Opinion | How Trump’s Deportation Plans Could Blow Up The Food System And Increase Migrant Labor

This article was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent, nonprofit news organization.

The U.S. food system is propped up by low-wage immigrant workers from farm to table. From California’s strawberry fields to Florida’s orange orchards, at least 70 percent of the agricultural workers who harvest our crops were born outside the U.S. In our meatpacking plants, nearly half of the people who slaughter, cut and package beef, pork and poultry were born elsewhere. And over a quarter of the truck drivers who shuttle cows to slaughterhouses and steaks to supermarkets are foreign-born, too.

While many of these workers are undocumented — about 40 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, for instance — research suggests that a majority of them are legal immigrants. In 2020, the total number of immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, a designation for immigrants from countries with unsafe conditions to reside and work legally in the United States, was just over 406,000. At that time, more than 76,000 of those immigrants — nearly 19 percent — were employed in the food industry. But the Trump administration has promised to crack down on documented and undocumented immigrants alike. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan is considering creating a “hotline” so residents can report undocumented people. The new administration is expected to try to end TPS protections and has flirted with stripping naturalized citizens of their status. The food industry’s immigrant workforce is massive, and the administration has put it squarely in its crosshairs.

If the Trump administration follows through on its most ambitious mass deportation plans, who exactly will replace these essential workers? According to several high-ranking members of Trump’s incoming administration, Americans will. In an interview with The New York Times last year, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller claimed that the jobs held by deported workers would be filled by U.S. citizens, “who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.” Vice President JD Vance has made similar arguments.

The opposite is likely to happen.

Labor organizers, public interest attorneys and labor economists we have interviewed believe that rather than improving the quality of food industry jobs to attract more American-born workers, employers will continue hiring low-wage immigrants. And the real development that we expect? The Trump administration will provide food industry employers with low-wage immigrant workers by expanding the existing H-2 visa program. While this would be a boon for employers, this expanded H-2 workforce would likely be more vulnerable to abuse than many of the undocumented workers, asylum recipients and other immigrants it would be replacing. And potentially, this change would also come at American workers’ expense.

The H-2 programs, which were implemented in their current form during the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, provide temporary work visas to seasonal, “unskilled” workers from other countries. H-2A visas are reserved for agricultural workers specifically, and H-2B visas are used by a wider variety of sectors that claim to be experiencing labor shortages. In the agricultural sector, the number of H-2A workers that farmers brought into the country spiked by over 64 percent between 2017 and 2022 and has continued to grow. In food manufacturing, the number of meatpacking plants that received H-2B workers has also skyrocketedin recent years. States with seasonal tourism, such as Florida and Virginia, employ more than 20,000 H-2B workers in food-related hospitality jobs, such as waiters and dishwashers. (The National Restaurant Association has repeatedly called for immigration reform, saying bluntly: “Employers need to be able to recruit and hire a legal workforce.”) The H-2 programs’ many fans appear to include Trump himself, whose businesses have increasingly relied on foreign labor and employed over 1,000 H-2 workers in the past two decades; cooks, bartenders and other food workers were among those hired, some of them on staff at his Mar-a-Lago club.

But while the food industry may like the H-2 program, these visas are notoriously abusive to foreign workers. That’s because they effectively create a captive workforce: In contrast to other immigrant workers in the U.S. — including recipients of certain humanitarian programs, like TPS — H-2 workers’ presence in the country is tied to a particular job and employer. H-2 employees are eligible to work for whoever sponsors their visa, and it can be prohibitively difficult for them to switch jobs even if they’re mistreated. If they quit, they’re sent back to their home countries, which would ruin many H-2 workers and their families financially. (Over half of all H-2A farmworkers enter the country in debt to illegal recruiters, who charge fees for connecting workers with job contracts.) Workers can file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), but they’re unlikely to get a swift result. As of October 2023, the underfunded agency had 750 investigators on staff, and they were tasked with monitoring over 11 million employers. Let’s just say they’re a little backlogged.

