ICE Is Raiding Farms Again

The Trump administration has reversed its position on immigration enforcement in the farm sector — again. Less than a week after announcing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, would halt its raids on agricultural facilities, the Department of Homeland Security announced that actually, the raids will continue as planned. The abrupt back-and-forth is likely to have ripple effects in the agricultural sector, including the meat and dairy industries. Some of the costs may land at the feet of American consumers.

In the U.S., immigration policy, and its enforcement, has serious consequences for the food and agriculture sectors. As of 2022, two-thirds of all hired crop farmworkers in the United States were foreign-born, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the majority of them were not authorized to work in the United States. Immigrants also make up 51 percent of all dairy workers, according to a 2015 study, and 42 percent of all meatpacking employees, according to the American Immigration Council.

ICE, a division of DHS, has been arresting and detaining immigrants at an accelerated rate since the second Trump administration assumed power. The agency reported 32,809 enforcement arrests in the first 50 days of the presidency, and according to TRAC, an organization that collects and collates data about the federal government, the administration detained at least 185,394 immigrants and deported over 162,000 during the first four full months of President Donald Trump’s second term.

“If you restrict migrant labor, then what ends up happening is you have to offer that job to ‘legal’ U.S. citizens,” Andrew Muhammed, professor of agricultural resource economics at the University of Tennessee, tells Sentient. “But you have to actually pay U.S. citizens a wage that’s likely far higher.” While this might appeal to some U.S. workers — those willing to take up the grueling and dangerous jobs in the sector — it would also probably make food more expensive.

Why farms rely on immigrant labor

The agriculture industry depends on immigrant labor to function. Migrant workers are often given the most unpleasant and dangerous jobs (like slaughterhouse and meatpacking work) in the sector, and enforcement of basic labor protections is notoriously lax in agriculture. Immigrants are often paid less than U.S. citizens, and undocumented immigrants in particular are common targets of wage theft, sub-minimum wage and other predatory wage practices that, in effect, allow employers to pay them less than they would pay American workers.

When workers are arrested or deported, employers might choose to replace them with more-expensive American workers to minimize their future exposure to ICE raids. The tactic of appealing to U.S. workers is already being trialed at a new meatpacking plant in North Platte, Nebraska. Ultimately, immigration raids on agricultural facilities can make it more expensive to be a food producer — which could result in higher food prices.

Trump pledged to lower food costs during his campaign, but they’ve gone up since he took office, which could be one factor in the flip-flopping on farm raids we’re currently seeing.

What’s going on with the recent ICE raids?

On June 6, the administration launched a series of ICE raids at workplaces in Los Angeles. This led to mass protests and clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement in the heavily Democratic, left-leaning city and brought significant media attention to the administration’s immigration policies, including similar ICE raids at workplaces in other parts of the country.

On June 10, ICE agents raided a meatpacking plant in Omaha, Nebraska. They arrested 76 employees suspected of being in the country illegally, according to the Department of Homeland Security, in what was ultimately the largest worksite immigration raid in the state since the beginning of the year.

Two days later, however, Trump adopted an uncharacteristically sympathetic tone while discussing undocumented immigrants in the restaurant, hotel and agricultural sectors, saying that “our farmers are being hurt badly” by his immigration crackdown and that “we can’t do that to our farmers.”

That same day, ICE instructed its agents to “hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”

But the reprieve didn’t last long: Just four days later, DHS reversed course and instructed ICE agents to resume immigration raids on agricultural facilities, restaurants and hotels.

The administration hasn’t given any reasons for the swift policy flip-flop. But various reports claimed that there were internal divisions in the White House regarding the policy change. According to the New York Times, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins advocated for the pause after fielding complaints from distressed farmers, infuriating Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, an anti-immigration hardliner .

Food prices, imports and economic uncertainty

From an economic perspective, there are two ways of looking at ICE’s raids on agricultural facilities. The raids themselves will probably have an impact, but so will the government’s inconsistency regarding the raids.

When employees at a business are arrested, detained and/or deported, that business takes an economic hit, as the sudden reduction in workers diminishes the business’s production capacity and forces it to invest in new employees. Those costs are typically passed on to the consumer, according to Muhammed.

“More likely than not, you’ll get … higher prices [at the grocery store] due to less output, and higher prices due to higher wages [for American workers].”

Of course, the administration could attempt to mitigate this by, for instance, increasing federal subsidies to agricultural producers. That’s exactly what Trump did during his first term in response to the economic fallout from his administration’s tariffs, and similar payouts could help offset any new burdens producers face due to ICE raids. In April, the White House said that it’s considering increasing farm subsidies to counteract the impacts of his second-term tariffs.

The raids may also compel the food industry to outsource its production to other countries in order to minimize their risk. In other words, they might result in imports comprising a larger share of Americans’ food than before.

“Anytime you make domestic production more expensive, or you reduce domestic output, the demand has to be satisfied through imports,” Muhammed says.

In addition to these dynamics, the Trump administration’s multiple flip-flops regarding the raids are also likely to have an impact on the industry, Muhammed says, as they create an environment of uncertainty for business owners and investors.

There are a number of ways this uncertainty might play out, but in general, agricultural producers will probably take a wait-and-see approach before investing in or expanding their operations.

“You could imagine a meat processing plant that’s been erected with the hopes of [employing] a certain number of workers now having to face a world where they may only get half the workers they expect,” Muhammed says. “That very uncertainty makes that company say, ‘Either we’re going to shut this plant down or reduce capacity, but we’re certainly not going to invest in the next plant.’”

It’s unclear where ICE raids in agriculture go from here, or whether the administration will stick to its current policy. But the ongoing saga highlights the degree to which American food production depends not only on immigrants, but on consistent application of federal immigration policy.