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-Lurid Crime Tales-

Gavin Newsom's Illegal Labor Problem

2026-11-13

This is a very long and well researched article. Here a few excerpts...
[City Journal] It’s 5 a.m. in Napa Valley and the field workers have been picking grapes for an hour. Floodlights illuminate the pitch darkness, bringing to life the vines running up and down the sloping hillside. Off in the distance, a tractor rumbles, pulling a small trailer filled with plastic buckets that will soon be filled with grapes. Spanish chatter fills the air as the workers’ hands move in quick, practiced motions. They work at night to escape the heat. It’s cold enough now that their breath is visible, hanging like smoke before dissipating in the predawn darkness.

During harvest season in the Napa Valley, similar scenes play out at vineyard after vineyard, night after night. Entire fields picked clean, one vine at a time, bringing $11 billion to the local economy every year. The grapes picked at this particular field, on this particular morning, are sweet to the taste, and will soon be crushed to make Cabernet Sauvignon, the full-bodied red wine for which the region is known.

Nearby, in Pope Valley, sits the Oso Vineyard, a sprawling, 129-acre site featuring Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, Petite Sirah, and Petit Verdot grapes. In 2022, the PlumpJack Collection of Wineries—part of the wine and hospitality business founded by California Governor Gavin Newsom—purchased Oso for $14.5 million.

Newsom did not divest his financial stake in PlumpJack when he was elected governor. Between 2019 and 2024, tax returns for him and his wife show at least $11 million in income, most of it coming from wineries, restaurants, and other investments.

For years, Newsom’s business has contracted the services of a vineyard management company with a long history of employing illegal labor. And as governor, Newsom has leveraged tax dollars to facilitate the presence of illegal immigrants in California, which, in turn, helps prop up the struggling Napa wine industry from which he profits.

In the early 1960s, as the Napa wine boom was taking off, Salvador Renteria arrived in the valley on a Greyhound bus. An illegal immigrant from the Mexican state of Jalisco, Renteria began working as a vineyard laborer in 1964, before a series of promotions led him to the ranks of management. In 1987, he struck out on his own and founded Renteria Vineyard Management (RVM), now one of the largest vineyard management companies in Napa Valley.

In 1995, Salvador’s son, Oscar, took over the family business. Oscar had begun working the fields at age 11. Now, under his stewardship, RVM manages more than "2,200 acres and employ[s] 80 full-time and up to 400 seasonal workers." The Napa Valley Grapegrowers recently named Oscar Renteria its Grower of the Year.

PlumpJack contracts RVM to manage its field operations at the property. A PlumpJack website identifies Oscar Renteria as Oso’s "long-time vineyard manager." RVM’s website lists CADE Estate Winery as one of its active clients, which has sourced a significant percentage of its grapes from the Oso property. We contacted PlumpJack and RVM, neither of whom disputed the existence of such a contract.

During multiple reporting trips to Napa, we spoke with industry sources. They told us that the region’s field workers are primarily composed of two categories: those who live in the region (many of whom are illegal immigrants), and those brought to the country under the federal H-2A visa program. The H-2A program allows employers to recruit "nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature."

We downloaded a trove of Department of Labor data. Given the files’ size—one of the spreadsheets had more than 400,000 entries—we fed them into two different large language models. We asked the systems to search for H-2A applications associated with RVM and Newsom’s wineries, either directly or through third-party contractors.

At first, Newsom’s Oso vineyard seems to have had a paper trail. PlumpJack bought the Oso Vineyard from Michael Mondavi Family Estate in August 2022. Three H-2A cases appear to have listed Oso as a worksite in 2022, and two more did so in 2023. A company named "Mendoza Bros. Harvesting" appears to have filed both 2023 applications under a worksite named "New Piña Vineyard Management." How this relates to Renteria’s status as the site’s "long-time" manager is unclear.

Later, however, the trail seems to disappear. After 2023, the systems found no further H-2A worksite listings for Oso. We found no application naming RVM or PlumpJack as the employer and no worksite listings matching the names or known addresses of PlumpJack’s other Napa estates.

