ICE shut down its arrests of farm, meat processing workers, hotel and restaurant workers on June 14 with the following advisory to field operations: “Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”

This was entirely predictable, when ICE began, on June 6, aggressively to expand its scope of activity from those with some form of criminal record to the far larger population of unauthorized persons with no criminal record.  The number of unauthorized persons with a criminal record (including misdemeanors) might be 500,000, while the entire unauthorized population is around 12 million.

This post is about the farming and meat processing sectors. The hospitality sector will be addressed in a following post.

The threat to farms and national produce supply

June and July are peak months for harvesting berries, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, melons, stone fruits (peaches, plums), and more across states like California, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and the Pacific Northwest. A decline of, say, 25% due to fear of ICE arrest means millions of pounds of produce would either rot in the fields or never be harvested.

The impact of raids on California farms is captured by a June 13 report by the Associated Press: “California’s farms produce more than a third of the country’s vegetables and more than three-quarters of its fruits and nuts. While the state’s government is dominated by Democrats, there are large Republican areas that run through farm country, Maureen McGuire, chief executive of Ventura County’s farm bureau, said between 25% and 45% of farmworkers have stopped showing up for work since the large-scale raids began this month. ‘When our workforce is afraid, fields go unharvested, packinghouses fall behind, and market supply chains, from local grocery stores to national retailers, are affected,’ she said in a statement.”

Regarding dairy farming in states such as Vermont and Wisconsin, a University of Wisconsin–Madison study estimates that upwards of 70% of dairy farm workers in Wisconsin are unauthorized workers. (Go here.)

The farming workforce:

The federal government (Census Bureau) record of farm employment is primarily Census code 6050: “miscellaneous agricultural workers.” Most are Hispanic, with a high school or less formal education, earning about $30,000 a year. The Census reported, between 2000 and 2023, between 700,000 and 900,000 farm workers. 40% of them are estimated to be unauthorized.  This means that about 400,000 unauthorized persons are employed, or about 5% of the entire unauthorized workforce.  Without them, the produce and dairy industries would be crippled.

The farming workforce in California has been gradually shifting from unauthorized workers to temporary workers admitted into the United States through the H-2A temporary working visa. The number of workers using this visa rose from 48,000 in 2005 to 140,000 in 2015 to 378,000 in 2023 – this is on top of the unauthorized workforce.  The percentage of the farming workforce which is non-Hispanic U.S. citizens is hard to estimate, but it seems reasonable to estimate between a third and a half.

The threat to meat processing

If the supply of meat to food stores and restaurants were to be cut by, say, 50% due to fear by workers of worksite raids, the effect would be immediate — panic buying, immediate shortages.

Reuters reported on June 11 that “ U.S. meat producer Glenn Valley Foods was operating an Omaha, Nebraska, facility with about 30% of its staff after federal agents detained workers [on June 10] in an immigration raid the previous day, slashing the output of products it sells to grocery stores and restaurants. ICE agents detained about 74 to 76 workers out of roughly 140 at the Glenn Valley Foods plant, President Chad Hartmann said. Other workers did not show up on Wednesday because they felt afraid or traumatized, he said, adding that the facility’s production dropped to about 20% of normal. Glenn Valley Foods sells steak, chicken and corned beef products to restaurants and grocery stores.”

The workforce for meat processing is about 250,000 per the Census. (Census code 7810.) About 40% – 50% of the entire workforce is foreign-born and about 20% of the entire workforce is unauthorized.  Many workers in large meat processing plants in the Midwest and Plain states are Asian and African as well as Hispanic.