Predictably, some employers take advantage of the power the H-2 program gives them over their employees. The nonprofit Polaris, which runs a U.S. human trafficking hotline, has connected the H-2A visa to rampant human trafficking, as have a number of criminal cases and media investigations. Wage theft is also a pervasive problem. In an interview with Prism media, Mike Rios, a DOL regional agricultural enforcement coordinator, said that wage theft is “baked into” the H-2A visa, and described the program as the “literal purchase of humans.” An Economic Policy Institute report, published in 2022, found that migrants with H-2B visas are being “employed in industries in which there is extensive wage theft and lawbreaking by employers” — with the largest share, more than half of all penalties assessed between 2000 and 2021, coming from the food industry.

H-2 workers have so little bargaining power that some employers prefer to hire them over U.S. citizens — which ends up disenfranchising the American-born workers Trump and Miller say their deportations will benefit. Under federal law, employers must show they were unable to hire American workers before they’re approved to hire H-2 workers, but some employers circumvent that rule and commit visa fraud to avoid hiring Americans at higher rates. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has filed a string of complaints with the DOL, alleging that meatpacking companies have repeatedly requested increased allocations of H-2B workers as a way of undercutting wages.

So much for “America first.” Unsurprisingly, H-2 visas have been fiercely criticized from the left, right and center, and immigration hard-liners in Trump’s orbit, who object to increases even in legal immigration, have called for them to be abolished. In Project 2025, author Jonathan Barry notes that H-2A agricultural workers “suffer frequent employer abuse,” and that the program should be “phased out.”

But despite this rhetoric from within Trump’s camp, we expect Trump to expand the H-2 program. He’s done it before. In Trump’s first term, temporary work visa programs steadily grew; by 2019, they were 13 percent larger than they had been under the Obama administration. Then, during the pandemic, his administration issued a series of emergency measures that made H-2A and H-2B visas more flexible and employer-friendly. Workers were allowed to stay in the country for longer periods of time, in part because they had been deemed “essential workers,” and wages for H-2A workers were effectively frozen. And if Trump’s second presidency is faced with a labor shortage of his own making, he might have no other choice but to expand the program again.

We don’t know how extensive the administration’s mass deportations will be, but because the U.S. food system is so dependent on immigrant labor to function, the deportations have the potential to profoundly destabilize the food supply. And while the Stephen Millers of the world might hope these deported food workers will be replaced by Americans, there are some serious barriers to that happening. For one thing, Trump has pledged to launch the “largest deportation in the history of our country,” and there may not be enough able-bodied American workers to replace the workers he deports. While American workers have a long history of doing many food industry-related jobs, the immigrant workforce of the last four decades was hired explicitly to work at speeds and under conditions that American workers had traditionally rejected.

Take agricultural work. Historically, American-born workers have only harvested crops by hand on large-scale farms if they were enslaved, imprisoned, forced into severe debt, displaced by environmental disasters or otherwise oppressed. There’s a reason for that. Agricultural work remains one of the most dangerous jobs in America; at least 20 percent of farmworker families live below the federal poverty line; and at the federal level, agricultural employers are largely exempt from many labor laws, including child labor laws and the right to form a union. If the Trump administration were to replace undocumented farmworkers with Americans, it would likely need to enact regulations that would fundamentally change agricultural work so that American workers would find those jobs appealing.

Or it could just replace undocumented farmworkers with an expanded H-2A workforce. One of these solutions would be easier than the other. (Or it would need to find a captive American-born workforce that could be compelled to do this work: Louisiana and other southern states have used prisoners as farm laborers in recent years.)

Agricultural lobbying groups have met already with Trump’s transition team and urged them to expand the H-2A visa program, and farmers are hoping the Trump administration will roll back a Biden-era rule that gave H-2A workers more labor protections. Trump senior adviser Jason Miller has already talked about expanding H-2A as well. “Any opportunity to come to this country is going to be temporary and only to do the work that nobody else wants to do,” says Kim Cordova, president of UFCW Local 7. “It’s like human slavery.”

So what would an expansion of the H-2A and H-2B mean for our food system? For employers, it could be to their advantage, particularly if the Trump administration also embraces additional visa reforms. For instance, H-2A workers are currently “temporary and seasonal,” but the agricultural industry has been urging the federal government to expand the program so that H-2A workers can work year-round. For workers, it could be a profound loss. Unless the program is significantly changed, American-born workers will continue to be undercut by a captive, lower-wage workforce — and foreign-born workers will continue to be mistreated.