US workers say Trump’s immigration crackdown is causing labor shortages: ‘A strain on everybody’

As Trump moves to strip over 1 million immigrants of legal status, factories grapple with slowdowns, say employees

Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration is piling pressure on US factories, according to employees and union leaders, as veteran workers from overseas are forced to leave their jobs.

As economists warn the administration’s full-scale deportation ambitions could ultimately cost millions of jobs, workers at two sites – in Michigan and Kentucky – told the Guardian that industrial giants are grappling with labor shortages.

The US president has moved to strip more than a million immigrants of their legal status in the US, including by shutting down the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans (CHNV) Parole Program, which allowed hundreds of thousands to work legally in the country. It has meanwhile ramped up immigration arrest operations with prospective daily quotas of 3,000 arrests per day.