Since RVM does not appear to source its large seasonal workforce from the H-2A program, it likely hires workers living in the region. Research papers from the Migration Policy Institute, a left-wing think tank, estimate that between one-quarter and one-third of Napa’s overall immigrant population is "unauthorized," including 27 percent of the workers in the agricultural sector. But according to multiple industry sources in Napa, the real percentage of illegals working in the vineyards is considerably higher.

"I think it’s 80 percent," said the owner of a vineyard management company, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity. "If you’re legal, you have your Green Card, you have your driver’s license and all these things, you don’t want to be working in the vineyards."

Napa County is now home to three taxpayer-funded farmworker housing complexes—in Napa, in St. Helena, and in Calistoga. There, farmworkers receive subsidized living quarters, on-site health care, English classes, and legal services. The complexes, operated as public-private partnerships, average an occupancy rate of 96 percent, according to county statistics. The state began funding the facilities to the tune of $250,000 annually during Newsom’s first full year in office. In September 2026, Newsom signed A.B. 1890, increasing the state’s annual contribution to up to $500,000.

We confirmed that illegal immigrants are welcome at the housing complexes. At the complex in Calistoga, we spoke to a man who told us a fellow resident had gone to watch the World Cup in Los Angeles, where he was captured by ICE and deported. When we returned the next day to interview more residents, the manager told us to leave, saying the men were worried we were "La Migra," a Spanish term for immigration authorities. At another facility, the manager confirmed illegals were allowed to reside there, saying many residents were afraid of immigration authorities.

The use of public funds to house illegal immigrants, who then work in Napa’s wine industry, allows vineyard owners partially to offset costs onto taxpayers. It also represents just one way—among many—that government policy has been leveraged during the Newsom administration to facilitate illegal labor in California.

As governor, Newsom and his wife have earned millions from his business ventures and investment holdings, with his wineries accounting for much of that income. The couple has "earned at least $11 million since he took office," according to a 2026 report from the Los Angeles Times.

Under Newsom, California runs America’s largest welfare system, spending more than $180 billion annually on food, health care, and other social programs. To pay for it all, California imposes the nation’s highest tax rates.

As recently reported by City Journal, California now oversees a "shadow welfare system" that provides illegal immigrants with health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, and more. At least one program, California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants, specifically bars American citizens from participation. California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the past fiscal year. Newsom has even bragged about his "controversial" decision to extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants. Meantime, his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, encourages people to sign up for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a program that assures applicants that "no Social Security number" is "no problem."

Under Newsom, the California Department of Food and Agriculture awarded more than $6 million to the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, a nonprofit that runs the California Farmer Relief Fund, which prioritizes "BIPOC, immigrant, and undocumented farmers." The Newsom administration has also heavily funded immigration legal services and removal-defense organizations, and sued the Trump administration over federal immigration policy.

We sent multiple requests for comment on this story. Izzy Gardon, a Newsom spokesman, told us that the governor "placed his business interests in a blind trust when he took office in 2019" and "has no involvement in PlumpJack’s operations or management." A PlumpJack spokesperson said the company expects "all vendors working with [it] to comply with the law." Renteria Vineyard Management did not respond to our request.
It's fun to visit California wineries. Many of the smaller wineries offer not only tastings at very nominal prices but educational tours of the wineries featuring the wine making process. You get to see how the grapes are processed and crushed, how the juice is fermented and aged. Sometimes you even get to see them bottling the wine and packaging the bottles. I have personally opened the tap of a huge stainless steel vat to fill my own glass with gewurzstraminer. The lady who guided us smiled as I sipped. It was a hot day, the wine was cool, sweet, refreshing and excellent.

I would hazard a guess that many of the winery owners are small to medium sized business owners and farmers who would tend to be conservatives at heart. But it's troubling to learn about certain aspects of the harvest, especially at Plumpjack.

Posted by:Abu Uluque

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