’s 496 total with zoning authority), 17 never provided a full copy of their zoning text, map or both.
The texts we could find — totaling 17,500 pages — revealed that Maine appears to have some of the longest zoning codes in the country. New Hampshire, with roughly the same population, has half the number of jurisdictions exercising zoning, and zoning codes half as long as Maine’s.
And when we located maps, some existed only as grainy, pixelated PDFs with faded lines and unclear boundaries. Others existed only in paper copy, not online.
What’s worse, Maine piles “shoreland zoning” on top of zoning. Shoreland zoning was created to protect water quality, but it’s hard to see how it achieves this goal. Zoning maps and shoreland zoning maps often conflict or don’t match up, and too often codes refer to outdated or inconsistent data about wetlands and watercourses. Even analysts who had handled notoriously complicated coastal zoning in California struggled to make sense of Maine’s regime.
When we had questions about interpreting texts and maps, we often had nowhere to turn. That’s because many of the 123 jurisdictions were very small towns, with part-time staff, or no staff at all. If our trained analysts cannot make sense of the rules, and no one’s on the other end of the line, it’s unrealistic to expect homeowners, builders or neighbors to do so. We imagine that many well-intentioned local officials feel caught administering systems that no one fully understands.
State legislators have taken action on zoning — primarily to promote more housing. They recently expanded opportunities for multifamily housing and made it easier to build accessory dwelling units. These are laudable and necessary reforms. Our analysis so far shows that only 15% of residential land allows multi-family housing by right, and more than half of single-family land bans accessory dwellings.
But legislators have not tackled a more fundamental need exposed by our Maine Zoning Atlas: to simplify and clarify the state’s land use regulatory framework. Property owners and policymakers alike experience zoning as a maze, where they must navigate missing information, conflicting requirements and procedural runaround.
To provide a way out, next legislative session, state lawmakers should consider requiring zoning codes to be available to the public online. Or requiring maps to be legible, with shoreland zoning clearly mapped. How can people be bound by rules they cannot find, or understand?
Legislators should also consider legalizing — and providing incentives for — local governments to share resources in land use administration. Small towns might be more empowered to achieve their land use goals if they have the tools and manpower they need to interpret and enforce their own zoning codes. Legislators might also rethink shoreland zoning altogether.
I’d like to say our nonprofit is eager to find funding to finish our analysis in Maine. But honestly, it’s been a bit of a nightmare.
For the sake of our team — and anyone else trying to make sense of zoning in Maine — I urge people in power to take action to streamline the state’s regulatory framework. There’s just no reason Maine’s land use rules should be the most complicated in the country.
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