Around half of California's farmworkers lack legal immigration status, though the United Farm Workers union says the number is much higher.

Summary:

Carolina Sanchez joined the United Farm Workers union in 2016 after the blueberry farm where she worked changed the daily rate for each pound she picked.

“They said if you don’t like what you’re paid, you can go home,” Sanchez said.

She organized the 500 workers at the Delano farm to strike with the UFW’s support. Eventually, they won a union contract, and Sanchez was elected as the union representative at her workplace.

This month, Sanchez began mobilizing her fellow workers to attend a march she was leading Monday, César Chávez Day. union rally Former UFW President Arturo Rodriguez addresses members at the rally Monday in Memorial Park in Delano, Calif.Iris Kim / NBC News

Sixty years after the historic Delano grape strike, which launched Chávez’s 280-mile march to Sacramento with Filipino American and Mexican American farmworkers, over 5,000 United Farm Worker members and other union members gathered Monday in Delano for a march to the Forty Acres site where Chávez held his first public fast.

This year’s march focused on the Trump administration’s recent immigration policies, in the hope that the rally, called “con estas manos,” or “with these hands,” reminds people about the workers who grow and pick their food.

Farmworkers in California, who grow one-third of the country’s vegetables and three-fourths of its fruits and nuts, have reported growing fear and anxiety over a series of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests and deportations in the Central Valley. Around half of California’s farmworkers are undocumented, according to a study by the University of California, Irvine, and according to the U.S. Agriculture Department, about 42% nationwide lack legal immigration status.

UFW Secretary Treasurer Armando Elenes said those numbers tend to be underreported. “We estimate it’s closer to 60 or 70 percent undocumented farmworkers" in California, he said.

Elenes said ICE has detained and deported around 200 farmworkers in Kern County. He said that calling for more temporary work visas isn’t enough and that there’s a need for broader labor protections for workers who fear being rounded up and separated from their families.