President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown is exposing just how dependent some U.S. industries have become on employing illegal immigrants.
After years of looking the other way, the federal government under Trump is cracking down on illegal immigration. Now, many employers in the agriculture, construction and hospitality sectors who built their business models on cheap, unauthorized labor are feeling the pain, Bloomberg reported Friday.
Worksite enforcement has picked up significantly in recent months. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now averaging over 1,600 daily arrests, though immigration hardliners in the administration, such as Trump advisor Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have reportedly called for 3,000 arrests.
Heightened immigration enforcement and the growing presence of ICE agents are hitting the agricultural industry particularly hard, where an estimated 42% of workers lack legal status, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) own data.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told Bloomberg that some illegal immigrant laborers have stopped reporting to dairy farms out of fear of arrest, and even some legal workers are staying away out of concern for being questioned or caught up in the raids.
“Those cows, they have to be milked every eight hours, so if milkhands are gone, what are you going to do?” Miller said to Bloomberg. “It’s sheer panic.”
Likewise, Shay Myers, an onion farm operator in Idaho, said that he has given up planting certain crops because of the difficulty in finding enough workers through legal pathways, according to Bloomberg.
“If we deported everyone here that’s undocumented and working on farms, in fields, we would starve to death,” Myers told Bloomberg.
Some argue that reliance on illegal migrants’ labor is inevitable because most Americans or legal immigrants are not willing to take on labor-intensive jobs. Notably, after a meatpacking plant in Omaha, Nebraska, was raided last week and dozens of illegal immigrant workers were arrested, the facility was reportedly flooded with prospective applicants seeking work.
Trump recently signaled that changes may be coming after reportedly speaking with USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, who urged him to scale back the crackdown in certain sectors, though Rollins has denied the reports.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump posted on Truth Social on June 12. “We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA.”
Just days later, however, Trump border czar Tom Homan said ICE would continue worksite enforcement at farms and hotels.
“Eighty million Americans sent President Trump back to the White House based on his promise to enforce federal immigration law and he is delivering. The Administration is committed to deporting criminal illegal aliens with the primary focus being on dangerous sanctuary cities that reward criminal illegal aliens and put American citizens at risk,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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