In recent earnings calls, shareholders of some publicly traded meat companies have questioned whether the Trump administration's deportation plans — among other issues — could pose a challenge to their industry. “We've been there before. It had no impact on our operations,” said Tim Klein, CEO of National Beef, owned by Brazilian food company Marfrig, in response to a shareholder question. In response to a similar question on a Tyson Foods earnings call, CEO Donnie King said: “There's a lot we don't know at this time, but I want to remind you that we have been successfully running this business for more than 90 years. regardless of which party is in power.”
It is not clear whether the Trump administration would target meatpacking facilities operated by the industry's largest companies, given the favorable treatment these companies sometimes received during the first Trump presidency. During the Covid-19 pandemic, President Trump issued an executive order that allowed plants to continue operating even as meatpackers were among the hardest hit by infections. The US House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis later found that Tyson's legal department had drafted a text of the proposed order.
“These major meatpacking companies have prevented additional protections from being put in place to protect workers, in part by making a concerted effort with Trump Administration political officials to shield themselves from surveillance to force workers to remain in dangerous conditions and protect themselves from liability for any resulting illness or death of employees,” the committee concluded in the report released in December 2022.
Labor supply is tight at meatpacking plants and in the agriculture sector as a whole, said Cesar Escalante, a professor at the University of Georgia's College of Agriculture & Environmental Sciences. The industry needs more workers, says Escalante, who argues that the U.S. should expand the H-2A visa program for seasonal agricultural workers to include more livestock workers. Smaller farms are more likely to be affected by a lack of labor, Escalante says, while larger farms may turn to mechanization.
If meatpacking workers are deported en masse, that could translate into an increase in prices for consumers. A report from Texas A&M Agrilife Research estimates that eliminating migrant workers on U.S. dairy farms would nearly double milk prices. It's not clear what impact Trump's deportation plan would have on meat or food prices in general because so much about the plan is still unknown. “We don't know yet how this will all turn out,” says Hubbard.
