On the mist-wreathed slopes of Mauna Loa, where the earth is rich with volcanic memory and the Pacific glimmers in the distance, a coveted coffee — Kona — is coaxed from the soil.
Nurtured by the Island of Hawaii’s unique mingling of abundant sunshine, afternoon rain and lava-infused soil, Kona coffee retails for more than $30 for an eight-ounce bag. With a devoted following around the world, the distinct coffee has been a point of pride for the Big Island, and for the thousands of immigrants from Latin America who for decades have handpicked the beans in the Kona fields.
Now the fate of many of those immigrant workers is uncertain, as is the future of the island’s coffee industry.
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has reached this remote, rugged island a 45-minute flight from Honolulu.
Federal agents have flown in several times since February, most recently last week, often remaining for days as they search for undocumented immigrants among the 200,000 or so people who live on the island.
Compared with widely publicized operations in big cities like Denver and Los Angeles, the actions on the island have been relatively small, with just a few dozen people known to have been taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But ICE enforcement actions have sent waves of fear across the rural island, and underscored how the immigration dragnet has expanded, sweeping in men and women with no criminal records, as well as children.
“Regardless of the number of people detained, the consequence of this is massive,” said Jeanne Kapela, a Democrat who represents the area in the State Legislature.
Kona’s coffee industry is composed of hundreds of family-owned orchards, usually three to five acres in size, and their immigrant workers often come from mixed-status families, with some members who may be naturalized citizens or green card holders and others who are undocumented.
“The futures of coffee farmers and these workers are tied together, whether we like it or not,” said Ms. Kapela, whose family grows coffee.
The industry is vital to her constituents, she said. “If it dies, I don’t know how we come back.”
The immigrant community has grown increasingly uneasy. In March, a widely shared video showed agents leading a woman and three children away from their home. The next month, a boy in first grade was pulled from class after his father was detained.
Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in an email that agents had conducted “a number of targeted enforcement actions” to arrest criminals on the Big Island. In addition, she said, “non-targeted illegal aliens were encountered and detained.” She did not respond to a question about how many immigrants were taken into custody.
Bruce Cornwell, 72, who grows and processes his coffee and that of other farmers for the U.S. and international markets, said: “These are good, hard workers. They aren’t gang members.”
Unlike industrial farms, small-scale coffee growers cannot readily make use of the government’s seasonal agricultural visa program, which is complex, costly and requires extensive paperwork.
Mr. Cornwell said that workers should be offered pathways to immigrate legally, rather than be rounded up.
“If we don’t have these immigrant workers, our coffee will be hurting,” he said, standing near his orchard, where coffee cherries were ripening. “The government should make it easier for these people to come here and work.”
Hawaii is the only U.S. state with significant commercial coffee production, led by the Big Island, where coffee cultivation began in the 1820s. In 1873, Henry Nicholas Greenwell, an English immigrant who settled on the island and whose descendants still grow coffee, took Kona to the World’s Fair in Vienna and won an award there for excellence.
In the early 1900s, Japanese workers escaping harsh conditions on Hawaii’s sugar cane plantations began leasing small parcels of land to grow coffee.
In the mid-1980s, the global embrace of specialty coffee catapulted Kona cultivation. Since then, thousands of Mexican and Central American workers have migrated to the Big Island, and some have become growers themselves.
Among them are Mexican Americans like Armando Rodriguez, whose family crossed the border into the United States illegally when he was 8 years old. He obtained a green card through his father, whose status was legalized in 1986 under the most recent amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and later became a citizen.
Today, his extended family grows and mills coffee on 13 acres. They ship their award-winning coffee, Aloha Star, across the country.
Mr. Rodriguez is worried about the harvest, he said. Workers who he normally hires for the season have informed him and other growers that they will not return from the mainland United States, even though they are green card holders.
“They’re afraid that they’ll be detained at the airport, or their green card is going to be taken away,” Mr. Rodriguez said as he drove along the Mamalahoa Highway, a narrow, winding coastal road with turnoffs on either side that lead to dozens of coffee farms.
On a recent morning, workers moved along a row of baby coffee plants on the three-acre farm of Don Davis, a retired Navy pilot who flew for Delta Air Lines.
The workers are on their feet for 11 hours a day, said Mr. Davis, who pays them $30 an hour. He had just hung a “no trespassing” sign on his gate in the hope of deterring ICE agents from entering his property. He said that he worried for his workers, even though they had legal status.
“There is nobody else who is going to pick this,” Mr. Davis said of his crop.
During a lunch break, Salvador Cancino, 47, who has devoted his working life to coffee, said that he and others in his extended Mexican family were long-timers on the island. They have green cards and American citizen children, and own their homes.
But he said that younger undocumented immigrants had been arriving in recent years to replace aging pickers. Many of the newcomers are Hondurans who grew coffee in their homeland, which for years has been plagued by one of the world’s highest murder rates.
Several of those workers unloaded 100-pound bags of coffee at a mill on a recent Sunday.
“There is a lot of work here, and you can make good money,” said Darwin, 26, who arrived in the country four years ago and who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name because of his immigration status.
He said he made $400 a day working the harvest, and had his wife join him in Hawaii.
She gave birth to a newborn in March, and days later, when others who live in the same house were away, she noticed an S.U.V. approaching. She said she locked herself and the baby in the bedroom with the curtains drawn. Agents banged on the front door for a while, and then left when no one responded.
Since then, the couple have been rethinking whether to stay. “We’ve been happy here, but the immigration situation now has us extremely worried,” Darwin said.
It was in March that Ms. Kapela, the state legislator, received frantic calls from schoolteachers and others about “the chaos that had ensued” from enforcement actions, she recalled. Children had disappeared from classrooms, she said, and frightened families were in hiding or sleeping in their cars.
“No one knew what to do,” Ms. Kapela said.
There are no immigration lawyers practicing on the island, and immigrants who have court hearings must fly to Honolulu, where immigration proceedings are held. Missing a hearing can result in a deportation order from a judge, making the immigrants targets for enforcement.
In early April, ICE agents returned to Kona.
John Redden, who grows certified organic coffee, left to run errands one day and did not close the gate behind him. When he returned, a neighbor informed him that federal agents had been on his property off the Mamalahoa Highway.
No workers were on his land when the agents were at his farm, Mr. Redden said, but even so, he was irate. On April 5, he joined a protest, brandishing a sign that read, “ICE invaded my farm.”
A community meeting was held on April 29 at the elementary school where the first grader, who was from Honduras, was removed and deported. At the meeting, Mr. Rodriguez, the coffee farmer and founder of Aloha Latinos, a nonprofit, asked whether local police officers were assisting federal agents.
The island’s police chief, Benjamin Moszkowicz, responded that his department “has not, does not and will not conduct immigration enforcement,” which he said is a federal matter. He received rousing applause.
Gollita Reyes, who makes tamales for mini markets that cater to immigrants, said that orders for her tamales had plummeted with each enforcement action.
“People are missing work because they’re afraid, and running out of money,” Ms. Reyes said. “Others are gone.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
