How Trump’s Deportation Plans Could Blow Up the Food System and Increase Migrant Labor

The U.S. food system is propped up by low-wage immigrant workers from farm to table. From California’s strawberry fields to Florida’s orange orchards, at least 70 percent of the agricultural workers who harvest our crops were born outside the U.S. In our meatpacking plants, nearly half of the people who slaughter, cut and package beef, pork and poultry were born elsewhere. And over a quarter of the truck drivers who shuttle cows to slaughterhouses and steaks to supermarkets are foreign-born, too.

While many of these workers are undocumented — about 40 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, for instance — research suggests that a majority of them are legal immigrants. In 2020, the total number of immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, a designation for immigrants from countries with...