By MARC SMITH

At 3 a.m. on a recent weekday morning, four U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement SUVs arrived at a locked farmhouse in upstate New York. “Acting on a tip,” agents of our own government entered through a bathroom window. When they left, they took several terrified migrant farm workers and a child with them.

This story has been repeated with disturbing, increasing frequency across upstate New York over the past several months.

While I’ve been away from my family’s farm for many years, the feelings that such news items evoke are of deep sadness, frustration, and betrayal by my own government. I am not alone.

Others from across New York and rural America, who make their livelihoods and support local economies by growing the food we all eat, share those feelings.

During my 15 years on the farm, my main responsibilities included searching for, hiring, training, managing, and paying people to help grow the crops and take care of the animals. All too frequently, I had to dismiss workers from that employment for a variety of familiar reasons (drug and alcohol use, absenteeism, animal abuse) that still raise concerns about schools, community support systems and the state of American families.

Farm operations growing and caring for living things couldn’t afford this perpetual uncertainty, fading willingness to do physical labor, and the increasingly scarce work force in rural New York. Starting in the 1990s, Mexican migrant workers have helped remedy the situation, eagerly and regularly showing up for hard work, doing the job cheerfully and supporting their families with the good wages they could earn.

Farm owners responded by investing in these new and valuable human resources. Many took Cornell Cooperative Extension Spanish classes; farm family members made sure the new employees could get around their new community to purchase the goods they needed; and employers and employees observed holidays and family events together.

More than a few farmers made the long trip to the poor, isolated, rural villages in Mexico that produce the men and women who have been raising calves, milking cows and growing and harvesting crops in New York State for well over a decade. American farmers are welcomed there with joyful, peaceful, unassuming celebration.

The terms of that mutual investment and the good faith with which our workers have honorably carried out their farming tasks for so long have been violated with determined indifference in recent weeks, as government agents have broken into farm homes, taking frightened, handcuffed workers off to detention centers and leaving behind a climate of fear and uncertainty about how the work of producing food on family farms will get done.

Families who have willingly provided their labor to make those farms productive now hide themselves away for fear of being caught up in the next nighttime assault.

The debate surrounding the personal travails of farmers and workers alike is heated and complicated, but reasonable measures to secure our borders, fix our broken immigration systems and provide for a legal work force were available to federal lawmakers in the reform legislation just killed by the U.S. Senate. Our elected officials have failed us miserably again.

The system must be reformed with an eye to doing no more harm to our rural economy and the people who make it function. My childhood on a New York farm never taught me that honest work should be treated as a crime.

We have reached a dark, sad day in this nation’s history when the government turns our values upside down in order to threaten families, the peaceful pursuit of a decent living, and the future of food production in mindless, arbitrary, intimidating efforts to enforce bad laws.

Editor's note: Marc Smith is a long time resident of Upstate New York and a concerned New York Farm Bureau member.