Immigrants Helped Save This Illinois Meatpacking Town. Trump Cut Hundreds from Its Workforce.

 

By Juan Vassallo, Investigate Midwest, Investigate Midwest

This story is supported by funding from the Chicago Region Food Systems Fund. Esta historia también está disponible en español aquí.

In Beardstown, Illinois, the Cuban couple had spent the past year building a life they were proud of.

Their arrival in the U.S. had followed a long and uncertain path: a northbound journey through Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, followed by seven months in Monterrey, Mexico, as they waited for their appointment with Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Aware of the growing hostility toward immigrants in the U.S., they were determined to enter legally.

In Cuba, they barely made ends meet — he worked in maintenance, she worked in a clothing store. But in the rural west central Illinois town, life started to feel promising.

They found work last year as forklift operators at DOT Foods, the largest food redistributor in the country. The pay was decent and the benefits generous, and the couple had begun to set aside savings.

Then, in June, they were abruptly let go.

“We were on the right track,” the husband said in Spanish, seated in the living room of their one-bedroom rental. The couple asked Investigate Midwest not to use their names for fear of deportation. “We were comfortable in our jobs, earning a decent salary. And suddenly everything collapsed — the castle crumbled.”

They are among hundreds of immigrants in Beardstown who arrived through humanitarian parole programs that have since been rescinded by the Trump administration, leaving them undocumented and out of work. Many of them were employed at DOT Foods and JBS, the world’s largest meat processor. These workers were part of a workforce that has long sustained both the town’s economy and its key role in the country’s food supply chain.

For decades, Beardstown has been a case study in how immigrants have revitalized once-decaying rural towns, particularly in the Midwest. But the Trump administration’s crackdown on both documented and undocumented immigration threatens the stability of communities that have long relied on foreign-born workers.

The previous administration’s humanitarian parole initiatives — which allowed individuals to enter the U.S. temporarily to seek safety or escape political persecution — significantly increased the pool of authorized workers. That influx helped major food companies fill staffing gaps and keep operations running during pandemic-era labor shortages.

Roughly 2.1 million immigrants power the nation’s food supply chain — planting, harvesting, processing and selling the food that ends up on American tables. So far, there is no evidence that Trump’s immigration agenda has created an “America First” labor market with higher wages to attract U.S.-born workers to slaughterhouses or farm fields. Instead, labor experts say the more likely outcome is an expansion of guestworker programs like H-2A and H-2B — often criticized for enabling exploitation — or a shrinking workforce that leaves remaining workers stretched even thinner.

“We’re not seeing any evidence yet of improved conditions for [domestic] workers,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute. “Some employers, especially in certain industries, have been ready to make a push for more H-2A and H-2B visas… They see that the only way they are going to replace that workforce is with these programs.”

In Beardstown, it’s unclear how employers like JBS and DOT Foods will address the labor shortage. Neither company responded to requests for comment.

Investigate Midwest spoke with dozens of workers, local residents, city officials and immigration advocates to examine how tougher immigration policies, including the rollback of parole programs, are impacting not just the local economy, but also the nation’s food system. Many Beardstown residents requested anonymity, fearing that speaking out could put them at risk of deportation.

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Just a few steps from the slow-moving waters of the Illinois River, the Western Illinois Dreamers Immigrant Welcome Center sits beside the weathered storefront of a local radio station in downtown Beardstown. Inside, “Know Your Rights” flyers in Spanish line the walls.

A staff of three helps connect newly arrived migrants with legal services, food pantries, clothing banks and other local resources.

Kate Cruz, who co-directs the center, said her office has heard from many of the recently terminated workers at DOT Foods and JBS. Most are scrambling to find legal pathways to stay in the country and return to work. Some are reaching out in fear.

“We have more people coming in or calling who are fearful,” Cruz said. “Or they’re sending family members because they’re afraid that if they leave their homes, they’re going to be deported.”

Many of these workers are from Haiti, another country that, like Cuba, was included in the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program in response to ongoing political and humanitarian crises.

Starting in 2021, the Biden administration expanded its use of parole authority, a long-standing legal tool that allows individuals to enter the U.S. temporarily for urgent humanitarian reasons or public benefit.

Both Republican and Democratic administrations have used parole for decades. Under Biden, new programs were set up to grant parole to people fleeing crises in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

The administration also extended parole to some migrants who scheduled appointments at the border using the CBP One app and met certain requirements after an interview, allowing them to enter legally through official ports — a strategy aimed at tracking arrivals and reducing illegal crossings.

“Many people fled their home country because it just simply wasn’t safe for them to stay there anymore,” said Sara Dady, an immigration attorney based in Rockford, Illinois.

Haiti, like parts of Central America and Mexico, has also been plagued by gang violence and instability in recent years.

