Eating Meat While Deporting Those Who Produce It

President Donald Trump likes his well Cambrc steaks. The Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., follows a “carnivorous regime”. In April, The New York Times Declared: “the meat is back, on the plates and in politics” and that a craze of proteins sweeps the nation. And yet, as the United States consumes more meat, our country engages in the mass deportation of workers who cut beef, pork and chicken.

A poultry transformation worker into Arkansas told me about the Trump administration: “They eat our hands.” She noted that at the height of the coco-19 cocovated pandemic, the meat packaging workers were considered essential and called heroes, but she said: “Now they throw us out of the country.”

On June 10, 2025, immigration and customs’ application agents (ICE) made a descent into the food of Glen Valley in Omaha, Nebraska, holding nearly 100 workers. As a result, during the following weeks, the production of the factory dropped 70%. According to Steven Hubbard of the American Immigration Council, around 23% of workers in the meat packaging industry are undocumented and 42% were born abroad. This is not new. For decades, the American food system relies on undocumented workers. During a Venceremos meeting in January 2025, a basic organization based on workers who support poultry workers in Arkansas, a poultry worker said: “I work with someone who is undocumented, and we do the same job. We will judge ourselves the same work. We are equal.

At a press conference this month, the US Secretary for Agriculture Brooke Rollins said that mass deportations are continuing until the United States obtained a “100%American workforce”. Rollins suggested that the “34 million valid adults in our Medicaid program” would soon be employed in meat packaging facilities and in farms in the country.

As an investigation journalist who has spent years covering the meat packaging industry, I can tell you why this is not true. Meat is one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States, with an average of 27 workers per day suffering from amputation or hospitalization. The work is brutal, with prolonged hours, extreme conditions and little surveillance.

I come from Rural Arkansas, the house of Tyson Foods, the largest company of meat debate in the United States. In 2023, an investigation by the American Labor Department found six children aged 13 to 17 working in a Tyson factory in Green Forest, Arkansas. When I started writing on the meat packaging industry in 2020, I never thought I would write on children. I thought that since 1938, when the congress has adopted the Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibited child labor, we, as a nation, agreed that child labor was immoral, inadmissible.

And yet, in March 2025, the governor of Florida, Ron Desantis, supported a labor law which aimed to replace migrant workers deported by children. Although the law is not adopted, states across the country, like my original state, Arkansas, have already started to retreat legislation on child labor. While the Trump administration deports meat packaging and agricultural workers, it seems that some legislators and lobbyists wish to replace them with children.

A week after the inauguration of Trump in 2025, on January 27, the Meat Institute, a lobbying group, sent a letter to the White House requesting that the administration reduces the regulations, in particular the Clean Water Act, the Salmonella inspections and the protections for workers. This comfortable relationship, however, will be tested because meat companies are faced with shortages of increasing labor.

During the pandemic, I saw how the first Trump administration ranked workers in meat packaging as essential and called them heroes. Now during his second administration, I watch the workers be detained and expelled while others hide.

In March, I received a call from a Mississippi poultry transformation worker. She had first accepted an interview but called to tell me that even if she had asylum and was legally in the United States, she was going to leave her job and hide. She had two young children and feared that if she kept her job, she could be swept away in a workplace raid and deported. “Who would take care of my children?” she wondered before finishing our call.

The meat packaging workers that I have interviewed in the past five years continue to cut the chicken, the beef and the pork. It is only now that they do the work of two or three people, taking over for those who have been detained, expelled or who have left their jobs. By doing such a job, they are more likely to be injured. Their hands, already a card of scars, tell the story of what we ask for.

While Kennedy promotes to eat more meat and cook fries in beef tallow in the movement “Make America Healthy Again”, workers who produce this meat are held and expelled. As we expel the workers who feed us, we are faced with the rise in food prices and the shortages of labor. Beyond that, the question remains: who will make the work dangerous and dirty to kill and treat animals? But the calculation goes beyond the consequences for consumers. Despite often dangerous working conditions, people who cut our meat hold our food system. They deserve to be treated with humanity and dignity – not expelled to do work that many Americans refuse to do.