Why would the Nuneses, Steve King, and an obscure dairy publication all conspire to hide the fact that the congressman’s family sold its farm and moved to Iowa? I went to Sibley to find out. Things got a little strange.

The first thing I did when I landed in Iowa, on August 27, was call Jerry Nelson, the author of the Dairy Star article. I’d read through Nelson’s other online articles. He’s funny and smart and could easily be a columnist at a major newspaper. When he was thirty, he almost died in a bizarre manure-pit accident, and he told me that since then he’s lived every day like it’s a blessing.

He was upfront and clear about why Representative Nunes wasn’t included in the Dairy Star profile of the Nunes family and the move to Iowa: The family asked him not to mention Devin. “They said, ‘Our brother’s involved in politics and we’re not going to talk about it and that’s that,’?” Nelson told me. “And I said, ‘Okay, we’re here to talk about dairy farms.’?”

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OOther dairy farmers in the area helped me understand why the Nunes family might be so secretive about the farm: Midwestern dairies tend to run on undocumented labor. The northwest-Iowa dairy community is small. Most of the farmers know one another, and most belong to a regional trade group called the Western Iowa Dairy Alliance (though WIDA told me NuStar is not a member). One dairy farmer said that the threat of raids from ICE is so acute that WIDA members have discussed forming a NATO-like pact that would treat a raid on one dairy as a raid on all of them. The other pact members would provide labor to the raided dairy until it got back on its feet.