Cruz said that at the beginning of the year, JBS hired hundreds of Haitian immigrants, most of whom have now been terminated. They want to stay in Beardstown, Cruz says, because it still feels safer than home despite their fear of deportation.

But for the terminated workers, finding a way to remain in the U.S. without risking deportation will look different for everyone — and it means navigating a constantly changing immigration system that can be complex, costly and slow.

For example, the Cuban couple hopes to remain in the U.S. under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a 1960s law that allows Cuban nationals to apply for permanent residency after one year of physical presence in the country.

They applied with the help of an immigration lawyer they found online. But with both of them out of work, their savings are quickly being depleted by the legal fees, on top of rent and daily expenses.

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For Elizabeth Amezcua, 39, an immigrant from Mexico, hiring a lawyer is not an option right now. Without the money for legal help, she is left to navigate the system on her own.

Amezcua was recently let go from the JBS slaughterhouse, where she worked as a cook in the facility’s cafeteria. The income supported her in Beardstown and helped provide for her son back in Mexico.

She entered the U.S. nearly 18 months ago through the CBP One process, like the Cuban couple. She says she was granted parole that allowed her to stay legally for at least one more year.

But after the Trump administration began dismantling parole programs — including converting the CBP One app that had allowed Amezcua to enter the country into a “self-deportation app” — she lost her job in June.

“I don’t have any family here. I don’t have anyone to help me,” Amezcua said in Spanish. “But God is almighty. And I know He’s going to help all of us who were left without jobs.”

On August 1st, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from rapidly deporting immigrants who had been paroled into the country.

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For nearly two centuries, Beardstown’s economy has been rooted in agriculture, shaped from the start by immigration.

In the early 19th century, Dutch immigrants drained the region’s marshlands, transforming it into farmland. By 1834, Beardstown had become a key river port shipping grain, hogs and provisions to downstate markets. With tens of thousands of hogs slaughtered each spring — more than in Chicago — it earned the nickname “Porkopolis,” home to the most extensive pork trade west of Cincinnati.

Beardstown’s industrial rise continued into the mid-20th century. In 1967, Oscar Mayer opened a large meatpacking plant, employing over 800 workers, most of them white men from the area. Jobs at the plant were stable, unionized and paid well.

The mayor of Beardstown, Tim Harris, remembers graduating from high school and dreaming of working at the Oscar Mayer plant.

“It was fairly difficult to get a job there,” said Harris, sitting in his City Hall office across the street from the town square, where speakers play music and ads in Spanish for jobs at JBS. “Unless you really had an in with somebody, a reference, you usually didn’t get a job there.”

But in the 1980s, industry consolidation, weakened labor unions and automation led to declining wages. By 1990, meatpacking jobs paid 24% less than the average manufacturing wage.

When Oscar Mayer closed its plant in 1987, Beardstown had already lost hundreds of jobs from other factory shutdowns. As families moved away, the town’s future looked bleak.

Cargill eventually bought the facility that same year and reopened it under a new model — cutting wages and benefits. But with the new jobs failing to attract the local population, which had dropped from 6,338 in 1980 to 5,270 in 1990, Cargill had to look elsewhere to build its workforce.

The company turned to immigrant labor, first from Mexico and later from other countries. The shift transformed the plant’s workforce from nearly all-white to one with dozens of nationalities and languages; Beardstown went from a declining town, with shuttered storefronts and an aging population, into a multicultural hub.

But this transformation was not without tension. In 1995, just 45 miles north of Beardstown, the Ku Klux Klan held a rally to protest the hiring of immigrants at the Cargill plant.

Thirty years later, Beardstown’s nearly 6,000 residents make up a far more integrated community, and Mayor Harris welcomes newcomers. “We need workers. The whole country does,” Harris said.

Beardstown’s story mirrors a broader transformation that has swept through the rural Midwest over the past four decades.

Immigration, global corporate consolidation, and the relentless drive for efficiency have reshaped the meat industry and the communities built around it.

The Beardstown slaughterhouse changed hands again in 2015, when it was purchased by JBS, a Brazilian conglomerate that is now the world’s largest meat company. The plant, which processed 7,000 hogs a day during the Oscar Mayer era, now slaughters over 20,000.

According to USDA data, pork production in the U.S. increased by over 75% between 1980 and 2020, now topping 28 billion pounds annually. Over the same period, the number of plants fell and line speeds accelerated. Modern meat processing plants can slaughter over 1,100 hogs per hour.

Industry profits have soared alongside this productivity boom, especially in recent years.

The top meatpacking companies — including JBS and Tyson Foods — more than doubled their profit margins during the pandemic.

However, the industry’s rapid growth and increasing profits have not always translated into improved working conditions for its frontline workers.

Real wages have decreased since the 1980s and injuries remain common today. And now, under a Trump administration that benefited from industry donations, thousands of these workers are at risk of deportation.

