(Bloomberg) — Immigration raids rocking cities from Los Angeles to Chicago are spreading to the agriculture industry, with a meat plant in the Midwest and fruit workers in California being targeted.
More than 70 people were detained after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at a meat plant in Omaha, Nebraska, earlier this week. Federal agents were also spotted at a field where farm laborers were picking blueberries in Tulare County, California, the LA Times reported.
The administration of President Donald Trump is ramping up immigration raids across the country, and farm workers are no longer being spared. Almost half of the more than 850,000 crop workers in the US are undocumented, the Department of Agriculture estimates.
The raid in Omaha found some undocumented immigrants at the Glenn Valley Foods facility, which makes products such as beef, chicken and pork for retail and other food-service providers. That was the biggest workforce enforcement operation in the state so far under Trump’s second term.
In California, the nation’s largest agricultural state, federal agents showed up in farm fields and packinghouses from the Central Coast to the San Joaquin Valley, according to the LA Times. Elizabeth Strater, vice president of the United Farm Workers, told the newspapers that there has been an “uptick in the chaotic presence of immigration enforcement, particularly the Border Patrol.”
“We are deeply alarmed by the latest actions from the Trump Administration targeting workers at agricultural fields, packinghouses, and other facilities from the Central Coast to the Central Valley,” said California Democratic Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff. “Without the people who work through harsh conditions — extreme heat, cold weather, or pouring rain — feeding the nation would be impossible.”
The raid in Omaha has already impacted production, with the facility now running with less than a third of its normal staff, according to Chad Hartmann, president of Glenn Valley Foods.
“We’ve done our best” to ramp up production, Hartmann said by phone.
–With assistance from Gerson Freitas Jr., Erin Ailworth and Eliyahu Kamisher.
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