For Candice Lyall, cherry harvest is always a race against the clock.

Eastern Washington is famous for its cherries, and in the fourth-generation farmer’s lush orchards, not far from Columbia River, there’s just a short window when they are the perfect ripeness. Wait too long and they are too soft for sale.

And they must be picked by hand. Lots of them.

Finding those hands locally can be a challenge. Like other growers, some of her workers are foreign-born, whose presence is reflected in the Hispanic restaurants in the nearby 3,300-resident town of Mattawa.

But this summer the harvest coincided with President Donald Trump’s mass deportation sweeps. Rumors swirled of roadway checkpoints. More than 100 workers who started Lyall’s harvest dwindled to 30 by the second week, leading her farm to struggle to get cherries picked in time.