U.S. district Judge Paul Maloney of the Western District of Michigan issued a ruling late Friday denying a request from farm workers and their employers for an injunction against an emergency order issued by the Michigan Department of Health & Human Services (MDHHS) on Aug. 3.

Maloney ruled that the COVID-19 testing mandate for farm workers on operations with 20 or more employees called for in the MDHHS order was not discriminatory against Latino farm workers.

As a result of Maloney’s ruling, the MDHHS order is still in effect, meaning an estimated 75,000 Latino farm workers are required to be tested by Aug. 24 under the department's mandate.

“Obviously, farm workers and their employers are disappointed with the judge’s ruling,” Michigan Farm Bureau manager of government relations Rob Anderson said. “The MDHHS emergency order has the potential to completely uproot the lives of many Latino agricultural workers and threatens their livelihoods.

“We’re also hearing, anecdotally, that farm workers are making the decision that they’re not going to submit to the testing and that they will seek work in other industries or in other states where this testing mandate isn’t in place to keep their jobs,” he said.

Michigan agriculture has taken COVID-19 very seriously, Anderson said, and has adopted best practices to protect all farm workers since the inception of the pandemic, long before the MDHHS emergency order was issued on Aug. 3.

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