TWIN FALLS, Idaho — The floor-to-ceiling windows in Rick Naerebout’s office afford a sweeping view of the stunning 500-foot-deep, quarter-mile-wide Snake River Canyon. Squint and you can still see what’s left of stunt motorcycle rider Evel Knievel’s ramp from his failed 1974 attempt to jump the canyon with a steam-powered rocket on his back.

That put Twin Falls on the map in the 1970s. But these days, Twin, as locals call it, and its surrounding fertile river plain are better known as a national agricultural powerhouse, owing largely to the state’s multi-billion-dollar dairy industry.

Today it’s also an open secret — even in deeply Republican Idaho — that local farms rely heavily on undocumented immigrant labor. Naerebout estimates some 90% of the workers at the state’s some 350 dairies may not have legal status.

“We’re not taking jobs from Americans,” Naerebout, the CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association says.. “The jobs are physical in nature and you’re out in the elements. They just don’t appeal to Americans.”

A cheese plant in Burley, Idaho, a state that routinely ranks in the top five in the nation for milk production.

Kirk Siegler/NPR

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Kirk Siegler/NPR

American farmers have largely escaped President Trump’s ongoing, aggressive immigration crackdown. As the ICE sweeps continue, however, farmers here and across the heartland are growing increasingly uneasy because many couldn’t find enough workers even before the recent wave of detentions and deportations.

“If we had a concerted effort to have enforcement activities within agriculture, you could really harm our ability to produce food to feed ourselves,” Naerebout says.

In Idaho, immigrants describe a lighter ICE presence

Like a lot of rural and Republican-controlled states, Idaho has not seen the level of immigration enforcement as some of its blue state neighbors, according to interviews with attorneys and immigrant advocates.

Still, twice a week, an ICE deportation plane lands at the tiny Twin Falls airport, in a rural area south of the small city surrounded by farm fields a half-hour drive from Interstate 84. On Tuesdays and Thursdays around noon, Heather Muth and a small group of immigration-rights activists unfurl a banner facing the tarmac that reads “Human Rights, Not Shuffle Flights.”