DAILY TRIFECTA: Round-up at the "We're Not OK" Corral
They're getting a little punchy
THE SET-UP: While the news media obsessed on MAGA’s infighting over Trump’s decision to bomb, there was another rift opening up much closer to home. It may gain traction now that Trump is trying to put the Iran War to bed (he announced a “ceasefire” on TruthSocial a couple hours after thanking Iran for telegraphing its retaliatory response). At least Trump is getting out while he’s ahead. Despite a few notable examples to the contrary, what I’ve seen is widespread praise from the mainstream media, from most members of Congress and from his evangelical base.
The split on immigration, though, might be a harder circle to square. He’s already had two flip-flops and his reversal of a day-long reprieve came after Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem lodged vociferous objections. The Chief Goon, Tom Homan, also made it clear that agricultural workers should be fair game. Reporting at the end of last week indicated a growing problem in the fields. Workers were no-shows. And it’s probably not helping matters that ominous-looking ICE agents in masks feel empowered to rough-up and manhandle detainees.
It also won’t help that someone posted a video of U.S. Customs and Border Protection goons violently detaining Narciso Barranco of Tustin, California on Saturday while he was doing his job—landscaping at a Santa Ana IHOP. The Department of Homeland Security claims he attacked them with a weed-whacker. They’ve produced no evidence of the whacking. Barranco, though, is a perfect example of the kind of worker employers are loathe to lose. As his son Alejandro told The Santanero:
“He has always worked hard to put food on the table for us and my mom. He was always careful and always did his taxes on time. He never caused any problems and he is known as a kind and helping person by everyone in our community.”
Alejandro is a former Marine who served in Afghanistan. Barranco’s other two sons are currently serving in the Marine Corps.
But wait, there’s more…
ICE detains Marine Corps veteran’s wife who was still breastfeeding their baby
That’s the headline for an AP report on Paola Clouatre, the wife of Marine Corps veteran Adrian Clouatre. He said he doesn’t know how to tell his children where their mother went after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained her last month.” Visits require Adrian “to make an eight-hour round trip from their home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to a rural ICE detention center in Monroe.”
It could be worse, though.
Today the Supreme Court rubberstamped Trump’s dream of swiftly deporting immigrants to countries other than their country of origin. That lifts a court order that gave deportees to third party countries a chance to challenge the deportations. Now there is no chance at blocking the administration. “Fire up the deportation planes,” said Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin. Shall we tell her those planes might be heading for a mid-term collision with reality? - jp
TITLE: Wealthy business-owning Trumpers are clashing with MAGA purists over who should get deported
https://fortune.com/2025/06/22/ice-raids-deportation-maga-business-workers/
EXCERPTS: A series of high-profile raids earlier this month have put a chill on the agriculture sector, with employees now terrified to show up for work, leaving cows unmilked and crops unpicked, Bloomberg reported. Trump has cited complaints from farmers and hoteliers that ICE raids were “taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” according to a Truth Social post that presaged a brief pause in enforcement for those industries.
The reprieve lasted barely a day, though, with Trump vowing to double down on immigration raids, with an emphasis on Democratic-controlled states and worksites. In a Truth Social post, Trump decreed ICE officers “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” including “expand[ing] efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.” The following day an email went out directing ICE to continue raids at food and agriculture businesses.
Immigrants, many without legal status, work throughout the food chain. One in five food production workers—a 22-million-strong chain that stretches from fields to meatpacking plants to restaurants and supermarkets—is an immigrant, according to the Migration Policy Institute and the National Restaurant Association. In some niches, like the dairy industry, more than half the 160,000-strong workforce is foreign-born.
Rep. David Valadao, who represents California’s Central Valley, an agricultural powerhouse that produces 25% of the nation’s crops and is known for its almonds, peaches, olive oil, and grapes, said on X the administration should “prioritize the removal of known criminals over the hardworking people who have lived peacefully in the Valley for years.”
“They need to knock it off,” House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson, of Pennsylvania, told reporters of the administration’s targeting of the food sector. “Let’s go after the criminals and give us time to put processes in place so we don’t disrupt the food supply chain.”
For a sizable contingent of Trump’s base, getting rid foreign labor is precisely the point. “Our position is there should be no carveouts for anyone,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for restricting immigration. For FAIR, there is a simple solution to industries who say they can’t attract domestic workers: Raise pay.
“You can turn any job in this country into a job an American won’t do simply by degrading wages and working conditions. We shouldn’t do that,” Mehlman told Fortune. “Even in lower-skilled jobs, there are a lot of people looking for work at wages that can support their families. We should hold the employer accountable.”
Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, also came out against the carve-out, posting a poll on X indicating a majority of respondents disagreeing with the brief enforcement pause and retweeting a farm touting its citizens-only hiring policy. And rightwing commentator Matt Walsh posted, “Employers who knowingly rely on illegal immigrant labor should be in prison. Instead we’re going to back off of immigration enforcement for their sake? Hell no. We can’t tolerate this.”
TITLE: A New Meatpacking Plant’s Novel Pitch to Attract American Workers
https://www.wsj.com/business/meatpacking-american-workers-immigration-d6bdd47a
EXCERPTS: For decades, this old railroad hub [in North Platte, Nebraska] was stuck. Some employers departed, Union Pacific cut rail-yard positions and young people fled. Now, officials are pinning their hopes on a slaughterhouse, which promises an economic jolt but represents a risky bet and a crucial question: Will Americans work there?
Opportunity and hope have ebbed away in parts of rural America, including North Platte, as farming has declined and economic dynamism has concentrated in urban centers.
Taking matters into their own hands, North Platte leaders have embraced an industry that has long conjured images of bloody, hazardous working conditions while supplying products for American dinner tables. The company believes the gleaming plant will appeal to locals who never would have considered doing such work. Nationwide, over half of all front-line meatpacking workers are immigrants, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and turnover is high.
Steep challenges loom. Sustainable Beef is taking on the Big Four meatpackers—JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill and National Beef—that control 85% of the beef industry. Cattle herd sizes have hit a 75-year low. And President Trump’s immigration crackdown is targeting the backbone of an industry known for some of America’s most-grueling jobs.
Among other policy shifts, the administration ended a parole program that authorized residency and work for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, nations that provide an estimated 10% to 20% of the meat industry’s workforce.
Sustainable Beef has tried to lure local workers, including Americans, with starting pay of $22 an hour—about $46,000 a year—on par with average wages locally. The facility’s single daytime shift lets employees attend their children’s sports games after work. The company touts ergonomic work stands and individual lockers—even the plentiful toilets are an upgrade from typical meat plants.
“This isn’t the same old meatpacking plant!” its hiring ads promise. The implicit pitch: In a city that is 85% non-Hispanic white, this work isn’t just for immigrants. Whether locals step up remains uncertain, especially on the production floor where knife workers slice cattle into cuts.
Sustainable Beef, a concrete behemoth the size of 10 football fields just off Interstate 80, aims to process 1,500 head of cattle daily, with most of the beef going to Walmart, an investor in the project. The plant expects to hire about 850 workers by year’s end, which would make it the city’s third-largest private employer. Ancillary businesses such as trucking and food services, by some estimates, could yield 1,200 more jobs—if the slaughterhouse survives.
The new facility is airier and more spacious than typical meatpacking plants, many of which came online in the 1960s. It provides workers with more space and reduces movements that can cause strain—one of its employment ads touts “no overhead throwing.”
Unlike traditional plants with dual shifts that require some employees to work late into the night, Sustainable Beef said it wanted to promote quality of life and family time for its workers, so it operates on a single, daytime shift.
It has sparkling stainless steel equipment and features technology such as artificial-intelligence-enabled systems to maximize the meat taken off a carcass and track workers’ efficiency.
At the plant, labor roles have split informally along racial and ethnic lines. Most production-line workers hired so far are Hispanics new to North Platte, according to employees and company officials.
The reason: The operation prioritizes industry experience for the dangerous jobs of killing and cutting up carcasses quickly, and Hispanics are more likely to have that. White locals, meanwhile, gravitate toward positions in areas such as shipping, maintenance and cattle receiving, which don’t involve knife work, said Ashley Henning, the human resources and safety manager. She attributes this to unfamiliarity with production-line work.
Keenan Taylor, who is white, took a job at Sustainable Beef as a forklift driver. He works in a warehouse, chilled to around 35 degrees Fahrenheit, moving boxes of plastic-sealed beef. He recalls tense arguments with fellow North Platte residents who griped about minorities arriving to work at the meatpacking operation.
“All of these locals that want to complain, ‘Oh, it’s all going to be Mexicans,’ I have no nice words to say other than stop being lazy, go get your hands dirty and stop saying it’s somebody else’s job to do,” said Taylor, 31.
Some of his acquaintances have complained they have grown kids living at home not earning enough. He suggested they apply at Sustainable Beef. “Their response was, that’s beneath them. That’s a dirty job for immigrants,” he said.
The stigma of working in meatpacking is real. North Platte resident Crystal Neill, 23, has no interest in a job there, and not just because of the physical demands. She said she would rather continue working with intellectually disabled adults for $17 an hour “than go cut meat in a stinky, smelly place.”
Sustainable Beef leaders said they are confident they can fill the jobs, having received more than 2,000 applications. They are ramping up slowly and have brought on more than 400 workers so far, close to half their goal. But industrywide, anxiety is mounting.
A recent ICE raid at a meat-processor in Omaha—even though it used the government’s E-Verify program to confirm employment eligibility—caused employees to stay home at other plants. Sustainable Beef also uses E-Verify.
A deeper fear is a shrinking labor pipeline. Trump’s actions to end certain immigration programs and work authorizations are expected to reduce the available workforce and raise costs industrywide.
Another headwind is higher cattle costs. The nation’s supply is at its lowest since 1951, with drought and low margins after the pandemic prompting ranchers to sell herds. That pushed cattle prices to record highs, and analysts say meatpackers are losing more than $100 per head of cattle.
TITLE: Trump Again Considering Immigration Relief for Farmworkers
https://www.agriculture.com/partners-trump-again-considering-immigration-relief-for-farmworkers-11759112
EXCERPTS: USA Today’s Zac Anderson reported that “President Donald Trump again is saying he wants to shield farmers from the effects of his crackdown on illegal immigration, just days after his administration reinstated workplace raids on agricultural operations.”
“The Trump administration has been sending conflicting messages on the issue,” Anderson reported. “Under Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been conducting widespread raids and arresting and detaining immigrants, many of whom do not have any criminal record. Trump promised changes to protect migrants in the farming, hotel and leisure industries in a June 12 Truth Social post.”
“Following those comments, Trump’s administration directed immigration officials to largely pause raids on farms, hotels, restaurants and meatpacking plants,” Anderson reported. “But the administration reversed course a few days later and resumed the raids.”
The Associated Press’ Paul Wiseman reported that “the flipflop (has) baffled businesses trying to figure out the government’s actual policy, and (Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition) says now ‘there’s fear and worry once more.’ ‘That’s not a way to run business when your employees are at this level of stress and trauma,” she said.”
“One ICE raid left a New Mexico dairy with just 20 workers, down from 55,” Wiseman reported. “’You can’t turn off cows,’ said Beverly Idsinga, the executive director of the Dairy Producers of New Mexico. ‘They need to be milked twice a day, fed twice a day.'”
“In some places, the problem isn’t ICE but rumors of ICE. At cherry-harvesting time in Washington state, many foreign-born workers are staying away from the orchards after hearing reports of impending immigration raids,” Wiseman reported. “One operation that usually employs 150 pickers is down to 20. Never mind that there hasn’t actually been any sign of ICE in the orchards.”
“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, foreign-born workers made up less than 19% of employed workers in the U.S. in 2023. But they accounted for nearly 24% of jobs preparing and serving food and 38% of jobs in farming, fishing and forestry,” Wiseman reported. “‘It really is clear to me that the people pushing for these raids that target farms and feed yards and dairies have no idea how farms operate,’ Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association, said Tuesday during a virtual press conference.”