“destroy our lives out here.” It was an incredibly sensitive subject. “It’s kind of a third rail among dairy farmers,” Nelson said. “Whenever I go to a dairy farm, I never ask about the immigrant-labor thing unless they bring it up themselves.”

Could I really be sure that was the same guy and the same Yukon? A

“They think you are going to mess with their lifestyle or take it away, interfere with it.”

“If they come in town, then we have to talk about it, find out what’s going on, why, whether to participate, and make sure our town’s not disrupted,”

of course

ormer Canadian trade minister, Ed Fast, recently complained to the country’s Financial Post

“We love Canada,” Trump said on September 18. “They cannot continue to charge us 300 percent for dairy products.” At a hearing on the issue in March, Nunes attacked Canada for “getting away with murder in their dairy industry.”

massive political hypocrisy

“The industry itself in the United States has admitted they wouldn’t be viable if they couldn’t use undocumented workers,”

even though

It was suspicious

On the other hand

What if an article triggered an ICE raid? Was there even a story here, anyway?

And it helped explain the reaction I received in Sibley.

“If you employ someone you know is not legal, you are committing a federal crime,” he wrote.

“illegal alien harboring”

The car was registered in Tulare, California.

haphazardly

Was he watching me?

Not only was I being followed, but I was also being watched, and my sources were being contacted by NuStar.

“The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans. As far as I’m concerned, they’re Iowans with better food.” Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

“If I see something, I’m not going to report it to ICE,” he said. “It’s not my job.” He added, “That’s not to say that everybody in town that lives here is legal. We don’t go knocking door-to-door to say, ‘Are you, are you not?’ ”

Getty Images When I walked in the front door of the mayor’s office, I had noticed a mud-spattered white Yukon parked outside. As I was driving to my next interview, I looked in the rearview mirror and noticed the white Yukon again. I drove aimlessly, crisscrossing streets from one end of town to the other. Everywhere I turned, the white Yukon appeared. I was being followed. When I turned the tables and followed the car back, it raced off. We played cat and mouse like that for more than an hour until I finally got a good glimpse of the driver: It was a middle-aged woman with curly, red hair who had a cell phone stuck to her left ear. The cat-and-mouse game started to feel a little dangerous, so I left town for a couple hours. On my way back into Sibley, the same car passed me on the highway. This time, the chubby man from the Lantern was driving. He smiled and waved.

“He has a right to his opinion.”

“doesn’t have any bearing on our crime rate at all.”

a deputy in the county sheriff’s office,

“I told him to go see Nunes, and that didn’t go very good,”

impressively enlightened when it came to Sibley’s immigrant population.

though

According to Johnson

“Dairy farmers are very deeply patriotic and American, and yet here they are hiring these people who are not American,” he said. “And maybe they feel a little shame over that or feel like they are exploiting [people] and they don’t want that to come to light.”

of course

chubby man eyeing me.

“This article,” she said, “is going to destroy families.”

It made no sense

You have a phone call,” she told Nelson.“A phone call?”

“It would be a disaster for the dairies,” he said. “They would suddenly have nobody to milk or feed the cows. I don’t know what they would do.”

hypothetically

“Sure,” she said, “if you’re kind and truthful and honest.”

ocumented or not.

“They are immigrants and Devin is a very strong supporter of Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump wants to shut down all of the immigration, and here is his family benefiting from immigrant labor,”

Think about the story

the Dairy Star reporter

“They want to send ’em all back to Mexico and have them start over. What a crock of malarkey. Who’s gonna milk the cows?”

Everyone’s got this feeling that in agriculture, we, the employers, are going to be criminalized,” the first area dairy farmer I had spoken to said. “I’ve talked to Steve King face-to-face, and that guy doesn’t care one iota about us. He does not care. He believes that if you have one undocumented worker on your place, you should probably go to prison and we need to get as many undocumented people out of here as possible.”

The absurdity

“I’ve talked to Steve King face-to-face, and that guy doesn’t care one iota about us. He does not care."

“People are going to go broke,”

“It’s next to impossible,” the first dairy farmer said. “There’s no dang way.

“They show you a Social Security card, we take out Social Security taxes. Where’d they get the card? I have no idea.”

“I just look at the document—Hey, this looks like a good driver’s license, permanent resident card, whatever the case is—and that’s what you go with,”

“It would be great if we had enough unemployed Americans in northwest Iowa to milk the cows. But there’s just not. We have a very tight labor pool around here.”

“Eighty percent of the Latino population out here in northwest Iowa is undocumented,”

unthinkable

Apparently

“I don’t want to be bothered anymore.” As he walked to his truck, he looked back and warned me: “If I see you again, I’m gonna get upset.”

I’m taking your license plate down and reporting you to the sheriff,” he said. “I don’t want to be bothered.”

It didn’t go well.

A source told me

According to Dairy Star,

“I don’t agree with him on that!”

Perhaps

“a safe place where everyone is welcome.”

“Do not fear for I have redeemed you. I have summoned you by name. You are mine.”

His name was Bailey. He was seventeen and he had died thirteen days ago. This was the first day the coffee shop had been open since his death.

It came out of nowhere

“My son recently took his life.”

knocked the wind out of me

Well, we don’t agree with him on that!”

“You should talk to Gene,” she said.

“it would be a good deal”

“spilling very innocent blood.” Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

“Democrat immigration policies

I was visiting the state just days after police found the body of Mollie Tibbetts, who was allegedly killed by an undocumented worker from a dairy farm, and everyone was talking about immigration. I

more diversity than you might expect

“Dutch Reformed and very religious.”

“Are you a believer?”

“tend to be very conservative, and of course they all are Trump backers,”

H

“They said, ‘Our brother’s involved in politics and we’re not going to talk about it and that’s that,’ ” Nelson told me. “And I said, ‘Okay, we’re here to talk about dairy farms.’ ”

“the first Nunes to be born outside of California or Portugal,”

“recent transplants to the Midwest,”

Strange

this fact

unusual

familiar refrain

For example

As far as I could tell

apparently

particularly

presumably

So here’s the secret

What is strange is that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public—for more than a decade.

“The cows are not far from his mind. He keeps in regular contact with his brother and father about their dairy farm.”

“The Dairy Farmer Overseeing U. S. Spies and the Russia Hack Investigation”—“

“It’s 105 degrees as I stand with Rep. Devin Nunes on his family’s dairy farm.”

As recently as

“I feel as if I had just shaken hands with all my ancestors.”

“worked and saved enough money to buy a 640-acre farm outside Tulare.” T

, “a fertile, sunny Eden,”

celebrated

Which brings us back

long

but

reliably

Indeed

alleged

a bona fide conspiracy theoris

In hindsight,

at all costs

Are they hiding something politically explosive?

Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret