American agriculture relies on undocumented workers. What happens now that they’re being deported?
How many workers are undocumented?
About 40% of the nation’s nearly 1.2 million hired farmworkers lack legal status, according to the Agriculture Department. In California, which produces over a third of the nation’s vegetables and three-quarters of its fruits and nuts, undocumented migrants make up more than 75% of agricultural labor. Some are skilled supervisors who oversee planting and harvesting; others operate and maintain tractors, irrigation systems, and other machines crucial to modern farming. Other food production industries also rely heavily on migrant labor, with 30% to 50% of the country’s 500,000 meatpacking workers lacking visas. All are now at high risk of detention and deportation, because workplace raids have proved to be one of the easiest ways for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to fulfill the Trump administration’s quota of 3,000 migrant arrests a day. American farmers have warned that those raids are causing labor shortages across the agriculture sector, leaving them without enough workers to pick crops or milk cows. “If we deported everyone here that’s undocumented,” said Idaho onion grower Shay Myers, “we would starve to death.”
Why don’t farmers hire legal migrants?
Because it’s easier and cheaper to use undocumented workers. To secure seasonal H-2A agricultural visas, farmers must navigate a tangle of 200-plus regulations, first proving they tried to hire Americans, and then agreeing to provide housing, transportation, and meals for the guest workers. Farmers must also prove each H-2A recipient will be paid at least the prevailing farm wage, which at nearly $20 an hour in California is higher than the $16.50 minimum wage made by most farmworkers in the state. Those costs and bureaucracy mean the H-2A program favors large agribusiness firms, and while H-2A employment has increased tenfold since 2005, it still accounts for only 17% of the agricultural workforce.
How have workers responded to the raids?
Many foreign-born laborers, both those with and without legal status, are choosing to stay home rather than risk being caught in the dragnet. After federal agents arrested 76 workers during a mid-June raid on an Omaha meat-processing plant, most of the remaining workers failed to turn up the next day, leaving the plant to operate at 15% capacity. That same week, dozens of migrants were arrested in a series of ICE raids on Southern California farms. “We’re being hunted like animals,” one undocumented farmworker told The Guardian. “You can’t go out peacefully to do things, or go to work with any peace of mind.” The raids frightened off many workers in California’s Ventura County, with some farms losing up to 70% of their workforce, according to local farmer Lisa Tate. That means “70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day,” she said. “Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”
Have officials addressed those fears?
President Trump has wavered between trying to assuage the worries of farmers—many of whom voted for him—and appease his MAGA base. After the June raids, Trump posted online that he’d heard from “our great Farmers” that they were losing “very good, long-time workers,” and pledged that “changes are coming!” Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security ordered a pause of arrests at farms, restaurants, and hotels. But those carve-outs were opposed by top White House aide Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown, and DHS ended its pause the following week. Trump has more recently floated letting migrant farmworkers stay “if a farmer is willing to vouch for these people,” and the Labor Department has established a new service to help farmers get visas. But ICE still has quotas to meet, and migrants have no protection against raids.
What does this mean for our food supply?
With fewer workers to harvest and package fruit and vegetables, the domestic production of crops will likely drop. That will lead to more food imports—many of which will be hit with Trump’s double-digit tariffs—and higher costs; the nonpartisan Peterson Institute expects deportations to raise food prices by 10%. Labor shortages could so significantly raise the cost of handpicked produce, especially delicate fruits such as strawberries and blueberries, that those items could become “luxury goods,” said Harvard economists Willy C. Shih and Veronica Chua. Smaller farms, already battered by pandemic labor shortages, are increasingly struggling to stay afloat—farm bankruptcy filings in the first quarter of 2025 were double that of the same period last year. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently argued that any pains would be temporary and cited the “34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program” as potential replacements for migrant laborers. But experts say that won’t work.
Why not?
Because about 60% of Medicaid recipients are already employed, and most of the others are either children, disabled, in school, or full-time caregivers. The remaining 2.1 million adult Medicaid recipients are unlikely to want to pick vegetables in hot fields or carve up animal carcasses—the type of jobs that Americans have shunned for decades. To comply with H-2A regulations, the North Carolina Growers Association advertised some 6,500 jobs in 2011 but received only 268 applicants. Of the 245 hired, 163 arrived for their first day’s labor, and more than half quit after a month. Only seven worked the whole growing season. With Americans unwilling to take the place of migrants at farms and slaughterhouses, that leaves only one option, said Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association. “We can use imported workers in our food production, or we can import food,” he explained. “And, from a national security, food security standpoint, we don’t want to import food.”
