“”In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,” she said in an interview. “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don’t want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”
In the vast agricultural lands north of Los Angeles, stretching from Ventura County into the state’s central valley, two farmers, two field supervisors and four immigrant farmworkers told Reuters this month that the ICE raids have led a majority of workers to stop showing up.
That means crops are not being picked and fruit and vegetables are rotting at peak harvest time, they said.
One Mexican farm supervisor, who asked not to be named, was overseeing a field being prepared for planting strawberries last week. Usually he would have 300 workers, he said. On this day he had just 80. Another supervisor at a different farm said he usually has 80 workers in a field, but today just 17.
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“Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said an estimated 80% of farmworkers in the U.S. were foreign-born, with nearly half of them in the country illegally. Losing them will cause price hikes for consumers, he said.
“This is bad for supply chains, bad for the agricultural industry,” Holtz-Eakin said.
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Trump conceded in a post on his Truth Social account this month that ICE raids on farm workers – and also hotel workers – were “taking very good, long-time workers away” from those sectors, “with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
Trump later told reporters, “Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers.” He added, “They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great.”
He pledged to issue an order to address the impact, but no policy change has yet been enacted.
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ICE operations in California’s farmland were scaring even those who are authorized, said Greg Tesch, who runs a farm in central California.
“Masked federal agents have repeatedly grabbed people in immigration raids over the past few weeks. Most seem to be members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but in the moment there is often little to indicate who they are. This presents a danger not only to the public but to the masked agents themselves.”
“Deportation is the most commonly understood term, but it refers to a codified judicial process for expelling an alien back to their home country for violating immigration law—a process that the Trump administration’s program barely resembled. In the multiple cases of foreign students who were snatched off the street and had their visas revoked, they were given no due process and provided no evidence of what, if any, laws they had violated.
The Trump administration also summarily expelled several hundred alleged Venezuelan gang members and sent them not to their home country but to a nightmarish Salvadoran megaprison. The only word we have that comes close to describing that, courtesy of the war on terror, is to rendition someone.
At the same time, the administration terminated temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of refugees from countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. There were also reports that the White House was considering revoking legal status for Ukrainians who had fled their war-torn country.
There is a term for that last one: refoulement—the act of returning a refugee or asylum seeker back to the country from which they fled, and where they face serious risk of harm. The principle of non-refoulement is a cornerstone of international refugee law.”
“it’s perfectly legal for members of Congress to visit ICE detention facilities, even unannounced. And ICE’s attempt to circumvent that requirement threatens the constitutional system of checks and balances.”
“Without fixing H-2A, tougher immigration enforcement is a recipe for empty fields, higher food prices, and failing farms.”
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“Without a legal path to hiring the workers they need, mass deportations will gut the agricultural workforce with no backup plan, hurting farms, driving up grocery prices, and weakening America’s food security. If Washington ignores the warnings from farmers, the real harvest this fall will be shortages and higher costs for everyone.”
“Mahmoud Khalil, the first target of President Donald Trump’s crusade against international students he describes as “terrorist sympathizers,” was released from custody on Friday after more than three months of detention. But the Trump administration is still trying to deport Khalil, a legal permanent resident, based on his participation in anti-Israel protests at Columbia University.
The official rationale for expelling Khalil is that he poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. That justification is alarmingly broad and vague, raising due process and free speech concerns that interact with each other.”
Trump’s Border Czar says ICE is just enforcing the law. If you don’t like ICE enforcing the law when it comes to illegal immigrants, then contact Congress and tell them to change it.
Wealthy people and great entrepreneurs aren’t going to not start that great business because they will pay more taxes if they make it big. Either way, if successful, they would have done something great and will be rich.
The most profitable and flexible workforce for Americans is illegal immigrants.
When we put tariffs on China, we are saying every country on Earth can get low inputs from China except America, making American business less competitive.
Israel leader Netanyahu has been saying Iran is weeks away from a nuke for over a decade.
Many Republicans called for the violence in LA to be crushed with military force and for Democrats to be removed from office, even though the violence and vandalism were contained and the Los Angeles Police Department had it under control.
When an immigrant kills someone, Republicans want to move and spend Heaven and Earth to limit all immigration and deport all illegals, devastating the lives of many people, but when Americans repeatedly murder, massacre, and assassinate fellow Americans with guns, they offer simple condolences.