Trump Labor Department Says His Immigration Raids Are Causing a Food Crisis

In a filing in the Federal Register, the Labor Department argues there are “immediate dangers to the American food supply” due to a lack of migrant agricultural workers.

By David Dayen, The American Prospect

The Department of Labor’s new rule cutting farmworker wages bluntly states that souped-up immigration enforcement has devastated the agricultural workforce and created a significant “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages,” according to a document filed in the Federal Register last week. The document also indicates that American workers are simply not interested in and do not have the skills to perform agricultural jobs, at odds with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s claim that the farm workforce will soon be 100 percent American.

“The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers,” the document says, adding that “this threat will grow” given new federal funding for immigration enforcement under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The rule seeks to bring in guest workers through the H-2A program at lower wages, potentially reducing wages across the spectrum for all farmworkers, regardless of legal status. But in order to do so quickly, Trump’s Department of Labor is surprisingly citing the downside risks of its own president’s mass deportation program, arguing that it is causing “immediate dangers to the American food supply.”

“They’re sort of, I guess refreshingly, explicit about how this is going to go down,” said Daniel Costa, an attorney with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) who tracks the H-2A program. But this claim of mass carnage from immigration has a very particular intent: the only way out of the crisis, the Labor Department states, is to hire many more foreign workers to pick U.S. crops at lower wages, a direct transfer of income from workers in the fields to their agribusiness employers.

Only one of two things can be true: Either Trump’s Labor Department actually believes that Trump’s immigration enforcement is destroying the agricultural sector and threatening food security, or they are pretending this threat is real in order to crush wages for both foreign and domestic agricultural workers. Neither look particularly good.

An email to the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration, which filed the new rule, could not be answered because of the ongoing government shutdown, according to the office’s media contacts. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.