How Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Could Impact the Illinois Farming Industry

Abena Bediako | July 11, 2025, 3:11 pm

President Donald Trump has directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents to pause his immigration crackdown on hospitality and agriculture workers.

That’s after business leaders raised concerns that the administration’s mass deportation efforts were depriving them of essential workers.

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Last week, the Trump administration said it’s working on legislation to allow undocumented workers to remain in these industries.

“We will follow the President’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokesperson, said in a statement when asked to confirm the directive.

The unclear circumstances have caused turmoil within both industries, and farmers have seen a shortage of workers during some of their peak seasons.

“They are angry, they are scared, they are feeling that their business is being attacked,” said Maggie Rivera, CEO and president of the Illinois Migrant Council.

Nationally, construction and agriculture workforces had the highest shares of undocumented workers as of 2022, according to the American Immigration Council. Nearly 14% of people employed in the construction industry are undocumented, compared to 15.1% in the agriculture sector and 7.6% in the hospitality sector.

“If they don’t show up, the production of that industry will drop significantly, and we’ll see real damage done to these industrial sectors,” said Robert Bruno, professor and director of the labor education program at University of Illinois’ School of Labor and Employment Relations. “There’s a lot of lost revenue, a lot of lost GDP, and there’s downstream effects of those workers not being on the job.”

Last month Trump ordered ICE agents to ramp up mass deportation efforts, specifically singling out Los Angeles. White House aide Stephen Miller said the administration’s goals were a minimum of 3,000 ICE arrests per day, up from about 650 per day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.

“Undocumented workers do pay taxes and contribute to things like Social Security and Medicare, so we lose that tax base,” said Steve Hubbard, senior data scientist at the American Immigration Coalition. “There’s some serious questions about, how do these industries adapt and make it economical for our country?”

Mass deportations could reduce the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by 4.2-6.8% and result in significant reduction in tax revenues for the U.S. government. In 2022, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes and contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.

“We’re talking about farm workers,” Bruno said. “There’s never been a non-immigrant workforce that’s wanted to work in that industry. There is no replacement labor force. It’s not as if you get rid of all these immigrants, you’re going to have a bunch of American citizens who are going to step up and say they want to do that work.”

A similar labor shortage during the 1940s in the U.S. led to the Bracero program, a diplomatic agreement between Mexico and the U.S. that permitted millions of Mexican men to work legally in the United States on short-term labor contracts. These agreements addressed the national agricultural labor shortage during World War II.

“There’s going to be a shortage, and the farmers or the growers are going to be the ones that are going to lose in huge monetary amounts, because all of what they have planted will go to waste, and our day-to-day food industry is going to suffer,” Rivera said. “Our household, our families are going to suffer.”

Advocates believe Trump’s immigration reform efforts will create a ripple effect.

“It potentially means higher prices,” Hubbard said. “It may also mean food security. We may need to import more food from outside the United States and we need to think about that as we implement more tariffs and how we can think about our food security to ensure we’re more self-sustaining as a country.”