What does Donald Trump’s deportation plan mean for the food system?

A Q&A with Ted Genoways

• Theodore Ross

Writing in The New York Times op-ed section, newly named FERN senior editor Ted Genoways argues that a Trump presidency, built on threats of mass deportation of migrants, would be a disaster for the American food system:

On August 22, just hours before Kamala Harris was due to take the stage in Chicago to accept her party’s nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention, her opponent Donald Trump was in Arizona along the U.S. border with Mexico. Mr. Trump attacked Ms. Harris on immigration, claiming that she intended to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (I.C.E.) and allow more than 100 million people to cross into the United States. “If Comrade Harris has the chance,” Mr. Trump warned, “our country will be overrun and essentially it will not be a country. It will be ungovernable.” Mr. Trump then renewed his promise to use the military and other government resources to arrest and banish between 15 and 20 million immigrants currently living in the United States, including those in various humanitarian programs. “With your vote,” Trump said in Arizona, “we will seal the border, stop the invasion, and launch the largest deportation effort in American history.”

It would be easy to dismiss these threats as posturing to stir up his base, but recent reporting suggests that Mr. Trump’s allies are actively drawing up plans for the broadest and most regressive anti-immigrant policy program since 1954, when Dwight D.the Eisenhower’s administration rounded up more than a million Mexican immigrants as part of an openly racist campaign dubbed Operation Wetback. According to reporting by the Times and Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump’s planned measures — which he describes as “following the Eisenhower model” — would not just remove people already living and working in the United States but also cut off the flow of new migrants. If implemented abruptly and thoroughly, as Mr. Trump has promised, such policies would threaten vital areas of the American economy dependent on immigrant labor. Nowhere is that more evident than the meat industry.

The Democratic National Convention is over, and the momentum Vice-President Harris has gained since taking over for Joe Biden has changed the face of the election. But Donald Trump is by no means finished, and that means Americans must still reckon with the nature of his policies, if elected. As November nears, what immigrant workers can expect from this country only grows more concerning. FERN editor-in-chief Theodore Ross spoke with Genoways about his article. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You argue that Donald Trump’s anti-migrant policies would uniquely harm the food system in this country. Why is that? And why tell that story in Cactus, Texas?

I focus on the tiny meatpacking town of Cactus, Texas, because the potential impact is especially apparent there. Cactus is a town of about 3,000 people, and almost every adult works in the JBS beef plant along the highway on the north side of town. The industry’s reliance on immigrant labor is kind of impossible to miss in such a place. This is a dusty waystation between Amarillo and the Oklahoma border — I mean, truly the middle of nowhere — but there’s an African restaurant, a Burmese and Thai food store, multiple Mexican restaurants. And each of these populations have their own churches: the Cactus Islamic Center, serving Muslims from Somalia; the Cactus Nazarene Ministry Center, with services in Dinka for Christians from South Sudan; Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church for Catholics from Mexico and other parts of Latin America. According to the last census, 90 percent of residents in Cactus speak a language other than English in their homes. So when you start talking about mass deportations — including deportations of refugees, asylum-seekers, and people with other humanitarian status — you can see rather quickly how such a policy would empty out a town like Cactus.

But the effect stretches well beyond this little town. The JBS plant in Cactus is one of the largest beef processing plants in America. Its closure would dramatically affect the availability and price of beef all by itself. But then, multiply that effect across the other meatpacking towns dotting the middle of the country. And don’t stop there. The dairy industry is reliant on immigrant labor. Our fresh produce is almost entirely picked and packaged by migrant laborers. And consider how many immigrants work in trucking, in loading and unloading, in the kitchens of restaurants. The estimates are that at least a quarter of all jobs in the food industry are filled by immigrants — and the entire industry has been begging for exemptions to be able to hire more and more temporary foreign labor. If Trump’s proposed policies were put in place, it would break the entire food supply chain. How would we eat?

It’s estimated that 40 percent or more of the workers in American meatpacking plants are foreign-born. Why does this industry rely so heavily on immigrant labor?

