Horse racing depends on immigrants who are suddenly working in fear
The modern backbone of an ancient sport quivers and quakes amid a relentless fear hovering at the barns of American horse tracks. The fear, almost like some smothering yet invisible blanket, howls at wake-up, lingers through the rigors in the stables and harasses eyelids at bedtime. The backbone, the laborers from Mexico and Guatemala and other lands who feed, water, walk, wash, massage, sustain, coddle and converse with the racehorses, finds the fear even in periphery:
“Like if you [dropped] something over there” and it made a noise, one laborer said through an interpreter while pointing across a room, “you’re scared of what you might see [next].”
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids of the second Trump administration — and the smartphones with which to view them — have halted these laboring lives into an eerie immobility, after some have logged 10 or 25 or even 40 years of toil on U.S. soil with varying levels of documentation. Many workers across the 32-odd states with horse racing confine their existences to track interiors and dorm-like barracks with hot plates and small refrigerators and microwaves, in what California Horse Racing Board vice chairman Oscar Gonzales called “a perimeter that sadly has become a jail-like experience.”
Some refrain from store-going altogether or go only at nightfall. Some ask others to run outside errands. Some shop but in a gasping hurry. Nearly all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Horse racing depends on immigrants who are suddenly working in fear
One said each 10-minute walk between his track and his apartment doubles as a 10-minute shudder. Several speak of the customary treks from state to state for different horse seasons as recast into rides spent both hushed and unquiet. One tells of one hell of a dilemma: drive her (American) children for doctor’s appointments in fear or refrain from same out of fear. (She drives and hyperventilates, particularly at red lights.) Some fear accidents for a new reason: Who would come to help, and what might happen then? Some make provisions with friends and co-workers who vow to oversee American children in the event of deportation.
All gaze helplessly at their phones. “They even have things now where they’re getting an auto-respond if an ICE agent comes, almost like you’re doing an earthquake training for you and I, or something like that,” said Doug O’Neill, a Californian trainer of two Kentucky Derby winners. Some have adopted a human coping tactic: dark humor. Probably all have studied photos of the June 17 raid at the Delta Downs track in Louisiana — a worker handcuffed face down in the dirt and so on — that detained 84, four with criminal records (and two of those four involving “aggravated assault” or “aggravated battery with a dangerous weapon”).
The particular anxiety of 2025 extends to two further realms — violence and white supremacy. “Back in the 1970s, it was pretty much the same as this here now, but at the time there was no beating up [the immigrants],” said an American assistant trainer who arrived in 1976 from his native Mexico. “No one got beaten up or that type of thing. It was just catching people who didn’t have the papers at the time, and they leave the country and that type of thing.”
“I never in my life feel like this, ever,” said a laborer with 19 years at tracks in three different states, soon adding: “Everybody feels. All the time. And not only me. All the people” — including those with proper documents.
Workers guide a racehorse through an on-track workout.
ANYONE WHO HAS FREQUENTED the “backsides” of American tracks in the past two generations would find these laborers familiar and the sound of their Spanish routine. They’re embedded in the fabric of the equine subculture and the broader American culture, in barn villages that feel like little towns and in the broader cities around them, and they’re practically next of kin to trainers.
With the fear swirling to unprecedented heights, warhorse Kentuckian trainer and 2011 Preakness winner Dale Romans, who learned at Churchill Downs under his father, Jerry, held a news conference at his barns on the Thursday before the Kentucky Derby in early May, during which he said, “If we couldn’t have an immigrant workforce on the backside, I don’t know how horse racing could survive.”
“The backbone of the industry,” said Eric Hamelback, the CEO of the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association.
