How the current immigration crackdown is impacting food and farmworkers

Around 40 percent of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented. The numbers are similar in many other parts of the food system, especially meatpacking, where undocumented immigrants fill an estimated 23 percent of jobs. That left some big questions about how farmers and others in the food and agriculture industries might be impacted by the new administration’s immigration policies, especially given a years-long labor shortage that was already making it difficult to find workers. For the most part, farmers supported the Trump administration in the election, with many believing the president’s claims that he would spare farmworkers from promised mass deportations, focusing instead on “dangerous criminals.”

And for the first few months of the administration, that assumption largely held: Early ICE actions appeared to be targeted operations against activists rather than broad sweeps (with the exception of one allegedly untargeted raid on a Vermont dairy farm in April). When union farmworker and immigration activist Alredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino was seized by ICE in Washington in March, and workers associated with the United Farm Workers were arrested in New York in May, many believed the actions were intended to intimidate workers and stall organizing efforts.

In June, however, that changed thanks to frustration within the administration that the agency wasn’t meeting its deportation goals of 3,000 people per day. To meet those objectives, ICE agents began aggressively targeting worksites, visiting farms and packing sites in California and a meatpacking plant in Nebraska on June 10. Those raids generated an immediate flurry of complaints from farmers and the food industry, who lobbied the Department of Agriculture and the president to hold to earlier promises of an exemption.

Initially, industry pushback appeared to make a difference: President Trump announced on social media that he was reconsidering the policy. But any hope for a pause was stifled by representatives from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, who made it clear that there would be no exemption for raids on farms and other worksites.

Since then, there have been a few more high-profile ICE actions on farms, including one chaotic raid in California that terrorized hundreds of workers and resulted in the death of one man, Jaime Alanís, who fell more than 30 feet from a greenhouse roof.

While the pace of major raids on farms and other food worksites seems to have slowed, smaller raids are still ongoing, targeting workers on their way to farms, at warehouses and other jobsites. And the effects of the raids have already been profound. Families of workers at raided sites often have no information about whether their loved ones have been detained, where they are being held or whether they’ve been deported, and seeking that information out often puts workers’ families at additional risk. For communities that have already long been subject to ICE raids at home and out in their communities, work sites are now another place immigrants — regardless of legal status — fear being singled out because of their appearance, with one worker interviewed by the Guardian describing feeling like they are “being hunted like animals.” As a result, many farmworkers and their families report hiding at home, which has in turn left businesses and streets in many neighborhoods empty.

As FERN detailed in its profile of Haitian workers at a Greeley, Colorado, meatpacking plant, employers in the food industry were quick to capitalize on the influx of workers, offering jobs to those fleeing their countries and creating immigrant communities in towns like Greeley overnight. In many cases, those workers were housed in cramped motels and given some of the most dangerous jobs on the floor, with the local union accusing JBS of trafficking the workers on broken promises of a better life.

It was a flawed program, but it wasn’t the labor abuses that made the CHNV recipients a target: Broad anti-immigrant sentiment and outright racism, including the widely memed false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets, led to widespread backlash against the expanded program. Even before the Trump administration took office, DHS announced that many of the CHNV recipients wouldn’t be granted extensions. Under Trump, DHS moved to fast-track that process and revoked TPS for the Biden-era CHNV recipients by April 2025, putting at least 500,000 at risk for deportation.

As workers have their TPS revoked, their employment authorization is also rescinded. That’s led to mass firings at meatpacking plants and other workplaces. In one plant, more than 200 employees were informed by managers that they had been terminated due to a change in their work authorization. In that plant, CHNV recipients made up about 10 percent of the workforce.

For many workers with TPS visas, losing their jobs has also meant losing their housing. Without those two things, applying for any other form of legal residence in the U.S. is nearly impossible, leaving few options aside from deportation.

What’s next for immigrant workers in the food system?

The Trump administration’s aggressive actions to expel immigrants from public life in the U.S. have been paired with some much-needed public outcry recognizing that the food and farm labor force relies heavily on foreign workers. But it’s hard to interpret the President’s vague assurances that his administration will “work something out” to prevent farmers from losing the highly skilled workers they’ve employed for decades — particularly when others in the administration have pledged “no amnesty” for undocumented people who don’t self-deport.

That’s frustrated many in the food and agriculture industry, who want answers about what kinds of disruptions they can expect moving forward.

But it’s important to understand that while these twists in immigration policy might harm employers in the food system, the food and agriculture industry is not an innocent victim here, nor is it an ally for humane immigration policy. As FarmStand, a legal advocacy group, explains, agriculture has long relied on the threat of deportation to strongarm immigrants into accepting poor working conditions. So while the latest moves on immigration may be encroaching too far for Big Ag’s lobbyists, those same lobbyists have played a big role in blocking common-sense immigration reform, especially paths to citizenship, in the past.

Meanwhile, the Department of Labor (DOL) has announced its plans to expand the H-2A visa program, which provides temporary authorization for seasonal workers. Although the program offers them legal status, that status is not permanent; it is also heavily reliant on employers keeping their end of the bargain when it comes to providing housing, pay and other basic worker protections. And as the program has grown in recent years, so too have complaints about employers failing to meet those provisions — or worse. In addition to complaints about wage theft and substandard housing, investigations have revealed passport confiscation, trafficking and even slavery under the program. To make matters worse, the DOL also announced it would be suspending recently finalized measures to protect workers from these abuses.