McHenry County Farms Depend on Immigrant Labor. There Is No Legal Way to Hire Most of It.

McHenry County has 911 farms and about 2,300 people who work on them. Many of those workers are immigrants, and there is no legal visa that lets farms hire them year-round. That gap between how agriculture actually operates and what immigration law allows has existed for decades. What is new is the enforcement: the federal government arrested more than 4,000 people in Illinois in 2025, and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed operations in Crystal Lake, the McHenry County seat, in January of that year. ^{2 5}

The county is one of the more productive agricultural areas in northeastern Illinois. Its farms cover 234,000 acres, about 60% of the county's total area. ³ McHenry County ranks first in Illinois for Christmas tree production, fifth in forage acreage, and seventh in milk sales. The market value of crops sold was $182 million in the most recent reporting year. These are commercial operations, not hobby farms.

The workforce that keeps them running is concentrated in the county's western communities. Harvard, 12 miles northwest of Marengo, is 56% Hispanic, with 16% of residents born outside the United States. ⁴ These western communities supply much of the labor for nurseries, dairies, and crop operations across the county's rural half.

The federal enforcement campaign has been substantial. An operation branded "Midway Blitz" began in September 2025 and resulted in more than 1,500 arrests statewide, as reported by the Marshall Project. ⁵ In January 2026, ICE agents detained five men on their way to work at a sawmill in Du Quoin. The men appeared to have had valid work authorization, according to Capitol News Illinois. ⁶ No mass raids have been reported in McHenry County, but the scale of the statewide campaign has created uncertainty among workers and employers.

Illinois law limits what local police can do. The Illinois Trust Act (signed in 2017, amended in 2021) prohibits sheriffs and police from honoring ICE detainers or acting on immigration status without a judicial warrant. A separate law, the Illinois Way Forward Act (effective 2022), forced McHenry County to cancel its contract to house ICE detainees at the county jail. ² Sheriff Robb Tadelman has publicly called these restrictions a hindrance and has traveled to Springfield to lobby lawmakers to amend the Trust Act.

Why this matters for agriculture: the legal framework for hiring farm workers does not match the work the farms need done. The H-2A visa program is the primary legal pathway for agricultural labor, but it only covers seasonal work. Think detasseling, short-term harvest, temporary nursery labor. Illinois certified 5,757 H-2A positions in fiscal year 2025, a 10% increase from the prior year. ⁷

Dairy farming, year-round nursery operations, and greenhouse work do not qualify. There is no equivalent visa for permanent agricultural positions. Nationally, immigrant workers account for roughly 51% of all dairy labor, and dairies employing immigrant labor produce 79% of the U.S. milk supply, according to the National Milk Producers Federation. ⁸ The sector depends on a workforce that has no legal pathway to be here on a permanent basis.

The federal government has acknowledged the problem. In an October 2025 regulatory filing, the U.S. Department of Labor stated that the reduction of unauthorized workers is threatening the stability of domestic food production and consumer prices. The department cited research showing a 10% decrease in the agricultural workforce could cause a 4.2% drop in fruit and vegetable production and a 5.5% decline in farm revenue. ⁹

The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens is threatening the stability of domestic food production.

U.S. Department of Labor, Federal Register, October 2025

McHenry County has already seen what this dynamic produces. In 2018, Kooistra Dairy in Woodstock, the county's last large dairy operation, sold its entire herd of 280 cows. The owners said they had switched to an immigrant workforce around 2000 because they could not find anyone willing to start at 4 a.m. As the political climate around immigration grew hostile, they decided to get out. ¹ In 1931, the county had roughly 85,000 dairy cows. By the most recent census, about 3,000 remained.

USDA Census of Agriculture, McHenry County Farm Bureau

The American Farm Bureau Federation has called for immigration reform that provides a legal year-round agricultural workforce. At its January 2026 convention, President Zippy Duvall said he is confident the administration wants to address the issue, but warned that current programs are broken and too expensive for many farmers. ¹⁰

What comes next: the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would create a year-round agricultural visa, has passed the U.S. House multiple times but stalled in the Senate. McHenry County's farms are heading into another planting season with tariff-driven losses projected at $100 to $200 per acre. Adding labor uncertainty to those economics compounds pressure on an agricultural sector that remains central to the county's identity and tax base.