Burcum: Minnesota communities may land on deportation push’s frontlines

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President-elect Donald Trump has promised to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” targeting an estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. Minnesotans living in and around the city of Worthington, a city of about 14,000 near the Iowa border, don’t have to imagine how that vow translates to real life.

They got a preview in December 2006, when federal immigration agents conducted an early morning raid on what was then the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant. Officials detained at least 400 employees, shutting down operations as part of a six-state hunt for workers who had used stolen identities to get a job.

Eighteen years later, the community remains one of Minnesota’s most diverse, with the plant, now run by JBS, continuing to attract immigrant workers and their families. While the county overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the recent election, there are also understandable questions about how his aggressive deportation plan might impact the town.

“There’s a lot of people on pins and needles,” said current Worthington Mayor Rick Von Holdt, who remembers the 2006 operation and the communitywide “shock to the system” it provided.

While Minnesota is far from the U.S. border with Mexico, the 2006 action is a reminder that the state very likely will be on the front lines of the Trump administration’s deportation push. A critical reason: the meatpacking industry concentrated along the state’s I-90 corridor.

“About 17 percent of workers in the U.S. workforce today are immigrants. But more than one-half (51.5 percent) of front line meatpacking workers are immigrants,” according to a 2020 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The data makes clear the nation’s uneasy, often unacknowledged reliance on immigrants’ vital role in our food supply, which has become even more important amid a historic labor shortage.

These workers put meat, produce and milk on our tables, often for relatively low pay and in conditions that can be dirty and dangerous. Perhaps there might be a rush of applicants to fill kill-floor vacancies or manage manure for the state’s large dairy, beef, pork and poultry operations after wide-scale deportations, but that seems unlikely.

To be absolutely clear, secure borders are imperative. At the same time, it’s also important to be honest about potential consequences from the sweeping actions the incoming Trump administration has proposed.

Labor shortages tend to lead to higher worker pay, which may translate to higher grocery costs. And if meatpacking and other agricultural enterprises can’t find workers, they’ll eventually relocate to where employees are more plentiful. The shameful long-standing congressional failure to pass immigration reforms, particularly ones that provide some sort of lasting safe haven for this critical workforce, has wider implications than many realize.

The St. Paul office for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) declined to answer questions about whether Worthington and other Minnesota meatpacking communities will be targeted under new Trump deportation policies. An ICE spokesman referred questions to the Trump transition team. As of Friday, there was no response. JBS also did not respond to request for comment.

Logic still applies, however. If the aim is to deport a lot of people, then it makes sense to focus on communities where many immigrants reside. Immigration legal experts in Minnesota share this concern.

“We are prepared,” said Susana De León, a Twin Cities immigration lawyer. “I think it’s possible for wide-scale disruptions of workers and families and communities.”

Julia Decker, policy director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, said there’s a lot of uncertainty about what will happen. She and the law center’s team are being careful not to spark unneeded fear while also weighing how to advise those who could be affected.

“I think it is a time for everyone to be very aware of what is going on and not to be complacent about how large some of the changes that we’ll face could be,” Decker said. Her organization provides free legal representation to low-income immigrants and refugees in Minnesota and North Dakota. More information about this service is available at ilcm.org/immigration-help.

A look back at the Star Tribune’s 2006 Worthington coverage underscores Von Holdt’s memory of it being a “shock to the system.”

Witnesses reported seeing 10 buses lined up to take people away. One worker told the paper that she “saw workers at the plant bound with plastic cuffs and heard women screaming about who would pick up their children.”

A school bus driver dropped off five children at a local church when no one was home to take care of them. Volunteers then went door to door to check for other children with absent parents.

It’s one thing to call for mass deportations and another to see immigrants who have become friends and neighbors swept up. Former Worthington Mayor Alan Oberloh, who was in office in 2006, recalled that year’s tumultuous December and said, “It was not a good time.”

He’s still Facebook friends with some immigrants who were deported. Oberloh, who owned an auto body shop, also mourns the good workers the community lost. His wife, Janice, saw a carpenter who had worked on many local homes arrested at City Hall when he sought a permit.

Oberloh grew passionate as he urged Washington, D.C., policymakers to strike a balance between workforce needs and border security. Local officials are deeply frustrated by decades of inaction, he said. And as Congress and the new presidential administration considers reforms, Oberloh would like them to know that he’d much “rather build schools than jails” for the city’s immigrant community.