The incoming Trump administration and their allies in Congress have promised to make unsparing mass deportations their top priority, including a return to devastating workplace raids. Unfortunately, we don’t have to imagine the downstream consequences but look to workplace raids from the last time Trump was in power. The result: U.S. citizen children were left in the lurch, and far from being a boon for workers born in the U.S., the deportations came at their expense while corporate executives and managers skated away with no accountability. Trump’s own long history of exploiting undocumented immigrants not just for political gain but also for financial gain foreshadows the corruption and cruelty that is likely on the horizon.
As Trump’s promises to enact an even more draconian and damaging version of the workplace raids, it’s worth revisiting their past consequences.
This year, in fact, marks five years since the first Trump administration launched the largest workplace raids in more than a decade, targeting seven poultry processing plants in central Mississippi and sweeping up nearly 700 of the immigrant workers who help sustain our nation’s food supply. But as The New York Times reported in a profile marking the fifth anniversary, the raids “upended” life for many outside the plant walls and its assembly lines, leaving a trail of traumatized children and worse conditions for working families.
American kids – U.S. citizens – came home from school to find an empty house. One child wept on camera for her dad’s return. At least one family member who didn’t work at any of the plants was swept up after dropping off a worker at the job site. Local stores saw business decline. Meanwhile, exploitative meatpacking plant executives escaped any accountability as hundreds of their workers were ultimately deported and many more left in limbo or stripped of their livelihoods.
The Biden administration issued a memo in 2021 halting these mass raids that disproportionately punished workers while leaving many exploitative bosses relatively unscathed, likely causing more harm to working people and failing to deliver the promised economic windfall. But they are set to become commonplace under the second Trump administration’s violent mass deportation agenda, which has tasked incoming border czar Thomas Homan and Stephen Miller (a noted white nationalist) with carrying out “the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”
WORKERS WERE ROUNDED UP IN BATTLE ZONE-LIKE RAIDS THAT EVEN ENSNARED BYSTANDERS
The New York Times reported that Baldomero Orozco-Juarez “was slicing chicken meat into tenders” at a plant in Carthage when ICE agents swooped into his workplace to detain him and dozens of his coworkers as part of a coordinated campaign across six working class towns in Mississippi on August 7, 2019. In Sebastopol, a small town of just 259, Carolina Perez said that terrified coworkers cried out that immigration had arrived and to run. “Run where?” she pleaded. The doors had been locked.
“Luis Cartagena, a pastor in Morton, Mississippi, said he witnessed ICE agents surround the local chicken processing plant. ‘It looked like an invasion in a war,’ he said, noting that there were dozens of agents, buses, and helicopters were roaming the air,” Buzzfeed reported. The dragnet also ensnared at least one bystander who had nothing to do with the operation. ICE callously refers to these as “collateral arrests.” Angela Sorac, 13 at the time, told journalist Maria Elena Salinas that her dad had prepared her for the possibility that they could be separated. “If police cars are close … ‘you know, if this happens … we just, we just want you to know that we love you very much,’” she said. Her dad, Nery, was simply dropping his sister off at a plant when he became a collateral arrest.
Eleven years prior, in Iowa, a similarly brutal scene played out when the Bush administration carried out its mass workplace raids in Postville, which led to the arrests of almost 400 people and decimated a small but diversifying town. During the raid, “enforcement officials deployed two black helicopters, a line of SUVs, and ten white buses with darkened windows — a ridiculous show of force considering that they were arresting mothers and fathers who were doing nothing but working full-time jobs,” America’s Voice noted on the tenth anniversary of the operation. “Workers who managed to escape hid in the cornfields overnight. Those who couldn’t called their spouses, family members, and friends, imploring them to take care of their children. So many workers were arrested that they had to be taken to the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, Iowa, to be processed.”
Similar scenes played out following the Mississippi raids, when federal immigration agents bussed the hundreds of workers they swept up to an airplane hangar for processing. It is a frightening preview of the second Trump administration’s plans to set up mass camps to hold thousands of detained immigrants. In one clear indication that at least some on the Trump team recognize the repellant nature of this plan, allies have reportedly been told to stop saying they’ll put people in “camps.” But there has, of course, been no indication that they will do anything but bulldoze aggressively ahead towards the raids and camps.
WEEPING U.S. CITIZEN KIDS WERE SEPARATED FROM PARENTS FOR WEEKS AND EVEN MONTHS
The U.S. citizen children of meatpacking plant workers have also borne the community-shattering brunt of workplace raids. In one case, a worker was able to make an urgent call to his partner to ask her to take care of his kids. “Dianne” told Buzzfeed that her fiancé frantically called her as agents were storming his worksite. “In the background, Dianne could hear other laborers terrified. The panic was palpable … His voice trembling, he told Dianne that she needed to make a promise before he got off the line: ‘Take care of my kids.’” But other children arrived home after their school day to find an empty house, with some spending weeks and even months separated from their parents.