JBS subsidiary Pilgrim’s Pride, the second-largest poultry processor in the U.S, made a $5 million donation to Trump’s Inaugural Committee — the largest single contribution, far exceeding the $1 million given by corporations like Meta and Amazon.

Some critics argue that JBS’s political donations and aggressive lobbying helped clear the way for its recent listing on the New York Stock Exchange, despite a controversial track record that includes corruption and bribery scandals in Brazil.

In the U.S., the company’s record has also drawn scrutiny.

During the early months of the pandemic, JBS kept its plants open without proper safety measures, and they quickly became COVID-19 hotspots.

At its Greeley, Colorado, plant, nearly 300 workers were infected and six died. By July 2020, the plant accounted for 65% of all COVID-19 cases in Colorado. Most of the affected workers were older immigrants.

JBS did not respond to requests for an interview or comments on its political contributions, COVID-19 safety protocols, and the recent termination of immigrant workers on humanitarian parole.

Neither JBS nor other major meat companies and industry groups have publicly opposed Trump’s immigration policies. However, the North American Meat Institute, a powerful trade group, has formally urged the administration to expand the H-2A visa program — originally intended for seasonal farmworkers — to include meat and poultry processors.

“You’ve seen some action in Congress and the Appropriations Committee,” said Costa, with the Economic Policy Institute. “There are amendments being considered that would change the rules in the work visa program so that they’d apply for additional industries. So I do think that is going to be the main strategy.”

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About 740,000 immigrants on humanitarian parole were part of the U.S workforce between 2021 and 2024, according to FWD.us, a bipartisan immigration advocacy group.

Of those, 30,000 worked in agriculture and 90,000 in manufacturing, including meatpacking and food processing.

The organization projects that eliminating their work authorization, alongside other immigration policy changes, could increase prices for food, beverages and tobacco by 14.5% between 2024 and 2028.

But the economic impact is only part of the story. In places like Beardstown, the new immigration policies have stoked anxiety and discouraged civic life.

The annual celebration for Mexican Independence Day on Sept. 16, which draws hundreds to Beardstown’s town square with music, food and costume contests, has been cancelled. Even residents with visas or green cards say they’re hesitant to leave their homes.

While fears of deportation have increased under the Trump administration, for many immigrants, that fear is nothing new. Many advocates argue the system has been broken for decades: the Obama administration deported more immigrants than any U.S. president, and the largest workplace immigration raid in the country’s history happened under President George W. Bush at a meatpacking plant in Iowa.

Martin Pineda has lived through these shifting policies.

A native of Mexico, Pineda spent years working in strawberry fields in California and later at a Missouri slaughterhouse. When that plant closed, he moved to Beardstown to work at the slaughterhouse there — then owned by Cargill — and stayed for more than a decade.

He left in 2007, after an immigration raid during the Bush administration led to the arrest of 62 undocumented night-shift workers and the company began enforcing stricter documentation checks.

Pineda, who has a wife and three children, is outspoken in support of immigrant rights. In 2023, he traveled to Washington, D.C. to advocate on behalf of undocumented workers.

“We are contributing heavily to the economy and we don’t get any recognition,” Pineda said. “That’s what makes me sad about this country. In my case, I’ve worked more than 30 years, and I don’t have Social Security to retire.”

In recent months, ICE agents have detained dozens of migrants in Chicago — at court appearances, during mandatory check-ins and in a high-profile South Loop operation that swept up at least 10 people.

While there have been no confirmed reports of ICE activity in Beardstown or at the JBS plant, fear still lingers. Some residents are reluctant to go outside, scared by false rumors spreading quickly on Facebook and WhatsApp.

But Pineda refuses to live in the shadows.

Each summer, he organizes a youth soccer tournament that brings together over 280 children from different ethnic backgrounds. It’s become a much-anticipated event, held at the town’s soccer fields — owned by JBS — against a backdrop of cornfields.

Pineda sees the tournament as more than just a game. It’s a show of resilience in a time of fear, and a reminder that immigrants contribute to a community in ways that go far beyond labor.

“It’s a lot of work — but I enjoy it. I like doing something productive,” said Pineda about the tournament. “This is something I wish I could have done in my own country, but I couldn’t. So I’m doing it here, with the children in my community, in this town. Most of them are Latino, but we also have kids from other backgrounds — African, white. And like I said, I enjoy it. I’m a volunteer.”

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This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Investigate Midwest is an independent, nonprofit newsroom. Our mission is to serve the public interest by exposing dangerous and costly practices of influential agricultural corporations and institutions through in-depth and data-driven investigative journalism.Visit us online at www.investigatemidwest.org

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Photo credit: A family watches a youth soccer game in Beardstown, a rural meatpacking town in west central Illinois. photo by Ben Felder, Investigate Midwest

The post Immigrants Helped Save This Illinois Meatpacking Town. Trump Cut Hundreds from Its Workforce. appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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