(Bloomberg) -- In the past year, JBS SA, the world’s biggest beef producer, relied more and more on Haitian migrants to work the line at its sprawling meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado.
The Brazilian meat giant gave them jobs after former President Joe Biden extended their temporary protected status, and roughly 1,000 Haitians now work at the plant, union representatives say. (JBS disputes this estimate.) They’re part of the latest wave of immigrants to take on the grueling, dangerous task of butchering cattle at meatpacking plants across the country, ensuring Americans have plentiful, affordable beef. Right now, it’s fully legal for them to work, but that could change soon under President Donald Trump.
The White House is ending or restricting deportation protections for some Haitians, Venezuelans, refugees and asylum-seekers, deepening a push to scrap shields for migrants fleeing turmoil or disaster at home. Those without the protections won’t be permitted to work and may have to go home or face deportation, threatening to drain workers from plants across the country over time and upend the meatpacking industry’sdependence on migrants.
“You will have hundreds of people coming off the line,” said Mark Lauritsen, who is a vice president at the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, which represents the Greeley plant. “What will that do? When supply drops, prices will go up.”
Fearing a potential shortage of workers, unions and big meatpackers are talking about how to keep plants running as Trump rounds up migrants. “We’ve started to have conversations with all the employers about their response and how to make sure they are staffed and safe,” said Lauritsen, whose union also represents workers in plants owned by Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods and Cargill, among others.
JBS said it doesn’t expect major hiring challenges at Greeley or any other plant. The company said less than 2% of its 65,000 US workers have TPS status and said union estimates for the number of Haitian workers in Greeley are “inaccurate.” JBS declined to provide its own figures, saying it doesn’t track the nationality of workers. “JBS is not concerned about our ability to properly staff our Greeley facility or any of our plants across the US,” the company said in a statement.
“If laws change, we will adapt with those requirements,” JBS said in emailed responses to questions, adding that it complies with US immigration law and all employees have proper work permits. In recent years, JBS has run its plants with more workers than needed, providing a cushion if it were to lose some employees.
Over the long term, Trump’s crackdown on the border would limit the flow of immigrant workers, presenting a long-term challenge for meatpackers.
In Washington, while JBS’s lobbyists aren’t currently engaged on immigration, industry groups are trying to persuade lawmakers and the White House to create more pathways for migrants to get long-term work visas. They are focused on averting the kind of high-profile raids that scared off workers in the past, triggering meat shortages and higher prices, people involved in the lobbying effort said.
Raids stoke “fear, uncertainty, workers who feel like they’re being harassed,” said Matt Teagarden, chief executive officer of the Kansas Livestock Association, which represents ranchers who sell cattle to meatpackers. “If these actions lead to workers not showing up at beef processing plants, we’d see a dynamic pretty quickly of cattle prices dropping and beef prices increasing.”
The push for securing a legal immigrant workforce goes beyond Big Beef.
“In our businesses, farm labor has always struggled and immigration has been absolutely central,” said Beth Ford, chief executive officer of dairy cooperative Land O’Lakes, who also leads the immigration committee at the Business Roundtable. The group of 200 CEOs has been speaking to policymakers about the inflationary impact of reducing immigration and curtailing visas.
In Greeley, a city of 113,000 north of Denver where it’s hard to escape the smell of cattle and manure, there are signs that Trump’s threatened crackdown has JBS plant workers on edge. Haitian employee chat groups are dominated by talk of raids — punctuated by rumored sightings of immigration agents at the local Walmart (those were false alarms).
One worker zeroed in on a sign at the plant warning of winter “ice” hazards, asking in Haitian creole if it signaled Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, was near. In conversations with Haitian workers at the plant, many express fear of getting swept up in Trump's crackdown and getting expelled from the US.
“People are scared,” said Swe Ko, a union representative at the JBS plant in Greeley.
About 500,000 Haitians are eligible for TPS, and Trump got elected on pledges to end the program, falsely claiming that migrants who came to Springfield, Ohio, to fill labor shortages were eating pets. Trump also shut down the US refugee program. The moves raised concerns inside the beef industry about how to replace workers who are shut out of America over the long term.
A judge temporarily blocked Trump’s efforts to suspend the refugee admission system on Feb. 25, and a group of immigrant organizations sued to block the end of TPS status for Haitians and Venezuelans.
Few industries are as reliant on migrants as meatpackers — roughly 45% were born outside the US, more than double other industries, according to a 2022 study published by the American Immigration Council.
Meatpacking has always been a business that depended on recent migrants. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Irish, German and Eastern European arrivals, as well as Black workers from the US south, did the hard work in the slaughterhouses of New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.
Then Mexicans and Central Americans moved in, filling jobs Americans didn’t want. Later, meatpackers filled their massive plants in places like Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado with immigrants from conflict-ravaged countries like Vietnam, Myanmar and Somalia who had refugee and humanitarian visas. Most recently, TPS holders like the Haitians have been tapped for labor, union officials say.
The beef industry has ratcheted up efforts to head off a repeat of 2019, when Trump’s federal immigration agents raided seven poultry plants in Mississippi, arresting almost 700 workers suspected of being in the country illegally. A decade earlier, under President George W. Bush, federal agents swarmed six major meatpacking plants, including Greeley.
They’re asking lawmakers to instead come up with a more reliable supply of legal immigrant workers, people involved in the campaign say.
Teagarden, the son of ranchers, is focusing on key lawmakers, like Kansas Representative Tracey Mann, a Republican who chairs the subcommittee on livestock. He’d like to see an overhaul of the US guest-worker visa program so it can be used for longer-term meatpacking and ranching work. Mann declined to comment.
The Meat Institute, which represents the meatpacking industry and counts JBS as a member, is calling for renewable visas for processing plant workers. And the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which represents 25,000 ranchers across the country, recently proposed an “immigration reform” that gives law-abiding undocumented workers a path to legality because of “a lack of interested and reliable US workers.”
Inside the small UFCW office in downtown Greeley one morning in February, union representatives said programs like TPS have given recently arrived immigrants access to jobs at JBS where the pay is good, starting around $23 an hour.
Ko, the union representative, knows from experience what finding employment in the US feels like. He got his first job in Greeley a decade ago, after fleeing repression in Myanmar and arriving in the US as a refugee. He has become a US citizen.
He says workers come to union reps every day to ask if Trump’s immigration crackdown will cost them their jobs, and, ultimately, get them sent home.
--With assistance from Isis Almeida, Gerson Freitas Jr, Alicia A. Caldwell and Ilena Peng.
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