How Immigration Crackdowns Are Impacting America’s Farmworkers

American farms hire roughly 2.5 million people annually to pick crops, milk cows, manage nurseries, tend livestock, and otherwise keep farms running, according to an analysis of federal data by UC Davis economics professor Philip Martin. 

Most farmworkers in the U.S. are immigrants, particularly from Mexico. Some foreign workers come to the U.S. just for seasonal work through the H-2A guest worker visa program. Many more, approximately 1.7 million Mexico-born farmworkers, according to Rural Migration News, are settled in the U.S. and have worked on U.S. farms for decades. Of these settled workers, roughly half have some sort of legal residency status or U.S. citizenship, while the other half, an estimated 850,000, are unauthorized to live in the U.S. 

Another 1.7 million people work in food processing plants, per the USDA. Many are refugees, and approximately 19% are in the country without authorization, according to the New American Economy research group. In the largest food processing segment, meatpacking, the American Immigration Council estimates that 45% of all workers are immigrants and around 23% are unauthorized.

Food workers and farmers are worried about what President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown will mean for their livelihoods, their families, and the nation’s food supply. 

“The anticipation of not knowing what’s coming down the pike is creating a lot of sleepless nights for agricultural employers,” said Michael Marsh, president and CEO of the National Council of Agricultural Employers (NCAE).

The administration’s change in enforcement tactics and violations of due process have heightened fear among farm and food workers. The president has suggested that farmers may be able to offer workers a path to leave the U.S. and return legally, but the administration has not presented specifics.

After Initial Pause, Raids Hit Farms

In his first 100 days, President Trump issued several executive orders directing federal agencies to prevent illegal border crossings, deport unauthorized immigrants, and constrict immigration overall, particularly for refugees and those seeking asylum.

As a result, border crossings declined to historically low levels, and immigration arrests are up. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claimed to arrest more unauthorized immigrants in the first 50 days of the Trump administration than in all of the 2024 fiscal year. However, some immigration data experts believe this figure is inflated and that arrests have increased, but not by as much as the administration claims. 

Nonetheless, Richard Stup, director of Cornell University’s Agricultural Workforce Development program, said farmers and workers have noticed changes in enforcement. “We have much more active enforcement from both ICE and border patrol in rural communities,” Stup said. 

Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said in January that ICE will target people with criminal records rather than conduct mass workplace raids. This largely held true for about six months, until ICE started conducting more food work site immigration raids. 

On June 10, ICE arrested 76 workers at the Glenn Valley Foods meatpacking plant in Omaha, Nebraska, roughly half the plant’s staff. That same day, immigration enforcers arrested 11 workers on a dairy farm in New Mexico. Throughout June, ICE also raided several produce farms in southern California, particularly Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles. The impact of those raids extends beyond the arrests. Farmers and plant owners reported that some workers stayed home out of fear following a raid.

The Trump administration continues to give mixed signals about its immigration enforcement priorities, at times reiterating that farms and food plants are not targets, only to change its position. The inconsistencies represent internal conflict in the administration between pleasing business owners, such as farmers, and meeting aggressive deportation targets. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller reportedly pressured ICE leadership to increase arrests to meet a goal of deporting 1 million people by the end of the year.

The Trump administration has struggled to legally increase deportation rates. The Transactional Records Clearinghouse at Syracuse University and The New York Times found that daily deportation rates during the first six months of the Trump administration were similar or slightly lower than during the Biden administration and started increasing only in May. This largely reflects the fact that many Biden-era deportations happened at the border and border crossings have declined under Trump. 

National Public Radio reported a 20% increase in immigrants in detention centers from January to June, reflecting the increase in arrests but not deportations.

This may explain why the Trump administration has created systems and offered incentives for unauthorized immigrants to voluntarily leave, or “self-deport.” The administration also has been criticized by legal experts for denying immigrants their constitutional right to a fair hearing, and otherwise violating due process to expedite deportations.

Restricting Refugees, TPS, and Asylum

In addition to new enforcement tactics, the Trump administration has largely eliminated some legal forms of migration, particularly for people fleeing danger and prosecution as refugees, asylum seekers, or migrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

On his second day in office, President Trump suspended all refugee resettlement programs via executive order. The administration has since accepted white South Africans as refugees, but all other refugee resettlement remains on pause despite a court order to resume it. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, the meatpacking industry has the fifth-highest concentration of refugee workers. 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also narrowed the TPS program, which permits migrants from 17 countries experiencing war, famine, or other disasters to live in the U.S. without threat of deportation for a limited time. DHS removed Afghanistan and Venezuela from the TPS list and seeks to remove Haiti as well, which would make over 9,000 Afghan, 300,000 Venezuelan, and 200,000 Haitian migrants in the U.S. liable for deportation. 

