A highly visible ICE raid in Bakersfield, California earlier this month ruffled local immigrant communities and caused some farm workers to stay home in the fourth most productive agricultural county in the U.S. While nearly all undocumented workers went back to work within days, barring those who faced detainment or deportation, the highly-visible targeting of an agricultural powerhouse sent ripples through the nation.
President Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of undocumented Americans would not only rip apart families, but target the population largely responsible for growing the nation’s food. Though Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, called food supply issues stemming from mass removals a “hypothetical” during her confirmation hearing, supply chain experts say the impacts are a certainty if mass deportations proceed.
Carolyn Dimitri, a professor at New York University and food policy economist, says farm workers without documented status are the backbone of the industry.
“Our food system is so heavily dependent upon undocumented workers that there's no way that this [mass removals] cannot have an impact on farm profits and the flow of product to the market, Dimitri told Salon.
Beyond the half of farm workers estimated to be undocumented, hundreds of thousands more round out other roles within the food supply chain: meat and poultry packing, processing and other labor-intensive, difficult-to-automate jobs. In a tight labor market — with unemployment hovering at around 4% — filling the millions of positions could be next to impossible.
Dimitri says potential staffing shortages could trigger the kinds of price jumps and supply shocks that Americans witnessed during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
“If it's a high production state, like California, for example, and the farm workers stopped going, then I think that that would be a pretty quick impact,” Dimitri said, adding that prices could surge in mere weeks or months if undocumented people either stayed home or faced removal.
David Ortega, an agricultural economist and researcher of food supply chains at Michigan State University, says the chaos of mass deportations could play a role in surging food costs, too.
After years of grocery price pressure, “we really need a period of stability. And the issue here is that some of the proposals, the proposed policies of the Trump administration are creating a lot more uncertainty for the food industry, which just leads to increased costs in operations. Farmers are sort of scrambling to obtain… to have a reliable workforce in place for their operations,” Ortega said.
But major farm owners understand the undocumented labor population is essential, and they’re making contingencies for mass deportations by looking for ways to keep non-U.S.-born laborers inside the country.
Undocumented workers aren’t going to be replaced by American-born laborers, or even automation any time soon, experts told Salon.
“These are individuals that perform essential, very labor-intensive activities like planting and harvesting,” Ortega told Salon. “They are filling very critical roles that maybe US or workers are either unwilling or unable to perform.”
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United Farm Workers Director of Communications Antonio De Loera-Brust told Salon that undocumented farm workers, despite a moment of fear and uncertainty, are forced to go back to work despite initial reports they were staying home.
“I don't see a very easy solution to this by looking at the domestic workforce,” Ortega said. Farm owners need immigrant workers, who account for over 70% of the agriculture labor force.
President Trump’s plans for mass removals, coupled with impending tariffs on Mexico, Canada and other American trading partners and the rapid spread of bird flu, could send grocery prices spiraling, but it’s more likely that farm owners lean on an even less protected class of workers.
Experts told Politico earlier this month that they expect the Trump administration to solve its deportation-fueled labor crisis by “expanding the existing H-2 visa program” and bring in temporary foreign-born workers who are “more vulnerable to abuse than many of the undocumented workers.”
Instead of advocating against mass deportations, farm owners are “going to Congress and asking for more H-2A workers and to pay them less… they want to replace one kind of cheap, vulnerable, undocumented labor force with an even cheaper, even more vulnerable, excluded-from-citizenship workforce,” De Loera-Brust told Salon.
H2-A visa holders may be spared from the looming threat of deportation, but they have even fewer rights than undocumented workers to address hostile working conditions. First, as De Loera-Brust puts it, they are “owned by their visa.” Since a particular farm sponsors workers, they can’t freely move between employers.
Secondly, since a federal judge shut down a Biden-era rule giving H2-A workers more legal organizing rights last year, it’s even more of a challenge for H2-A holders to fight the rampant wage theft, harassment, and brutal conditions that plague farm work.
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