Jack Herrera of The Texas Monthly asks whether farming can survive without laborers. His article is titled “Are We Living Through the End of Texas Farming?“

Didn’t anyone in the Trump administration think about the impact of their draconian deportation policies on farming, the tourist industry, and other sectors where immigrants are employed? Apparently not.

Trump claimed he intended to deport “the worst of the worst.” The murderers, rapists, repeat offenders. But in fact, ICE is deporting hard-working people who have not committed crimes and who have contributed to our economy.

Even though Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, has warned Trump about the impact of deportations on farmers, nothing has changed. ICE continues to round up farm laborers, threatening the nation’s food supply.

Herrera writes:

As we broiled beneath a relentless sun in the Chihuahuan Desert, next to countless rows of improbably green cotton plants, I expected Ramon Tirres to tell me that water is his most precious resource. In the valley south of El Paso, Tirres grows cotton and pecans, and for the past 23 years, he’s farmed in the midst of historic drought. But as the wiry 71-year-old toed the dirt next to one of the canals that waters his fields, Tirres told me he’s facing a more pressing shortage: “The big issue we’re having now is finding workers,” Tirres said. “God almighty, is it hard.”

Three years ago, Tirres began working to get an H-2A employment visa for a Mexican farmhand, one of a small pool of workers who could handle the massive John Deere harvesters, the sophisticated machines that use GPS to navigate down furrows without veering an inch off course. “I need him—I was looking forward to having him,” Tirres said. “Irrigation, hauling, driving the tractor, cultivating—he could do it all.” The visa process was going well, and around January, the worker received news that it was looking likely he’d get approved. Then in March, after President Donald Trump took office, the man called Tirres and told him that working as an immigrant in the U.S. now carried intolerable risks. “He got scared,” Tirres said. “He told me, ‘I hear the talk that [immigrants] are getting shipped out to Venezuela or El Salvador—and I don’t want that to happen to me.’” He gave up on the visa process. 

Labor shortages are crippling agriculture across the U.S., and they’ve got the attention of everyone from farmers in El Paso to top officials in the White House. For generations, farmers have struggled to find American-born workers, and in recent years, the number of Mexican farmworkers in the country has decreased, dangerously shrinking the labor pool. In 2022, a national survey of farmers found that close to half—46 percent—said they didn’t have enough workers and that they were struggling to hire more. “We are losing farms in America at a rapid pace and there is no question that our broken workforce system is partly to blame,” Zippy Duvall, the American Farm Bureau Federation president, said in March of that year. 

Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, is well aware of the problem. At a forum in February, she talked about meeting with farmers across the country. “Almost every single conversation, every single one, labor comes up, so it’s clearly a top issue,” Rollins said. She has had to contend with an inconvenient fact: More than 42 percent of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented. As farmers raise the alarm about critical worker shortages, the Trump administration is actively deporting those workers—or scaring them away. In June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted huge raids in California, Nebraska, and Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. In the Valley, ICE raids have not come for farms, but the fear of them has been disruptive. According to the most recent survey from the National Center for Farmworker Health, as many as 80 percent of farmworkers in Hidalgo County are undocumented. Farmers have reported that fears of ICE raids have led many of their workers to stop going to work. Food has been left rotting in fields and warehouses. Over the summer, South Texas farmers told reporters that they weren’t just low on workers—they had zero workers left; even those with papers were afraid to show up. “One hundred percent, one hundred percent don’t want to come out of fear of being picked up even if they are doing it the right way,” one farmer told the Valley Central News.