Kristi Noem's neighbors hit with immigration audit that decimates their workforce
LAKE NORDEN — The names on the list included some of Dorothy Elliott’s best employees: hardworking, reliable, honest.
Most had been working at Drumgoon Dairy for years. Some worked there for nearly two decades, playing a role in the operation’s expansion and success.
But after an audit of the dairy at the end of May by the federal Department of Homeland Security, 38 of those employees are gone.
The department said they each had inaccurate, outdated or incomplete proof of U.S. citizenship or permission to work in the country.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s eastern South Dakota home. Elliott asked the affected employees for updated documentation but ultimately had to fire those who weren’t able to adequately resolve the problems with their documents. One person returned home because his visa was expiring, and another quit.
The audit decimated Elliott’s workforce, once more than 50 employees, dropping it to just 16.
Audits at dairy farms under the Trump administration’s escalated immigration enforcement efforts have “created unrest” among workers and owners, Elliott said. It’s made for a tough summer in an industry that was flourishing after decades of support from state government.
Elliott’s remaining employees have been working without breaks, she said. Without a pathway or plan to create a sustainable workforce in agriculture and by “removing everyone working in it,” she worries some agricultural operations will go out of business. She hopes Drumgoon isn’t one of them.
“Basically, we’ve turned off the tap, but we’ve done nothing to create a solution as to how we find employees for the dairy industry,” she said.
Never previously audited
Elliott is required to file I-9 forms with documentation proving her workers’ identity and eligibility to work in the U.S. It puts employers in a difficult position, said Scott VanderWal, president of the South Dakota Farm Bureau, because applicants may present fraudulent documents an employer doesn’t catch. Yet employers could also be sued for mistakenly rejecting valid documents.
“If employers are presented with documentation that looks real and legitimate, they’re obligated to accept it,” VanderWal said. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offers similar guidance, saying employers must accept documentation if it “reasonably appears to be genuine.”
Elliott could use the federal government’s web-based system, E-Verify, that allows employers to confirm their employees’ eligibility to work in the country. But E-Verify is not mandated for new hires in South Dakota, and Elliott said she doesn’t use it because of “unreliable results.” Organizations ranging from the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute to the American Civil Liberties Union have opposed the use of E-Verify, citing reasons including errors that cost people jobs because the system wrongly flagged them.
So Elliott evaluates applicants’ documents herself. If their IDs are out of date or if they have a visa and are applying from another farm without returning home, she passes on hiring them. She’s turned people away a dozen times over the years, she said.
Drumgoon was never audited before. In her past dealings with the Department of Homeland Security during nearly two decades of running the dairy, Elliott said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would merely tell her they were searching for a person and ask for a notification if the person applied for a job.
This time was different. After an audit, employers are required to terminate unauthorized workers who can’t prove their employability, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson. Audits — which are distinct from raids or other immigration enforcement operations — are meant to ensure businesses comply with federal employment laws.
Elliott does not know where her 38 former employees went. They could be working at other dairies in the U.S. They could have left the country. They could be anywhere.
Because the dairy is near a farm owned by Noem, the former governor of South Dakota, and because Noem was in the state during the month of the audit to receive an honorary degree, South Dakota Searchlight asked the Department of Homeland Security if Noem had a direct role in the audit. The department didn’t respond to the question.
Elliott declined to talk about Noem, saying she recognizes that federal immigration authorities “have a job to do.”
South Dakota Farmers Union President Doug Sombke called federal dairy audits “stupid,” because they needlessly displace workers.
“Why the heck can’t we continue to use them there as an intern or apprentice or whatever you want to call it and make it legal? Why is it so important we grab them and call them a criminal? No one wants those jobs,” Sombke said. “I don’t understand why you’d cripple or cause problems for a labor shortage when all you have to do is get them legalized.”
Immigrants hiring immigrants
Elliott’s connection to immigrants isn’t limited to her employees. She was born in the United States but married her husband, Rodney, in Northern Ireland, where they had their children.
Eliott worked in health care and her husband operated their 140-cow dairy farm in Northern Ireland when a newspaper ad, “Wanted: Dairy farmers in South Dakota,” caught their attention. Moving to America meant fewer regulations, cheaper land, cheaper feed and the ability to grow their business, she said.
The couple used the EB-5 investment-for-visa program to secure backers for their operation, opened the dairy in 2006, paid off the investors within a few years and have been expanding ever since. They started with about 1,500 cows in 2006 and have grown to 6,500.
Elliott’s children got their citizenship shortly after moving to the U.S., and her husband became a citizen about eight years after they moved. That experience helps her empathize with her workers, many of whom are Hispanic. She said everything they’re doing is to support their families back home, even though many aren’t able to see their families for years at a time.
“All they’re guilty of is working and doing a job that isn’t currently being filled by an American,” Elliott said.
Taneeza Islam advocates for immigrants as executive director of South Dakota Voices for Peace. She’s spoken to immigrant workers in other industries who were scared and confused after being terminated due to stricter immigration enforcement.
“We have two very separate worlds right now: the community that’s impacted and worried about getting detained and deported, and the community that doesn’t know this is happening here,” Islam said.
State recruited dairies
The Elliotts are among many new South Dakotans who’ve helped the dairy industry boom in the last two decades. Then-governor and now-U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican, focused on supporting the industry in the early 2000s, which included efforts to recruit farmers from overseas.
In 2010, South Dakota’s dairy industry had an economic impact of $1.27 billion. By 2023, that had grown to $5.67 billion.
“We’ve achieved our goals we set out for ourselves: build a dairy, milk cows and grow the dairy industry in South Dakota,” Elliott said. “Is it a sustainable goal if there’s nobody to work on these dairies? No. So all the time, money, effort, investment and hard work that has gone into it will be null and void if there isn’t a workforce.”
Sombke, the state Farmers Union president, said the state’s investment in dairy “has been a good thing,” but he isn’t surprised by the recent disruption in the industry.
South Dakota Searchlight requested the number of audits conducted in South Dakota so far in 2025, but a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the department “does not disclose specific data on audits or enforcement actions by state or industry.”
Sombke said dairy audits are “way up” in the state compared to last year. He said nobody should be surprised to find workers at dairies without permission to be in the country.
“What do you expect? The unemployment rate is less than 2% in the state,” Sombke said. “You’re going to be looking for labor anywhere you can find it.”
Aftermath of an audit
Drumgoon Dairy’s remaining employees have made mistakes because of the long hours they’ve had to cover — like reversing a payloader into a manure pond — or because they’re new to working on the farm.
“Some of them only get one or two days off in a 15-day period,” Elliott said. “But what else do you do? Do you just let cows starve or calves die because there’s no one there to take care of them?”
Some nearby farms sent workers to help at Drumgoon for a couple of days at a time this summer after the audit. Elliott and her husband have spent over $110,000 on recruiters and transportation so far to hire 22 visa workers from Mexico. But the visas come with restrictions on the types of jobs workers can do, so Elliott hired a dozen or so new employees locally, and still wants to hire another 10 to 15 people to replace terminated staff.
Elliott is struggling to find local applicants, which she is required by law to attempt before hiring visa workers.
“If raising wages even more will bring Americans to work on the farm, we can try it,” Elliott said, “but there is a limit to how high you can raise wages when you don’t get to set the price of milk. Can I afford to pay a milker $25 an hour? At some point, you’d produce milk for more than you’re receiving for it.”
Trump could lead immigration reforms, Thune says
After a panel discussion at the annual Dakotafest agricultural trade show in Mitchell in August, U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, told South Dakota Searchlight that he believes President Donald Trump is interested in legal immigration and work visa reforms.
“If we can find some willing partners in the Democrats, some sort of an immigration policy or a piece of legislation that we could pass is not outside the realm of possibility,” Thune said. “Ultimately, that’s the best long-term solution, and I’ve heard him talk about it.”
Sen. Rounds told Searchlight that as more people are deported and industries are disrupted, “we will get enough support from the administration to begin looking at a legal system again.”
Republican U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, who is running for South Dakota governor next year, said some visa programs should be modified to meet the needs of the dairy industry. Some visas are seasonal programs that require participants to return home after a few months. The programs don’t fit the needs of dairy operations that require workers year-round.
Elliott has broached the issue for years to Thune, Johnson, Rounds and other federal officials.
“All I hear is, ‘I’ll mention that. We’ll talk about that.’ But nothing,” Elliott said. “What we hear is there is absolutely no passion for any kind of change to the status quo.”
Farmers suggest solutions
Lynn Boadwine of Boadwine Farms in Baltic has “run out of gas” trying to advocate for visa and immigration policy changes to support the dairy industry. But he was heartened to hear the congressional delegates’ comments.
“There’s rhetoric, but are you really working on it?” Boadwine said. “I hope they are, because the clock is really ticking on all of these issues and we’re going to start to run out of people.”
Boadwine shared immigration reform ideas with congressional offices but hasn’t heard back on the topic. His hope is to modernize and simplify the H-2A visa program for dairies. His proposal would remove the seasonality requirement and allow workers in the country without legal permission to transition to guest-worker status. Long-term guest workers would have a path toward permanent residency by proving they are law-abiding, hardworking employees.
VanderWal, with the South Dakota Farm Bureau, said he met this spring with Noem in Washington, D.C., in his capacity as vice president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. He urged Noem and the Trump administration to back off on audits in the agricultural industry in hopes that Congress would “fix the system.”
“We wanted to impress upon the administration that if they started removing illegal workers up and down the food chain, from production to processing to transportation to grocery stores to restaurants, we’d see a disaster worse than the pandemic,” VanderWal said.
The administration has since “backed off ag,” VanderWal said, but the consequences linger for producers like the Elliotts and their employees. He said that unless President Trump “gets real forceful and goes after it,” he doesn’t expect Congress to undertake legal immigration reforms.
Economic consequence predicted
At Drumgoon Dairy, Elliott has tried automating aspects of her operation. She and her husband put in 20 robots a few years ago with the expectation they could hire students from nearby Lake Area Technical College’s robotics program to maintain them.
They posted robotics maintenance positions to attract graduates, but the response was deflating.
“To date, no one,” Elliott said.
She plans to remove the robots because the cost of running and servicing them is too expensive. So far, they’ve sold three. If the cost of technology continues to be prohibitive or there aren’t reforms to workforce visa or immigration programs, she said, “I wonder how we will become a sustainable industry.”
Elliott fears there will be consequences and higher prices for milk and other consumer dairy products without action at the federal level. Boadwine agreed.
“If we keep down this road we’ll have no choice but to import more food,” Boadwine said, “and the reason we’d import more is because it’s gotten so much more expensive here because we crippled ourselves.”
This story was originally produced by South Dakota Searchlight, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.