MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Horse racing season is here. The fastest horses at some of America's most popular races are supported by dozens of workers. They spend every day grooming, walking, raising the horses to be winners. Well, many of those workers are immigrants. As the 2025 horse racing season ramps up, employers who hire them on visas are watching to see what the Trump administration's stricter immigration policy may mean for them. Here's NPR's Ximena Bustillo with more.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOSEPH DAVID BUHL's "FIRST CALL")
XIMENA BUSTILLO, BYLINE: Racehorse trainers gather around the track at Laurel Park in Maryland. Six horses are led into the green metal gates, and then...
(SOUNDBITE OF STARTING STALLS OPENING)
BUSTILLO: ...They are literally off to the races, galloping around the mile-long sandy track in barely a minute.
(CHEERING)
BUSTILLO: It's an exciting moment as the first muddy horse pushes across the finish line. The jockey, also caked in mud, breathes easy, knowing that he has won the big prize. It's not an easy journey getting a horse to the track, and trainers say that work depends on immigrants.
DIANA PINONES: Everyone is an immigrant. I think we rely a hundred percent on immigrants.
BUSTILLO: That is Diana Pinones. She says H-2B visas, which are for nonagricultural seasonal labor, are needed to find workers to groom, walk and raise the horses. She's the executive assistant at Laurel Park, and she helps the migrant workers settle in.
PINONES: I treat them like family, and they do the same thing - they treat me like family. It's a big family.
BUSTILLO: Family - it's a common theme in the horse racing world. Those in the industry say that it is made possible by the generations of individual families who come to the U.S. on H-2B visas year after year. Pinones said, like many others, her family came to the U.S. from Michoacan.
PINONES: (Through interpreter) My mom and dad dedicated themselves to this work all their lives. As a child, I would come here. That's how I got into this work.
(Speaking Spanish).
BUSTILLO: Mexico is the top country for H-2B visa holders, followed by Jamaica, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The visas are used by employers when they can't find anyone domestically to do the work. H-2B visas have an annual cap of 66,000 - a cap already reached this year. And employers are taking note.
LYNDEN MELMED: They can look and see that the border is much tighter than it was before, and that affects both legal and illegal workers coming across the border.
BUSTILLO: That's Lynden Melmed of BAL, an immigration law firm.
MELMED: What we hear is that they are certainly looking at those visa categories as a way to say, we need to secure a consistent workforce because we're not really sure how these immigration enforcement trends are going to affect, you know, current employees and future employees.
BUSTILLO: The trainers at Laurel Park are set for this year, but Pinones said that there's already uncertainty about visa availability for next year.
PINONES: We still don't see it 'cause everybody who had a visa hadn't come here in October, November, so we still don't see it. But eventually it will hurt the industry.
BUSTILLO: That fear is felt across the board.
FERRIS ALLEN: Come on, girl.
BUSTILLO: Ferris Allen has been a racehorse trainer for 27 years. He stands by a white picket fence, cheering on, taking notes and checking his watch as one of his horses - a glossy brown one with a No. 6 tag - races through the finish.
ALLEN: We finished fourth.
BUSTILLO: As he waits for another one of his horses, named Who Ways So, to run, he tells me the visa process is very complex.
ALLEN: Oftentimes it's very daunting to skate (ph) through all of this stuff.
BUSTILLO: And he has also heard concerns from his workers.
ALLEN: The workers that I have are all within legal status, but that doesn't mean everyone they associate with here is, so they're worried for their friends and for some of their relatives. And they're also worried that if they go home, will they be able to come back?
BUSTILLO: Allen calls these workers essential. Without them, his own family business wouldn't continue. He and others in the industry are cautiously hopeful they will be able to bring in more workers to help them race next season. Ximena Bustillo, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