The factors are complex, but it starts with a simple fact: this is physically exhausting, often dangerous, and unpleasant work. That’s been the case since meat processing industrialized in the 1890s, so the workforce turns over frequently. Tyson Foods estimates that 40 percent of line workforce turns over every year. To fill those undesirable jobs, the industry has always turned to people who don’t have a lot of other options. People with limited English-language skills. People with no work history. People who will take any job and be glad for the paycheck, at least for a while. This is an old story. Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is often remembered as an exposé about food purity, but it was actually a book about the systematic exploitation of immigrant labor. In 1906, when Sinclair conducted his research, it was people like the protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, who was fleeing poverty in Lithuania. Today, it’s Karen refugees from Burma, people fleeing civil war in Sudan, people escaping the failed state of Somalia, or the drug wars and climate pressures of Latin America.

The past being prologue, you write about a mostly forgotten episode in America’s anti-migrant history: Nationwide raids, in 2006, on undocumented workers in meatpacking plants, including the one in Cactus. Those deportations set the stage for a new economy in the food system, one built around immigrant and refugee labor. What are the lessons of those raids today?

To me, the first lesson is: when dramatic, high-profile raids are staged, they have a deep, traumatic effect on the people involved — the workers, their children, the broader community. After the raids on the six Swift and Company plants in 2006, children who had two parents arrested were left with no one to pick them up after school that day, nowhere to go. The school districts in places like Grand Island, Nebraska, and Worthington, Minnesota, were left scrambling to find relatives who could care for those kids. Such raids may even have a temporary effect on the industry. Again, after the Swift Raids, the industry briefly saw about a 10 percent dip in the employment of undocumented labor. And Swift itself, which was an old meatpacking company, the company that Upton Sinclair investigated in Chicago a century earlier, in fact, was severely harmed. Their production dropped by more than half as they struggled to replace their workforce, and the company was bought out by the Brazilian company JBS in less than a year. So the short-term effects can be devastating.

But the ruthless machinery of the broader industry always adapts. When one group of immigrants climbs a rung on the social ladder, raising itself out of poverty just enough to leave jobs on the meatpacking line behind, the industry always finds the next vulnerable group. The recent past tells this story. The industry went from Boat People from Vietnam to people from Latin America fleeing the drug war to Somalis fleeing civil war and the collapsing government. Wherever there’s a crisis creating a large group of at-risk people who are turning to the United States for refuge, the meatpacking industry is there to exploit them as the latest disposable workforce. To me, this one of the greatest shocks of the pandemic: seeing that as a country, we could stomach the cognitive dissonance of declaring a workforce “essential” — which required them to stay on the job for us — but then didn’t see them as worthy of workplace protections or even worthy of protections against deportation, once the crisis had passed.

There is the well-worn contention that ordinary Americans, whoever they may be, take Trump “seriously but not literally,” while us media folks take Trump “literally but not seriously.” Literal. Serious. How big is the threat to the food system?

I think it’s easy to look at what Trump is proposing — deporting as many as 20 million people — and to simply brush it off as impractical. It’s red meat for the base, many pundits are saying, not an actual policy objective. Carrying out a single day of coordinated raids, as ICE did  with the Swift Raids in 2006, is one thing. But deporting 20 million people would mean carrying out more than 10 such raids per day for the entirety of a four-year term. Setting aside the moral implications for even a moment, the logistical challenge would seem insurmountable. But, having said that, there are multiple reports that Trump’s immigration team is preparing plans for undertaking just such a policy. 

Stephen Miller — the architect of child separation, the travel ban, and Remain in Mexico from Trump’s first term — told the New York Times that Trump would instruct ICE to carry out workplace raids and other sweeps of public spaces. He said that officers from other federal law enforcement agencies would be temporarily reassigned, and state National Guard troops and local police officers would be deputized. They would build “vast holding facilities” along the Texas border — just think of that — where thousands of lawyers would be engaged in fast-tracking and rejecting asylum applications.

Could they actually get to 20 million people? Probably not. But, you know, in 1954, the Eisenhower administration rounded up an estimated 1.3 million people, mostly Mexican and Mexican American workers, as part of an openly racist campaign dubbed Operation Wetback. Trump himself has said that he plans on “following the Eisenhower model.” So, even if he only achieved a fraction of the promised mass deportations — so his threats were serious but not literal — the effect would still be catastrophic. 

I think that’s always the risk of taking Trump’s threats at face value. You start discussing them in terms of their logistical feasibility, and you’re missing the larger point. What he’s really vowing is to make life for immigrants as bad as he possibly can.