About 60,000 spectators are expected at Pimlico on Saturday for the second leg of the Triple Crown. (Wesley Lapointe for The Washington Post)
That same immigrant workforce dwells in a long-standing limbo that has straddled at least two centuries and mid-1980s raids in California and elsewhere. At the foundation of that limbo lies a timeworn set of words never any truer than in horse racing: Americans won’t do these jobs. It’s a reality upheld each year when, by immigration law, U.S. citizens get canvassed to apply for the work, then prove their widespread lack of interest before trainers and lawyers can seek visas for foreigners.
Sustaining the limbo across time has been a paucity of available legal work visas for a workforce numbering an estimated 30,000-plus, in a field in which one trainer might employ 50 or more souls in various regions. The category of temporary work visa from which horse racing draws, H-2B, places the sport alongside such industries as shrimping, forestry, hotels and ski mountains, the lot of them elbowing each year for just 66,000 visas the federal government allots, as Hamelback and immigration lawyer Will Velie explained. Then those visas, precious as they are, groan as a misfit to horse racing and its year-round calendar because they require workers to return to their homelands for two or three months before annual, sluggish and expensive renewal. “We just think there has to be a simpler system,” Romans said.
So through the spring and early summer, horse people and congresspeople have been meeting and mulling a medley of visa strategies for systemic repair, something that might widen the labor choices for trainers while relieving them of a visa application process pretty close to incessant. Both camps aim to appeal to President Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for business. “This guy has the power,” Romans said in June, “to positively affect the economy of the United States for years to come.”
All parties have bumped along the veering ride of White House messages about whether industries such as farms, hotels and restaurants warrant carveouts because of their chronic labor shortages. All parties have ridden from encouragement to discouragement and back. All agree that criminals deserve ouster but that there just aren’t all that many criminals among a cohort inclined to avoid visibility. “I understand the people, the culture, and I understand how many good people we’re talking about,” Romans said. “One thing people in this country don’t understand is many of these people wouldn’t be here if they could feed their families where they’re from.”
On a Tuesday morning in June, Romans appeared on a videoconference call with reporters and with representatives from Kansas livestock, New Mexico dairy and Texas restaurants, plus U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, the Republican head of the House Freedom Caucus who represents Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Said Matt Teagarden of the Kansas Livestock Association, “It really is clear to me that the people pushing for these raids that target farms and feed yards and dairies have no idea how farms operate,” and, “To me, we have a choice here: We can use imported workers, or we can import our food.” Beverly Idsinga of the Dairy Producers of New Mexico said, “You can’t turn off cows.” Emily Williams Knight of the Texas Restaurant Association spoke of “skilled labor that can’t be replaced,” of “a ripple effect across the economy that is very concerning for us,” with “restaurants unable to open” for lack of staff. Said Harris, with a photo of Trump on a shelf behind him, “Clearly the workforce issues are significant with unemployment of 4 percent, [such that] you’re not going to find the workers.” Still, encouragement seemed to trump discouragement, with Williams Knight saying, “This is a very serious issue, but again, we’re very hopeful.”
As they spoke, ICE raided Delta Downs.
Trainer Dale Romans advocates for immigrant workers who he says are vital for the horse racing industry.
IF ANYTHING, that threw on a fresh blanket of fear around the land, present in the voices of the laborers at the various tracks in their boots and their jeans with dirt flecks dotting the ankles. One said, “It’s only room and work, room and work.” One said, “I’m scared when I wake up because I don’t know what’ll happen.” One said: “The heart. The heart. … I shake all the time,” then laughed vaguely. Another: “When I go to sleep, I’m thinking for the next day, maybe something wrong comes the next day.” Another: “Sometimes I go to the store, maybe, and I look around at the [other shoppers’] eyes.” Another: “Somebody told my wife: ‘Never go anywhere together with the kids.’ We’ve got to go separately in case something happens.” Another spoke of a child saying: “‘Who’s going to be with me?’ Sometimes you talk about something like that, but you don’t want to think about it because the child’s 8 years old.” Another: “I have a friend that immigration took him, and [his family doesn’t] even know how to find him.”
