The Trump administration’s stated goal to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States has the agricultural and food industries wary about what this might mean for their workforces.
National experts warn mass deportations “could blow up the food system” and be “disastrous for the U.S. food supply.”
That’s because the U.S. relies heavily on immigrant workers to pick, pack and ship food. At least 70% of agricultural workers who harvest crops in the U.S. were born outside the country and about 40% of farmworkers are undocumented.
But in Colorado, farmers say they don’t expect much to change in the state’s $47 billion agriculture industry. The state has a far lower percentage of undocumented workers than in states such as California, experts say, where laborers can find year-round employment. Colorado’s shorter growing season makes the state much less attractive for those without legal papers, experts say.
Instead, Colorado growers, ranchers and producers rely heavily on a federal visa program that allows American employers to legally hire foreign workers to do jobs they cannot find domestic laborers to fill.
Centennial State employers requested just under 4,000 workers in 2023 on H-2A visas, an increase from fewer than 1,200 workers a decade ago, according to Colorado Department of Labor and Employment records. In 2001, just 246 people were approved to work here on H-2A visas.
There are approximately 18,000 “covered” agricultural workers in Colorado — that is, workers who are employed by companies in the agricultural industry and are entitled to benefits under the state’s unemployment insurance program, according to state labor department figures. These workers, which do not include undocumented workers or H-2A laborers, are believed to represent 44% of all agricultural workers in Colorado.
Dawn Thimany, a professor of agricultural economics at Colorado State University, estimates roughly 25% to 30% of the agricultural workforce in the state is undocumented.
Colorado farmers expressed little worry that their operations would be significantly impacted by the new administration. There’s fear nationally that, aside from actual deportation efforts, workers will be scared off from showing up to work.
“It won’t affect the Colorado fruit industry,” said Bruce Talbott, a longtime Palisade peach grower who relies on H-2A workers to pick produce.
Talbott said he didn’t have any more difficulty finding workers this year since foreign laborers — mainly from Central and South America — still flock to the U.S. for higher wages.
“The chances of the administration change being bad for me are pretty slim,” said David Harold, a sweet corn grower in Olathe who also uses the H-2A program.
Colorado growers, though, have not yet seen most of their workers return for the 2025 season, meaning the impact to the state’s agricultural workforce remains to be seen.
One Western Slope farmworker, who spoke to The Denver Post on the condition of anonymity because he has family members who are undocumented, said that while it’s too early to see the impact of the new immigration policies, “a lot of people will think twice before they decide to go to work.”
Thimany said industry watchers here are closely monitoring California, where migrant workers in the Central Valley have stopped showing up for work due to deportation fears, virtually halting the area’s citrus harvest. Leaders in the Bay Area have similar concerns about their harvest.
“They’re not going to show up for work and that means crops will remain in the field and not be harvested and probably lost at that point,” Monterey County Farm Bureau Executive Director Norm Groot told a San Francisco TV station.
Thimany said Colorado could encounter the same problems in a few months when workers return to the fields.
There are indications that the Trump administration supports continuing or even expanding the H-2A program.
During his first term, the president called H-2A workers a “source of legal and verified labor for agriculture.” Temporary work visa programs steadily grew during those four years, and by 2019 were 13% larger than they had been under the Obama administration.
Trump’s own businesses have also relied on foreign labor, employing more than 1,000 H-2 workers in the past two decades.
Still, one high-ranking administration official, Stephen Miller, said the mass deportations will “be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers.”
Agriculture and food industry experts disagree, saying there’s little evidence American workers want these difficult agriculture jobs.
Critics argue deportations would increase reliance on the H-2A program, which has long been decried as an abusive, exploitative program akin to modern-day slavery.
A Denver Post investigation last year found Colorado farmers and ranchers routinely treated their workers poorly or didn’t pay them on time — yet federal and state regulators allowed them to continue to bring more workers under the H-2A program year after year.
Workers complained of verbal and physical abuse, bosses threatening to send them back to their home countries and squalid living conditions.
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.