An increasing number of Americans are grappling with the fallout from the Administration’s mass deportation campaign. They may have taken in a child whose parents were deported, contributed to a GoFundMe page for an immigrant family with a caregiver in detention, or simply struggled to pay grocery bills made higher by the exodus of immigrant labor from the agricultural sector. Mass deportation seems bound to compromise food safety as well, for at least three reasons.

First, it’s expensive. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) $75 billion, and Customs and Border Protection $37 billion. This represents an enormous shift in funding: seven times ICE’s annual budget and four times CBP’s typical annual budget, according to the libertarian Cato Institute. The 2026 reconciliation bill piled on $39 billion more for ICE alone. 

You could do a lot to make food safer with this sort of money. To save on food inspection costs, the Administration has announced plans to lean more on state inspectors, rather than FDA staff, to do the work. At a recent meeting, however, state food inspection officials complained that FDA funding to cover rising prices for items like inspectors’ health insurance premiums (up 20%), or the gasoline they burn driving to far flung food manufacturing facilities, has not kept up. They need an increase from $117 to $175 million to meet costs. That’s about 0.15% of the $114 billion Congress has appropriated just to ICE since 2024. Put another way, ICE’s budget could pay for 651 years of state food inspectors’ work. It could fully fund CDC’s food safety program to restore active surveillance of pathogens like Cyclospora—something that consumer and industry stakeholders alike have asked Congress to do—for over a millennium. Or for those more worried about chemical ingredient safety, it could cover FDA’s estimated cost of “closing the GRAS loophole” for for the next ten thousand years and more.

Those are individual programs, of course, but comparisons with larger expenditures underscore the point. ICE funding is roughly sixteen times the entire FY2026 FDA budget ($7 billion),  thirteen times the CDC budget ($9.1 billion), and three and half times the entire child nutrition budget ($32 billion). With so much money going to pay for officers’ signing bonuses, new detention facilities, myriad contractors, and even the odd billion dollar slush fund, the challenge of meeting longstanding shortfalls in food safety funding seems bound to grow more acute. 

The second way mass deportation will increase foodborne illness risk is by degrading labor conditions. Workers serve as the critical front line in assuring food safety. A whole field of behavioral psychology research has sprouted up around the objective of fostering “food safety culture” within companies. But convincing employees across the management hierarchy to flag potential hazards and rigorously adhere to mundane precautions like handwashing is notoriously difficult. CDC research has identified factors like “staff reluctance to talk to managers” and “short staffing” as key obstacles.

Mass deportation has caused rampant staff shortages as ICE arrests hit a monthly record of 51,000 in August. Historically conservative farm groups are complaining that the disruptions will cause prices to rise and crops to go unharvested. The impact on food safety is straightforward. A skeleton crew racing to fill a backlog of customer orders is less likely to report a leaky pipe, a malfunctioning refrigeration unit, or a rodent infestation. 

But worse than short staffing, mass deportation has created a climate of fear among food workers. Examples abound of unscrupulous managers using the threat of immigration to silence dissent in the workplace. In New Jersey, for example, a recent lawsuit alleges that supervisors at the meal kit company Hello Fresh threatened to report Hispanic employees to ICE while denying them bathroom breaks and even physically assaulting them. According to the employees’ lawyers, “aggressive immigration enforcement has created a two-tier labor force, where employers treat some workers as though they have no rights.” In Colorado, lawyers struggled to organize a lawsuit alleging abuse by the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS, on behalf of Haitian workers, after that group's legal status was revoked in July. And in Michigan, a lawsuit by Mexican H-2A visa holders alleges that “employers used the threat of immigration enforcement to take them to another state and force them to work 12-hour days without breaks or days off; to live in and pay rent for woefully overcrowded, substandard housing; and to pay illegal fees to their employer.”   
 
The H-2A visa program has long been the darling of the agricultural sector, and its growth has accelerated as mass deportation proceeds. The program allows ag employers to hire temporary or seasonal staff, if available U.S. workers are not available, and it now accounts for a sixth of the U.S. agricultural labor force. But this arrangement has significant downsides. For one, workers are vulnerable to forced labor since, as one farmworker advocate recently explained, “having workers tied to an employer for their legal status, their wages, working conditions, their ability to return, creates such a power differential.” It’s not great for food safety either. 

Which brings up the third reason that mass deportation will make food less safe: human capital. The economic value of workers’ experience and skills, human capital has taken center stage in modern theories seeking to explain why some societies thrive while others decline. Mass deportation wastes human capital. This goes beyond food safety. Public schools alone have invested staggering sums into educating U.S. citizens now expected to immigrate out of the country with their deported parents. But human capital touches on an all too often neglected reality about our food system: food workers have valuable skills, including skills that reduce foodborne illness risk. 

These skills are borne from experience. A recent survey of 2,250 farm workers, for example, found that 80% had lived in the U.S. for more than ten years, 40% had worked in agriculture for over 20 years, and 90% worry about family separation because of deportations. Growers understand that experience matters. That’s one reason they work with organizations like the Equitable Food Initiative (EFI), which trains workers and creates management structures to prioritize food safety. By boosting employee retention, EFI’s certification programs improve food safety, and also generate a return on investment for growers. Conversely, replacing experienced farm workers with a parade of guest workers vulnerable to trafficking and abuse will make food more expensive, and less safe.  

In general, public policy should prioritize cultivating human capital, not for the sake of economic growth, but because investing in people raises standards of living and reliably leads to human flourishing. The happiest, healthiest countries—Finland, Denmark, Canada—also have the highest levels of human capital. This points to the need for reform beyond immigration. A recent analysis indicates that high unemployment among men in the U.S. results not so much from a lack of quality jobs, but rather men’s failure to resist the temptations of an ever more predatory economy. Gambling and marijuana, more than competition from immigrants, may best explain why one in 10 “prime age” men are “economically inactive.” 

This is not say that concerns about immigration, which has surged since 1970, are unreasonable. In 2024, the foreign-born proportion of the population had reached or exceeded records set in the 1890s. High levels of immigration generate extraordinary economic and other benefits, but often displace lower-income native workers, and put stress on the public schools and other services they depend upon. The details matter, and reasonable people can disagree about how and to what extent the government allows people to come and work in the country. But an informed public consensus should back whatever policy is in place. Mass deportation, premised on false promises of targeting immigrants with criminal records—the “worst of the worst”—enjoys no such consensus. It may also end up making a lot of us sick.