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Photograph: AP Photo/Nati Harnik
President-elect Donald Trump built his campaign on the promise of the “largest deportation operation in American history.” In early December he told NBC’s Meet the Press that he planned to start by deporting convicted criminals and then “the others,” including whole families where some members are in the US legally.
The human and financial costs of such an operation would be staggering. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented people in the US and a further 2.3 million who have been released into the US after crossing the border illegally during the Biden administration. According to an analysis from the American Immigration Council, deporting all of these people would cost nearly $968 billion over more than a decade, as well as requiring 24 times the detention capacity currently available and more than 1,000 new immigration courtrooms.
Mass deportations would also have a big impact on America’s meat industry, which is heavily reliant on undocumented laborers. Around 23 percent of workers in the meatpacking industry are undocumented and 42 percent are foreign-born, says Steven Hubbard, senior data scientist at the American Immigration Council. The meatpacking industry, where animals are slaughtered, processed, and packaged for human consumption, has one of the highest ratios of foreign-born workers of any industry in the US, says Hubbard.
The industry’s reliance on undocumented labor made it a target of immigration raids under earlier administrations. In August 2019 immigration authorities arrested 680 people in raids on seven food-processing plants across Mississippi, just one of several rounds of raids that targeted meatpacking plants during the previous Trump administration.
Wages in the meatpacking industry are low, and conditions are dangerous. A 2018 analysis of data from the Occuputational Safety and Health Administration by The Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that amputations happen on average twice weekly across US meat plants. Some meatpacking companies also hire incarcerated laborers to work in their plants.
“Poultry has been maintained as a pretty low-cost protein in this country, and that is largely on the backs of low-wage workers and people with precarious statuses,” says Angela Stuesse, an anthropologist at the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has studied poultry workers in Mississippi.
In recent earnings calls, shareholders in some publicly traded meat companies have asked whether the Trump administration’s deportation plans—among other issues—may pose a challenge to their industry. “We’ve been there before. It did not impact our business,” said Tim Klein, CEO of National Beef, which is owned by the Brazilian food company Marfrig, in response to a question from a shareholder. In response to a similar question in a Tyson Foods earnings call, CEO Donnie King said, “There’s a lot that we don’t know at this point, but I would remind you that we’ve successfully operated this business for over 90 years, no matter the party in control.”
It’s not clear whether the Trump regime would target meatpacking facilities operated by the biggest firms in the industry, given the favorable treatment these companies received at times during the first Trump presidency. During the Covid-19 pandemic, President Trump issued an executive order that allowed plants to keep operating, even as meatpackers were some of the hardest hit by infections. The US House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis later found that Tyson’s legal department drafted a text of the proposed order.
“These large meatpacking companies prevented additional protections from being put in place to protect workers, in part by engaging in a concerted effort with Trump administration political officials to insulate themselves from oversight, to force workers to remain in dangerous conditions, and to shield themselves from liability for any resulting worker illness or death,” the committee concluded in the report released in December 2022.
The supply of labor is tight in meatpacking plants and the farming industry as a whole, says Cesar Escalante, a professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Agriculture & Environmental Sciences. The industry is in need of more workers, says Escalante, who argues that the US should expand the H-2A seasonal agricultural worker visa scheme to include more livestock workers. Smaller farms are more likely to be affected by a lack of workers, says Escalante, while larger farms may switch to mechanization.
If meatpacking workers are deported en masse, then that could translate into a rise in prices for consumers. A report from Texas A&M Agrilife Research estimates that eliminating immigrant labor on US dairy farms would nearly double retail milk prices. It’s not clear what the impact of Trump’s deportation plan would be on meat or food prices more generally, because so much about the plan remains unknown. “We don’t know yet how this is all going to pan out,” Hubbard says.