Meat processing plants, packing plants, fruit and vegetable farms, dairies, and various other agricultural-related industries continue to watch and wait for more information about what will be ahead in the next several months after Donald Trump returns to the White House.
Trump gets sworn into office on January 20, 2025, but he has been discussing plans and announcing key administration choices much faster than he did during his first term as president.
American Farmland Owner has focused coverage since the November election about how Trump’s promise of mass deportations of migrants who don’t have legal status could impact farmland communities.
Trump pledged to voters that he would deport people who were living in the country illegally, and voters responded. They will return Trump as president.
Additional details have emerged about how Trump’s immigration policies will affect the country.
Windy City – Trump’s appointed “Border Czar” Tom Homan said Chicago, Illinois, could be a major initial target for mass deportation efforts. Homan, former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term as president, told the Northwest Side GOP holiday party audience gathered for a Law & Order PAC event that he wants Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor JB Pritzker to “come to the table” to discuss the mass deportation plan.
He also called both men “terrible.”
Farming communities have wondered how raids could affect families where some of the members may be in the country legally, while others do not have legal status.
Homan said, “I’m not looking to separate families at all. That’s not my goal. My goal is to enforce the law. But if you put yourself in that position, it may happen. But there’s no plan in this administration right now to separate families. It just isn’t. However, we’re going to enforce the law. So, if you put yourself in that position, it’s on you.”
Military Effort – President-elect Donald Trump reaffirmed his pledge that the United States military could be involved in rounding up and deporting undocumented people. Using the military may not be allowed under U.S. law, some legal scholars have speculated.
But Trump told TIME Magazine that he disagrees with the interpretations of the law that typically would not allow the military to be used for domestic law enforcement. Trump’s rationale is that migrants represent an “invasion” of the United States.
"I consider it an invasion of our country," Trump said. “We'll get National Guard, and we'll go as far as I'm allowed to go, according to the laws of our country."
Reuters pointed to a 2022 report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that estimated there were 11 million people in the country illegally. That figure was only an estimate and could be lower than what it is today.
Reuters also found a statistic that might surprise many people. It reported that President Joe Biden deported more undocumented immigrants in 2023 than Trump did in any of the four years that he was previously in office.
Missing Workers – Rural parts of the United States often vote Republican, and Donald Trump fared well with rural voters in 2024. Those parts of the country may feel the impact of his mass deportation plan harder than bigger communities where food production doesn’t have the same prominence.
Reporting from Stateline using data from the U.S. Department of Labor showed that about two-thirds of the country’s crop farmworkers are immigrants. And roughly 40% of them are not legally authorized to work in the United States.
That is a substantial amount of the workforce that is already difficult to fill for farmland operators.
Bruce Lampman -- owner of Lampman Dairy Farm in Bruneau, Idaho – told Stateline that without the migrant employees his 350-cow operation uses, “We wouldn’t survive without them.”
Lampman said that farm operations across the country will be “crippled” without migrant labor.
RELATED: Stateline looked at concerns from agricultural producers if large numbers of undocumented workers leave the industry and a why the H-2A visa program has limited ability to offset the loss of those workers. Read that story.