Some workers with second jobs such as roofing have stopped going to those second jobs. Trainers wonder whether workers they have known every day for years will show up to work. One worker told of avoiding his occasional stops at his favorite local restaurants. “They’ve slowed down so much,” Leandro Mora, a longtime assistant to O’Neill, said of the restaurants, “and now you see those small businesses, you know, and they all pay their taxes and run their businesses, but now instead of 100 people, they’ve got 20 people.” And as training operations hopscotch from latitude to latitude, with horses and trainers and workers in vans and planes and cars, those road trips to other tracks have gone from refreshing to foreboding. “Everybody was thinking about that [next] state line,” one laborer said.
Rumors abound and menace, such as the one at a major track where an ICE car showed up but with a warrant seeking only one person. The sights of certain cars cause alarm and then the spreading of that alarm by text. Tedium dances with the fear. “All evening [every evening] with the TV,” one worker said. One laborer, nearing 70 with weathered hands and gnarled nails and sparse teeth, has seen just about everything across 40 years at horse tracks in at least six states while crossing the border back and forth. “Not scared,” he said with all of his years in tow, “just only be careful.”
Coincidentally, he arrived first as a young man at just about the time the Delta Downs raid had found one precedent: the predawn hours of Friday, Aug. 23, 1985, just 14 months before the Reagan administration’s landmark amnesty wave. The Immigration and Naturalization Service stormed the elegant track Del Mar, which still hugs the Pacific north of San Diego. That raid, around 5:45 a.m., qualified as klutzy.
“So they went and drove straight onto the track and parked their cars in the track, in the dirt track,” said Mora, present at Del Mar that day. “Charlie Whittingham,” the legendary trainer by then 73, “he liked to work some of the horses at 5 a.m. The track would open, and he would be the first one there.” Thereby did the INS vans and their headlights suddenly encounter horses, including Precisionist, valued around $10 million or so, and thereby did another legend of the sport, jockey Bill Shoemaker, wind up telling reporters: “I looked up [in the darkness], and there was a car coming right at me. Another 10 seconds later, and I would have been gone.”
A racehorse is bathed following a workout.
Trainers and INS officials had spatted for years by then, the former needing labor and the latter needing paper, and the raid involved 160 agents and claimed 123 arrests, including one U.S. citizen trying to smuggle two workers in a car. The aftermath moaned with an idle Saturday after trainers said they couldn’t ready their horses, a financial ache therein, and some of the precise conversation points still bubbling four decades later.
“It would be easy to say the trainers should have been hiring legal folks along the way,” Joseph W. Harper of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club said in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “but legal workers are difficult to find.” Leonard Dorfman, a trainer at Del Mar since 1937, told Lorie Hearn of the Union-Tribune that the raid had removed his right-hand man of 10 years’ standing, Crissanto Morfin, of whom Dorfman said, “He’s as good a horseman as anybody.” And as Mora recalls nowadays that “most workers came back the very next week,” some with fresh papers, in the interim Dorfman had a bar-owner friend hauling around hay, and a comment from Dorfman’s wife, Marlene, seems it could have ricocheted across time to fit snug into 2025.
“These people they want us to hire,” she said, “don’t know what end of a horse eats.”
IN THE BEGINNING OF ANY HIRING, immigration law demands that a trainer or a lawyer seeking a worker prove Americans can’t or won’t do the job. Velie, an Oklahoman immigration lawyer who works with barns in a bevy of states, submits an ad to the Labor Department. The ad, which describes these jobs alongside thousand-pound athletes of varying moods and delicate value, appears on a job website for roughly 70 days. Ads also might appear in an array of horse racing publications. Velie, after Romans’s news conference before the Derby, fielded a question about how many Americans applied during the most recent window.
“One,” he recalled.
Sometimes, he said later, an American applies with no follow-up, as if to feign interest to sustain benefits.
