Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is making it harder for American farms to find seasonal workers and putting the nation’s food supply chain at risk.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/08/trumps-labor-department-admits-that-trumps-immigration-crackdown-is-causing-a-labor-shortage/?nab=1
“Nitrate from fertilizer and manure befouls countless waterways and kitchen taps across the US. But unlike other big polluters, from petroleum to plastics, Big Agriculture has largely avoided responsibility for its dirty footprint. In no state is this arguably clearer than Iowa, where the multibillion-dollar corn industrial complex of farmers, food processors, tractor makers, chemical companies, ethanol producers and their lobbyists reigns supreme.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KXOO3gK5wo
“The Trump administration is now struggling to reconcile its mass deportation efforts with the need to keep farm production going. Huerta is not optimistic about how it will all play out, though she was able to poke at Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ recent suggestion that automation will soon replace human laborers. “I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work,” Huerta joked.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/02/dolores-huerta-farm-raids-immigration-labor-interview-00489203
Human activities caused a dangerous environmental problem, so the government heavily intervened and the problem was fixed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNT3aDnzd10
“As Trump has acknowledged, he is torn between the economic concerns of business owners, including many of his own supporters, and the demands of hardliners like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. That tension is apparent in the contrast between the administration’s immigration rhetoric, which emphasizes the removal of dangerous criminals, and workplace raids that target peaceful, productive people with strong, longstanding ties to the United States. And it reflects the general public’s mixed attitude toward immigration enforcement, which includes an openness to legal pathways that would allow people in the latter category to remain in the country.
“In 2020–22,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports, “32 percent of crop farmworkers were U.S. born, 7 percent were immigrants who had obtained U.S. citizenship, 19 percent were other authorized immigrants (primarily permanent residents or green-card holders), and the remaining 42 percent held no work authorization.” But as Trump tells it, he was not aware of how his deportation campaign might affect U.S. farmers until Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who attended the Des Moines rally, brought the issue to his attention. “You were the one that brought this whole situation up,” he said to her at the rally. “Brooke Rollins brought it up, and she said, ‘So we have a little problem. The farmers are losing a lot of people.'”
Trump has repeatedly promised to execute “the largest deportation program in American history”—a goal that he reiterated in Des Moines. Yet he sounded surprisingly sympathetic toward at least some of the people affected by that crackdown. “These people…work so hard,” he said. “They bend over all day. We don’t have too many people [who] can do that.” He added that “some of the farmers…cry when they see [immigration raids] happen.” He alluded to “cases where…people have worked for a farmer on a farm for 14, 15 years” and “then they get thrown out, pretty viciously.” His conclusion: “We can’t do it. We’ve got to work with the farmers and people that have hotels and leisure properties.”
If the agricultural sector’s reliance on undocumented workers somehow was news to Trump even after he served as president for four years, he should have been intimately familiar from his own businesses with the potential impact of immigration enforcement on the hospitality industry. In 2023, the American Immigration Council estimated, U.S. hotels and restaurants employed 1.1 million unauthorized workers, 7.6 percent of the total work force.
Trump did not mention construction. But last September, the National Immigration Forum estimated that undocumented workers accounted for “almost a quarter” of employees in that industry.
It was completely predictable, in other words, that a broad crackdown on unauthorized U.S. residents that included workplace raids would have an outsized impact on several kinds of businesses”
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“a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early June, 54 percent of respondents opposed “more raids where people in the U.S. illegally may be working,” and 65 percent thought “there should be a way for undocumented immigrants to stay in the country legally, if requirements are met.” Despite Trump’s rhetorical emphasis on deporting criminals, 57 percent of respondents anticipated that his immigration policies would have “no impact” on crime or lead to “more crime.” A plurality (46 percent) thought those policies would make the U.S. economy “weaker,” while just 34 percent said they would make it “stronger.””
https://reason.com/2025/07/08/trump-reiterates-his-promise-to-protect-farm-and-hospitality-workers-from-pretty-vicious-deportation/
“”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.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/immigration-raids-leave-crops-unharvested-100833841.html
“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.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/23/mass-deportations-are-putting-americas-food-supply-at-risk/
“The Department of Homeland Security on Monday told staff that it was reversing guidance issued last week that agents were not to conduct immigration raids at farms, hotels and restaurants – a decision that stood at odds with President Donald Trump’s calls for mass deportations of anyone without legal status.
Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including its Homeland Security Investigations division, told agency leaders in a call Monday that agents must continue conducting immigration raids at agricultural businesses, hotels and restaurants, according to two people familiar with the call. The new instructions were shared in an 11 a.m. call to representatives from 30 field offices across the country.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-officials-reverse-guidance-exempting-133327303.html
“U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has directed immigration officials to largely pause raids on farms, hotels, restaurants and meatpacking plants, according to an internal email reviewed by Reuters, a senior Trump official, and a person familiar with the matter.
The order to scale back U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids came from Trump himself, the person familiar with the matter said, and appears to rein in a late-May demand by top White House aide Stephen Miller for more aggressive sweeps.”
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“The White House pointed to a Trump social media post on Thursday where he said farms and hospitality businesses were concerned the administration’s far-reaching immigration enforcement was taking away “very good, long time workers” and promising changes.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-immigration-officials-told-largely-044100625.html
“Wednesday’s announcement elevated tariffs on three of America’s five largest agricultural trading partners—China (34 percent), the European Union (20 percent), and Japan (24 percent). Mexico and Canada, which are America’s two largest trading partners, were exempt from the list but have faced 25 percent duties on certain products since March.
Together, these five markets account for more than 60 percent of American agricultural exports and retaliatory tariffs have already been enacted by some. China has implemented a 10 percent to 15 percent tariff on American soybeans, cotton, pork, and poultry. In March, Canada announced retaliatory tariffs on a number of American goods, including $5.8 billion worth of agricultural products. The European Union, meanwhile, is considering a suite of tariffs that will impact the agricultural sector.
As these tariffs make it harder for American farmers to access foreign markets, thus decreasing revenue, they could also increase production costs and the price of fertilizer, which is one of the largest expenses involved in farming. Imports of the three most commonly used nutrients in fertilizers—potassium (potash), nitrogen, and phosphorus—topped $10 billion in 2023, $5 billion of which came from Canada. Potash, which “is an irreplaceable component of modern agricultural production,” according to the Fertilizer Institute, is sourced predominantly from Canada. Nitrogen, meanwhile, is imported mainly from Canada (the country meets 10 percent of American nitrogen needs), Russia, and Trinidad and Tobago (10 percent tariff).”
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“The damage that this policy will cause is not lost on the Trump administration. On Monday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told the Des Moines Register that her agency is ready to make farmers affected by tariffs “whole” through cash assistance programs. Under the first Trump administration, the Agriculture Department also hedged against its poor trade policy by issuing $28 billion in bailouts to farmers.
Monetary compensation may provide farmers a reprieve, but it will be at the expense of taxpayers, who are going to have to pay more for their favorite products because of Trump’s trade war.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/03/how-trumps-new-tariffs-will-make-farming-and-food-more-expensive/