The Trump Administration’s push to deport millions of people living in the U.S. without legal status is about to surge.
Washington will pump an extra $170 billion into Immigration Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and the Border Patrol between now and September 2029. With a massive budget behind the effort, the goal is to ramp up deportations to at least one million immigrants a year.
That poses a huge threat to immigrant-dependent industries, like agriculture, which has been dealing with an acute labor shortage.
Brandon Raso grows blueberries in New Jersey. Ideally, he would hire 600 workers to harvest the delicate fruit, but this year he could fill only a third of the positions.
“We lost two and a half million pounds of blueberries last year to falling on the ground, just due to the fact that we couldn’t harvest,” said Raso, describing what he said amounted to a $5 million loss.
MORE THAN 70% of farm workers were born overseas, mostly in Mexico, and more than 40% of them are in the country illegally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers claim they turn to foreign nationals because native-born Americans just do not want to do farm work.
“Over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve probably had 150 people apply for a job here. Two of them have been Americans, and those two were just fulfilling a need for their unemployment to apply for a job,” said John Rosenow, a Wisconsin dairy farmer. “So, we really, really appreciate the immigrants that are working for us.”
The Trump administration is conflicted about agriculture’s dependence on immigrant labor. In September, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins set a goal of a “100% American workforce” in agriculture. “With 34 people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly,” Rollins said.
Trump contradicted Rollins before and after her statement, saying the farm workforce should be protected, and after a spate of ICE raids in early summer, primarily against farms in California and a meatpacking plant in Omaha, ICE has largely steered clear of farming operations.
“I’ve heard conflicting reports,” said Zach Rutledge, assistant professor at the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University. “And so, I don’t know where the current policy stands.”
RUTLEDGE HAS tracked a small decline in the number of farm workers from last spring, but he believes the farm workforce is currently stable, though vulnerable.
“There’s been a crisis in farm labor for some time, and it certainly would be exacerbated by immigration enforcement,” said Rutledge. “It certainly doesn’t help.”
It’s unclear if ICE will target farm workers as it ramps up enforcement, but White House Border Czar Tom Homan told Reuters that immigration arrests will “explode greatly next year,” and that enforcement would “absolutely” hit workplaces.
