As bird flu continues to spread across the San Joaquin Valley, county public health officials are working to stop transmission to humans by focusing on the group most at risk – dairy farm workers. 

But there’s a catch. According to researchers, a majority of dairy farm workers are immigrants, including many who are undocumented. Now, amid sweeping federal immigration raids across the country, some immigrants have stopped engaging with government agencies at any level for fear of harassment and even deportation.  

“For symptomatic employees, we worry about some of them coming forward because of the current political milieu and fear of whatever their immigration status is,” said San Joaquin County Public Health Officer Dr. Maggie Park. “We really want to reassure people who work on farms that public health agencies are here to help them. We are not here to check on their immigration status.”

To support that effort, the county has tapped El Concilio, a nonprofit community-based organization that coordinates services, including healthcare, for Hispanic communities in the Valley. Together, El Concilio and the San Joaquin County Public Health Department are passing out bird flu test kits and offering flu and COVID vaccinations in an effort to keep farm workers healthy and working.

El Concilio spent the COVID-19 pandemic connecting Hispanic residents in the Valley with health services and education. Inez Ruiz-Huston, El Concilio’s Vice President of Civic Engagement, said one lesson from that time was that health outreach teams need to get information to individuals at least five times before they’re likely to take action on it. Now, they’re applying that approach as they address bird flu.

“First off, we try to identify our families or workers that do already work in the poultry or dairy area,” she said “Our messaging is a little bit more different, because we know families don’t like to miss work. They want to continue working. So for us, most of the messaging is ‘we want to make sure you get vaccinated so you don’t get as sick and then you don’t miss as much work.’”

As El Concilio does its work, the organization is facing some of the same challenges as those they’re trying to help. Jose Rodriguez, president and CEO of El Concilio, said that since last year’s presidential election, the organization has become a target of harassment. 

“It started right after Trump got elected, in terms of harassing calls,” Rodriquez said. “We had somebody drop off like a Trump manifesto to us. We get harassing phone calls. We get harassing messages on Facebook. It’s just the climate. There’s an anti-immigrant climate and some people are taking it further than they should.” 

Last week, someone threw rocks through the windows of El Concilio’s offices in Stockton.

“We’ve gotten threats,” Rodriguez said. “We’ve gotten vandalism at several of our locations so we’re just trying to be cautious and put up a few more cameras and a few more lights and just advise our staff to be careful.”

Also known as H5N1 or avian flu, bird flu has been decimating chicken farms and raging though cattle herds across the Central Valley since last fall. Last year, the virus hit the San Joaquin Valley harder than anywhere else in the country.

Only four human cases of bird flu were documented in Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties last year, and no new cases were reported in 2025. Thus far, no human-to-human transmission has been reported anywhere in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Infected cattle herds have been the number one cause of human infection to date, according to the California Department of Public Health’s dashboard on human cases of bird flu. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, reports new infections of bird flu in cattle herds every 30 days. New herds of infected cattle were reported in California as recently as Feb. 12.

According to researchers, 79% of milk produced in the U.S. comes from farms that employ immigrant, often undocumented, workers, and about one-third of dairy farms need immigrant workers to stay in business. 

Rodriguez said the current political climate has made helping local farm workers stay healthy more challenging than usual. In recent months, he said, El Concilio has received fewer requests for services, and his staff has started to meet with some families in their homes where they feel safer. 

“There have been less people coming out, but one of the things that we’re trying to do is create a sense of normalcy and let people know that our events are safe and secure,” he said. “We’re going to do everything that we can to protect them. If anything should happen, if ICE shows up, we’ll have attorneys here to deal with that. So we just want to remind people that despite what’s going on, we’re still going to plug ahead, and we can’t let this basically control our lives.”

Vivienne Aguilar is the health equity reporter at the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative.