This is one of my favorite Thanksgiving memes.

It is a reminder of some of the people who deserve our gratitude for the food we eat—not only on Thanksgiving—but every day of the year.

What we don’t like to talk about is the fact that somewhere between 50-75 percent of the workers who grow, harvest, and process the food we eat are undocumented. Especially under the Trump administration, they do their work while living in fear of being deported.

But during this coronavirus crisis, these farmworkers are living with a peculiar irony: they are now considered both illegal and essential. Based on guidelines distributed by the Department of Homeland security, they have been included on the list of “essential workers” who “have a special responsibility to maintain [a] normal work schedule.” As a result, many employers have provided farmworkers with letters identifying them as “essential” in order to protect them while traveling to and from the workplace. Those letters do not, however, protect them from deportation.