“Many local leaders were furious at the lack of coordination from federal authorities,” Christopher Ross, vice president of migration and refugee resettlement services for Catholic Charities USA, wrote in his Center for Migration Studies analysis on the fifth year anniversary of the raids, “leaving locals unprepared, but still responsible, for responding to the chaotic aftermath.” The Times reported that “Mike Lee, the sheriff of Scott County, where three plants were raided, said his office was inundated with calls about children at home alone after they returned from school — their parents did not return from work.” WJTV reported that children “relied on neighbors and strangers to pick them up outside their homes after school. They drove the children to a community center where people tried to keep them calm.” One local business owner in Forest even converted his gym into a temporary shelter to house children whose parents had been disappeared. “But many kids could not stop crying for mom and dad,” WJTV continued.
In one of the most heart-wrenching moments from the raids, Magdalena Gomez Gregorio, then 11, sobbed on-camera for the release of her dad, who had been detained at his job site in Forest. “Government, please show some heart,” she told WJTV. “I need my dad and mommy. My dad didn’t do anything, he’s not a criminal.” Though they were finally reunited after several months thanks to advocates who raised thousands to secure his bond, the family struggled financially due to loss of income.
The research has also been clear on the detrimental effects of family separation, including PTSD. The collective harms of mass raids also reach children beyond those directly impacted due to their parents’ occupation. Leake County School District reported that the day after the raids, more than 150 Latino children did not show up to class. Following an ICE raid on a meatpacking plant in Tennessee the prior year, 500 students stayed home from school. And in New Mexico, the year before that, 2,000 students skipped school following a raid that targeted a Las Cruces neighborhood. In Mississippi, the cruelty was intentional: the raids fell on the first day of school, CNN reported.
AS WORKERS FACED SEPARATION AND FINANCIAL STRUGGLE, EXECUTIVES ESCAPED ACCOUNTABILITY
A report released by the Mississippi Center for Justice on the second anniversary of the raids in 2021 revealed that as an estimated 230 workers were deported in the aftermath of the sweeps and hundreds of others still in the United States faced financial struggles and uncertain futures, not one single high-level poultry corporation executive ever faced charges despite clear evidence that they knew their companies were exploiting undocumented immigrant labor. “Court documents additionally show that an indicted hiring and payroll manager received fifteen percent of the salaries of each person she recruited,” Mississippi Center for Justice said at the time.
“Instead, the local managers of one plant are headed to trial while the owner and the manager of an employee services contractor have pled guilty,” the organization continued. “The speed with which these cases are processed contrasts sharply with the protracted delay faced by our clients and others like them for individual hearings on their claims, 90% of which still are not scheduled or anticipated to be scheduled two years after the raids.”
Immigrant rights advocates also expressed fears that the raids were in fact retaliation against workers who had brought forward a $3.75 million lawsuit against Koch Food Inc. alleging “supervisors touched and/or made sexually suggestive comments to female Hispanic employees, hit Hispanic employees and charged many of them money for normal everyday work activities.” Koch Inc. eventually settled with the workers, creating “a 24-hour-a-day bilingual hotline for workers to use to file complaints” as part of the settlement decree, labor magazine Payday Report said. The following year, the Morton plant was among the locations raided by ICE.
Like Mississippi Center for Justice said in its report, “rogue” managers are not the sole bad actors here. “Instead, they make clear that exploitation of immigrants was embedded within the operational culture of the businesses, reaching to the top. This situation exposes the glaring inequalities, hypocrisy, and abuse in our country’s immigration system,” one that needs updating to help keep unscrupulous bosses in check. “Regardless of which side one fell on the physical, philosophical, and political fences that day in Mississippi, the situation, the policies – the status quo – still frustrate everyone,” Ross noted in his analysis.
In the meantime, recent guidelines better protecting undocumented workers from employer retaliation are to the benefit of U.S.-born workers, too. This past summer, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was doubling the time that immigrant whistleblowers who speak out about abusive workplace conditions can be protected from deportation from two years to four years. When abusive bosses are reined in and hostile workplaces are eliminated, everyone benefits. But it’s quite telling for who the incoming president is interested in protecting as he maneuvers to end a program that could have provided protections for the type of undocumented worker he exploited on his golf courses.
EXPLOITER-IN-CHIEF
But the sad truth of the matter is that we should expect to see exploitative employers get a free pass in the second Trump era. In fact, during his first administration, Trump commuted the only employer of late to be convicted and incarcerated after a mass immigration raid, America’s Voice noted in 2019. “It seems this administration operates from the theory that poor, exploited, hardworking immigrants are the threat, while American employers who break the law, exploit immigrant workers, undercut native-born workers and gain an unfair advantage over law-abiding competitors, are not.” Trump’s own organization has relied on importing and exploiting immigrant workers for Trump clubs, hotels and properties for years, including his first term.
We also cannot discount how some undocumented workers will now face the possibility of silencing themselves about abuses in order to avoid being reported to ICE by their workplace, which also comes at detriment to the U.S.-born colleagues they share a workspace with. Now aiming to place allies loyal to him and his rich cronies over working families in key federal agencies like the Department of Labor– one leading contenter reportedly exploited an undocumented laborer himself–Trump is poised to take his place as Exploiter-in-Chief to previously unimaginable depths.
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