ICE raids leave crops unharvested: "70% of workers are gone"

This is going to be a huge issue going forward - grocery prices are going to sky-rocket

In the vast agricultural lands north of Los Angeles, stretching from Ventura County into the state's central valley, two farmers, two field supervisors and four immigrant farmworkers told Reuters this month that the ICE raids have led a majority of workers to stop showing up.

That means crops are not being picked and fruit and vegetables are rotting at peak harvest time, they said.

One Mexican farm supervisor, who asked not to be named, was overseeing a field being prepared for planting strawberries last week. Usually he would have 300 workers, he said. On this day he had just 80. Another supervisor at a different farm said he usually has 80 workers in a field, but today just 17.

Most economists and politicians acknowledge that many of America's agricultural workers are in the country illegally, but say a sharp reduction in their numbers could have devastating impacts on the food supply chain and farm-belt economies.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said an estimated 80% of farmworkers in the U.S. were foreign-born, with nearly half of them in the country illegally. Losing them will cause price hikes for consumers, he said.

"This is bad for supply chains, bad for the agricultural industry," Holtz-Eakin said.

Over a third of U.S. vegetables and over three-quarters of the country's fruits and nuts are grown in California, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The state's farms and ranches generated nearly $60 billion in agricultural sales in 2023.

This was so absolutely 100% predicted.

Side of guac? That will be $3.99 — wait, never mind, we don’t have any this week.

[quote] [bold]Most Americans don't want to do this work[/bold]

THIS.

I don't know why these stupid fucking MAGA voters don't understand this concept.

Immigrants aren't "taking your jobs."

Immigrants are doing the jobs that you and your kids DON'T WANT TO FUCKING DO!

It’s insane

All hail Dear Leader Trump's Great Leap Forward!

It's by design. All the corporate agriculture concerns will be able to buy these farms for a song and jack up pollution and runoff to kill us all. And a couple people will make money on the stock market

Curtis & Shaleen looking forward to $50 a carton strawberries and $20 a jar baby food.

Or $100 for a pack of cigarettes.

Still a firm believer in the FAFO Principle.

Easy solution: all those unemployed MAGAts in dying rust belt and coal mining towns should head out to the fields for some stoop labor and an honest day's work. Win-win, right, MAGA?

^^^The Chinese already posted an AI video of that, r11.

As fat, old and medicated as most maggots are, they wouldn't be able to bend over to reach any crops. Their guts are in the way

Why not round up a bunch of those incel losers from basements and make them do this work instead?

R12, ha, good one. Those basement dwellers could use some good 'ol sunshine and exercise. It might give them some length of muscle they lack.

Yep, I think Trump should conscript all of his Gen Z fanboys to go pick crops.

I'm guessing Trump and the MAGAts will make sure those who able-bodied and receiving Medicaid will be the ones pickin' dem bales.

Why did you vote for orange.

I work in Ventura county.

There are a lot of MAGATS. Even the farm owners— inexplicably— are MAGATS.

So, this is working out very well for them.

You know it's bad when ICE agents are chasing down strawberry field workers. Because all those immigrant drug lord kingpins a la Scarface purposely throw off the feds by working the fields during the day (double eye roll)

🎶 Strawberry fields forever 🎶

Even Poodles are smarter.

I think Trump should deploy ICE, the National Guard and Marines to the farms. Half a Summer doing some actual work might teach these idiots a lesson.

This is Project 2025-get rid of the brown people and make the Medicaid poors do the work. Do the Project 2025 architects not know that MAGAts are fat, lazy, and drug addicted? They make for terrible workers-just ask Springfield, Ohio (DERE EATING DA CATS, DERE EATING DA DAWGS!) how that worked out for them. It's why they had to import Haitians to work those jobs.

Those ICE slobs can’t bend over, either, as most of them are domestic terrorists from Meal Team 6.

That’s why they gave to lay in wait for immigrants to show up - no way could those bloated toads run anyone down.

[quote] I think Trump should deploy ICE, the National Guard and Marines to the farms. Half a Summer doing some actual work might teach these idiots a lesson.

Many of the ICE agents are also Mexican, so this should work out quite well for them...

R17 - yes - I was going to say - how many in Ventura voted for this?

But I thought there were migrant Visas for people every year. The work Visas where they come in for season, pick all the crops, then return back to Mexico. I know a lot do this.

Of course, some stayed and didn't go back.

Didn't Florida already go through this a few months ago?

I just watched that new American Apparel documentary on Netflix, and that company went tits-up after ICE raided their LA manufacturing facility and deported all of the illegal workers. Now extrapolate that nationwide...

R25, the migrant visa program still exists but first you need it to work effectively (Trump made staffing cuts there) and then you need migrants to trust it enough to be willing to uproot their lives and try to use it. The fear and doubt and mistrust today among Latino migrants is of course several orders of magnitude greater under Trump 2.0 than it was under previous administrations.

When the food starts to run out, some idiotic "Marsha" (as in Blackburn) is going to call on us all to plant "MAGA Gardens" in our back yards, like it was 1943,

R27 - but where are they and how are they surviving? I presume they don't have a ton of cash saved up.

Shady Vance is all set to profit when the farms sell on AcreTrader (AKA Acre Traitor).