Law360 (February 5, 2025, 10:30 PM EST) — Unannounced U.S. Border Patrol raids in Kern County, California, the day after Congress certified the 2024 election ended up costing the county about $25 million in lost agricultural production after unauthorized immigrants stopped coming to work.
That figure, estimated by Richard Gearhart, who chairs the economics department at California StateUniversity, Bakersfield, was a “recession-level event” for the county, he told Law360. And it could be a portent of what’s to come if President Donald Trump is able to staff and fund the infrastructure needed to deliver on his campaign promise to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants.
“About 75% of workers didn’t show up. And they didn’t show up anywhere — they didn’t show up to their doctor’s appointments, they didn’t show up to school, their kids didn’t go to school — I’ve never been in an empty Costco before, except for that Friday,” Gearhart said.
In addition to disrupting the local agricultural labor force, the effects of the Jan. 7 raids in KernCounty trickled down to small businesses that predominantly serve the Latino community, many of which Gearhart said closed for about a week. That’s an economic loss he said most can’t absorb.
Removing even a quarter of the unauthorized workers without a plan to replace them could cause a mild recession, Gearhart said.
And it could hit some key industries hard and fast. Across the entire agricultural sector, 12.7% of the workforce is unauthorized. That number jumps to about 40% for crop farmworkers, according to theEconomic Research Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The industry itself is already fragile. Nearly 142,000 U.S. farms were lost between 2017 and 2022, about a 7% decline, USDA data show. And many farms are operating on tight margins, according toBrian Reisinger, who wrote the 2024 book “Land Rich, Cash Poor” outlining the decline of American farms.
Farmers, even those who support more stringent border security, are concerned about the effect of farmworkers being swept up in immigration raids, Reisinger told Law360. If that happens, not only will crops, income and more farms be lost, consumers will likely face higher prices at the grocery store, he said.
“If these actions continue, they’ll have to be carefully coordinated and targeted around criminal activity and … [done] in close consultation with state and local government and law enforcement —and with agriculture — to make sure that that’s navigated properly,” Reisinger said.
So far, the Trump administration has not said how it intends to address existing labor shortages, northose that might be made worse by mass removals. The White House did not return a request for comment.
Immigration officials have arrested more than 8,000 noncitizens since Jan. 20, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday. According to Leavitt, 461 of those people have been released because of a lack of detention space. Among them are noncitizens who can’t be immediately deported, some with serious medical conditions and others without final removal orders who are contesting their removability in the immigration court system, she said.
The administration is also adding to the pool of noncitizens who could be removed with its rollback of humanitarian programs, like temporary protected status for individuals from countries in turmoil, that will strip those people of temporary legal status and work authorization.
As of last March 31, there were about 864,000 temporary protected status holders, and the Biden administration made another 331,000 eligible by extending and redesignating Haiti, Yemen and Somalia for TPS, according to the American Immigration Council. But on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem terminated the 2023 TPS designation for Venezuela, which will take effect April 7 and will affect nearly 350,000 people.
The administration has also ended Biden-era parole programs for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela granting vetted individuals from those countries temporary admission and work authorization, which will affect more than 531,000 people admitted through the program. The Trump administration also suspended Biden-era programs that admitted 150,000 Ukrainians and 76,000 Afghans through parole.
Even if these people aren’t immediately deported, removing them from the workforce will still affect the economy, according to Diana Kearney, the senior legal and shareholder advocacy advisor at Oxfam America.
“That alone is really massive when we think about the huge loss in tax base that this is going to constitute,” Kearney told Law360.
The move to strip these individuals of work authorization could also mean fewer long-term caregivers, on whom the elderly, the disabled and the chronically ill rely to meet their medical and daily living needs.
The minimum-wage work can be grueling, which already makes it challenging to attract enough workers, according to Arnulfo De La Cruz, president of Service Employees International Union Local 2015. The union represents more than half a million caregivers in California, about half of whom are immigrants, including some TPS holders.
Adding the threat of deportation into the mix threatens the stability of the long-term caregiver workforce in California and across the nation, along with the ability of Americans to receive the medical care they may need, De La Cruz told Law360.
Shrinking the workforce “would have a devastating impact,” he said.
“If it was true that these were jobs that Americans were knocking down the door to get because they were paying $30 bucks an hour with good health care, I’d get it. That’s just not the reality,” De La Cruz said.
The Health Resources and Services Administration has projected that the demand for long-term caregivers, including home health aides, nursing aides, personal care aides and nurses working in long-term care homes, will grow 39% between 2022 and 2037.
That’s in part because of an aging baby-boomer population that is not only retiring but also requiring more healthcare, according to the American Immigration Council’s senior data scientist, Steven Hubbard.
Increasing labor shortages, which could be exacerbated by mass deportations and decreased immigration, could result in higher healthcare costs that may be difficult for those on fixed incomes to afford, Hubbard told Law360.
“We’re going to have some issues that we’re going to have to address,” Hubbard said. “It may mean higher costs, whether it be for our food or for our healthcare, and we have to be thinking and preparing for that society.”
–Editing by Brian Baresch and Kelly Duncan.