“In all my years of getting H-2B visas,” Romans said, “I think we’ve had three or four [Americans] to answer and very few last a week. … They just don’t answer the ads. And believe me, it would make my life much, much, much easier.”
That reality has dovetailed, of course, with horse racing’s wane from its mid-20th-century zenith, and O’Neill feels lucky to get a horse-minded collegian or two helping out for a summer. “You know, you get excited when you get an employee who’s born in the States and is interested in the sport,” he said, “but my experience with that is there’re very few of them, and when they do accept a position, they generally don’t hang in there very long.” A “hot walker,” for example, walks multiple horses per day for 40 minutes after their workouts. “You tell an 18-, 19-year-old kid, ‘Hey, I’ve got this job for you,’” O’Neill said. “And they’re like, ‘What is it?’ And you say, ‘It’s about two hours of walking.’ And they’re like, ‘What else you got?’”
“This is a job,” Mora said, “that nobody wants because they’re not brave to get up at 3 or 4 in the morning to start working and then work the labor with the horses from there.”
Exercise rider Tammy Fox, Romans’s longtime partner, reels off a subset of tasks of various jobs such as groom and hot walker: “Wash. … Feed. … Clean stalls. … Put medication on legs. … Put bandages. … Maybe massage. … MagnaWave works on their muscles. … Ice machine fills with cold water. … Hay racks, all the time. …” She says: “The way they’re taken care of, nobody really gets it until they come out and see it. The workers need to be here. It’s like your infant child. You’re not going to take care of your child for a couple of hours and just leave them.”
Romans, 58, views the lack of American interest in such grind not as would some grouchy old coot indicting subsequent generations for sloth. He sees a glass half-full and then some. “I’ve seen the shift in the labor force and the amount of people who want to work with horse racing,” he said. “And it’s just dwindled. But it’s not a negative thing. There’s lots of opportunities in America.”
That metamorphosis has echoed across generations in the specific family stories the trainers know so intricately. Romans has worked for 38 years alongside vital mainstays Cristina and Baldemar Bahena, U.S. citizens from Mexico whose two children together Romans has seen grow to 26, to 23, to caps and to gowns. A 26-year-old daughter aims for veterinary school after finishing at the University of Kentucky, and, Cristina said, “My young one is my little boy, he’s 23, he got a degree from U of L,” the Kentuckian parlance for the University of Louisville.
“My generation, I have no college degree,” Baldemar said, “so I have to do this.” He said, “Yeah, sure, my kids, they don’t want to do this,” and: “They know what I do. They know this job is tough.”
Into the void have come Latino workers with expertise and their own evolving patterns. “Latinos, most who are with the horses, 80 percent of them were on farms [in Mexico or Central America] at some point, working with the horses, and they know the animals left and right,” Mora said. He said he sees fewer Mexicans, more Guatemalans and a mild uptick from countries such as El Salvador and Honduras. Velie, the lawyer with the front-row seat at the visa-gathering process, notes that certain tracks have attracted certain Mexican regions as word-of-mouth flows: At Laurel Park in Maryland, the legal workers might hail from the Pacific Coast state of Michoacán; in Minnesota, from north-central Zacatecas.
“And, you know,” O’Neill said, “they may not have been blessed with the education that you and I have had, but each and every one of them are like a PhD in horse caretaking, you know, caretaking of horses. So they’re really priceless and virtually impossible to replace. So just to be a voice for the horses: You know, the horses would be not in the greatest shape if we lost these hardworking men and women and had to go out there and try to find people who have never worked alongside horses to care for them, because it’s a really — it’s an amazing skill and something that takes years to learn, and we’re blessed to have a lot of amazing men and women that are definitely concerned about the uncertainty right now.”
And so the quiet churning for reform is underway in meetings and on phone lines from the nation’s barns to the nation’s capital. And so, as said one 37-year-old Guatemalan at an American horse track, “I [wake up and] pray for the day and then go working.”