In 2020, approximately 15,600 people with TPS worked on farms or in food processing, especially meatpacking. The United Food & Commercial Workers union told Bloomberg that TPS deportations could lead to meat shortages and price increases. The world’s largest meatpacking company, JBS, disagreed, telling Bloomberg that less than 2% of its workers have TPS status. In July, visas were revoked for 200 JBS employees at the company’s plant in Ottumwa, Iowa.

Homeland Security also shut down the CPB One app, which allowed migrants who apply for asylum at U.S. points of entry to legally enter and work in the U.S. while their asylum cases are pending. Asylum applicants generally seek year-round work, including in some corners of the food industry, though not so much seasonal farm work. (Farms increasingly rely on the H-2A guest worker visa for seasonal labor.)

Immigrant rights organizations say the suspension of the CPB One app, TPS, and refugee resettlement are illegal and have sued to reinstate them.

What This Means for Workers and Farmers — and What Happens Next

By far, the biggest impact of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is the widespread fear it instills among food and farmworker communities. Most immigrant workers continue to come to work, then seek safety by retreating from public life. Some farms and business owners report workers staying home briefly following news of immigration raids. 

Most of the 850,000 unauthorized farmworkers in the U.S. arrived 20–30 years ago, have worked on farms for decades, and built lives and families in the U.S.

“Obviously, that is terrifying, to have a family at home and possibly get arrested and sent back,” said Stup. “It is affecting peoples’ mental health and well-being. People who used to go out on the weekend, go to Walmart, do shopping about town — none of those things are happening now. They stay home.”

Stup and Marsh encouraged farmers and workers to know their rights and create contingency plans in the event of an immigration raid. This includes having up-to-date emergency contacts for all employees, and a plan for dependents who could be left behind. Marsh also recommended that H-2A workers keep their I-94 forms on them at all times.  

For some farms, especially larger operations in remote areas, there is no Plan B to harvest crops or care for livestock if many of their workers get deported. “The system is not prepared for that; it doesn’t have the capacity to handle things like that,” Stup said. “A remote, large dairy farm that loses a significant part of its workforce — that’s an animal welfare issue waiting to happen.”

Agricultural trade organizations have expressed concern about the impact of mass deportations on the food supply, particularly on labor-intensive fruit, vegetable, and dairy farms. In April, President Trump suggested at a Cabinet meeting that unauthorized farmworkers could be granted legal residency if employers vouch for them.

“So a farmer will come in with a letter concerning certain people, saying they’re great, they’re working hard. We’re going to slow it down a little bit for them, and then we’re going to ultimately bring them back. They’ll go out. They’re going to come back as legal workers,” Trump said.

The president reiterated that idea in June. “We’re looking at doing something where, in the case of good, reputable farmers, they can take responsibility for the people that they hire and let them have responsibility, because we can’t put the farms out of business,” Trump said at a press conference. “And at the same time, we don’t want to hurt people that aren’t criminals.”

The administration has not provided details or clarifications about what exactly it would “slow down” for farmworkers facing deportation, how farmers would “take responsibility” for workers, why workers would need to leave the country to receive legal residency, or how it would be granted or on what terms.  

A White House official reportedly told NBC News that President Trump wants to expand the H-2A and H-2B visa programs that allow employers to hire immigrant workers for temporary or seasonal jobs. Employers can only hire migrant workers through these programs after demonstrating they were unable to hire U.S.-born workers at a local prevailing wage. The Biden administration changed the methodology for calculating the rate for H-2A workers, which resulted in a larger pay increase for some of them this year. Some farm organizations, including the NCAE and the Farm Bureau, want the Trump administration to roll back that change and expand the H-2A program to cover year-round workers, especially for dairy and livestock farms.

The number of farmworkers hired on H-2A visas has quadrupled over the past decade, and the number of meatpacking plants granted H-2B visas increased sixfold from 2015–2023, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. H-2 visa programs could grow even more if immigration enforcement ramps up and more unauthorized food workers are deported. Brownfield Ag News reported that the Department of Labor received nearly 20% more H-2A applications in the first quarter of 2025, which Marsh of the NCAE attributed to farmer anticipation of worker deportations. 

Farms incur extra costs to hire H-2A workers because they must provide them with housing, meals, and transportation. At the same time, H-2 visa holders have suffered from serious labor abuses, including human trafficking and wage theft, and the programs’ insufficient oversight has been well documented.

Critics on the right, such as the authors of the document to reshape government, known as Project 2025, want to limit legal immigration and phase out the H-2 visas. Critics on the left want to strengthen H-2 workers’ labor protections, as well as their enforcement, and provide guest workers a path to citizenship. Neither group seems likely to get its way if the Trump administration follows through on its comments about expanding or changing the visa programs.

This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization.