ICE Raids Are Tearing Down the Backbone of U.S. Agriculture

In June 2025, the U.S. government intensified immigration enforcement across California’s Central Valley. The targets were undocumented farmworkers, many of whom have spent years working the fields. The result was immediate. Crops were left to rot, farmers began sounding alarms, and entire communities were thrown into chaos.

Lisa Tate, a sixth-generation farmer in Ventura County, said it plainly.
“If seventy percent of our labor vanishes, seventy percent of our crops won’t get picked. They’ll rot. Most Americans don’t want this work.”

She is not exaggerating. California produces more than one-third of the nation’s vegetables and over three-quarters of its fruits and nuts. And much of that production now sits unharvested.

The Numbers Behind the Breakdown

Former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin estimates that about eighty percent of U.S. farm labor is foreign-born. Nearly half of that labor force lacks documentation. These workers are not a side story. They are the foundation of a sixty billion dollar sector.

After the ICE raids, farm supervisors reported entire crews disappearing. Fields that usually had three hundred workers now had eighty. In one case, a strawberry field that should have had eighty workers had only seventeen show up. Crops don’t wait. Miss a harvest window by a few days, and the product is lost.

Why U.S.-Born Workers Aren’t Filling the Gap

People ask why Americans don’t take these jobs. The answer is simple. The work is hard, physically brutal, underpaid, and lacks benefits. Conditions are often extreme. Most Americans will not accept those terms unless wages and protections improve significantly. Employers know this, which is why they rely on vulnerable, undocumented labor to keep costs down and silence complaints.