Por Amal Bouhabib
Abogado Senior de la Planta
In late January and early February 2026, two federal courts on opposite sides of the country halted the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians. For the roughly 350,000 Haitians who rely on TPS to lawfully live and work in the United States, the rulings offer a fragile reprieve. The administration may win on appeal, even though it does not have the law on its side.
Another group is likely breathing easier too, though for different reasons: Big Ag.
Haitian TPS holders, like many immigrants, are essential to American food production. They work on slaughter lines, in poultry plants, and in food processing warehouses. These jobs are brutal, injury-prone, and essential. The poultry and meatpacking industries in particular are highly dependent on Haitian labor. In some states, Haitians make up as much as 15 to 30 percent of the meatpacking workforce.
TPS was created by Congress to prevent people from being forced to return to countries devastated by disaster or conflict. For Haitians, it provided an escape from what the Secretary General of the United Nations described in 2025 as “a perfect storm of suffering.” Haiti is experiencing the collapse of state authority and rampant gang violence, including massacres, killings, sexual violence, child recruitment and mass displacement. Repeated environmental disasters, like a major earthquake in 2021 and severe flooding in 2025, have compounded the crisis. Some six million people are experiencing acute food insecurity and a humanitarian emergency.
The U.S. State Department has issued its highest level travel advisory for Haiti, warning citizens not to travel to Haiti due to “kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited health care.” That advisory remained in place when Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, at Trump’s urging, moved to end TPS for Haitians last year. Ignoring evidence of Haiti’s humanitarian collapse, Noem concluded in 2025 that “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti” preventing TPS holders “from returning [to] safety.”
If Noem tried to sound professional in her official statements, she made no effort to hide her racism and conspiracy theories on X. Statements she posted just days after revoking Haitian TPS left little doubt about the prejudice and hatred driving the policy.
The irony is hard to miss. Haitian TPS holders, and immigrants like them, sustain the U.S. through their labor. And Big Ag knows it.
Haitian TPS workers are essential to the food system, and they deserve to be treated with respect and fairness at work. That’s why FarmSTAND, Towards Justice, and Nichols Kaster filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Haitian workers at a JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado in December.
The lawsuit alleges that JBS exploited Haitian workers through a recruitment pipeline built on deception. They promised safe jobs, adequate housing, and humane conditions only to impose dangerously fast line speeds, inadequate training, discriminatory treatment, and severe workplace injuries. JBS capitalized on language barriers, racial isolation, and immigration status to get the labor they needed while minimizing their accountability to workers and the law.
JBS long ago recognized that immigrant labor, particularly newly arrived refugees with work authorization, could fill chronic labor shortages at their plants while minimizing the risk of immigration enforcement impacting their operations. Over decades, JBS and other meatpacking giants built recruitment pipelines through refugee resettlement agencies, cycling in new groups of workers as global crises unfolded: Somalia, Sudan, Cambodia, Myanmar, Venezuela, Haiti. Each new wave enabled expanded production, longer shifts, and soaring profits.
This administration’s decision to target not only undocumented immigrants, but also lawfully present workers with TPS and other forms of humanitarian protection, threatens to pull the rug out from under this system.
Last July, for example, a JBS plant in Iowa terminated hundreds of workers from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaragua, an estimated 10 percent of the workforce, after the administration revoked their visas. Some of the workers had been there for decades. They were deemed “essential workers” by Trump during the Covid pandemic and continued to report to work at great personal risk. Then, they were fired. While local leaders decried the cruelty of uprooting hard-working, long-standing members of the community, JBS publicly reaffirmed its cooperation with the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda.
Behind the scenes was a different story. Industry leaders quietly lobbied to delay or blunt Trump’s immigration agenda. They knew that mass deportation of legally authorized workers would bring labor shortages, production slowdowns, and hits to profit. Around the same time JBS was laying off workers, executives at Mountaire Farms, the fourth-largest chicken company in the U.S. and a large Trump donor, were also worried. They privately warned the Maryland Secretary of Agriculture that ending TPS could cost the company “approximately 15 percent of our total workforce . . . nearly 1,300 employees.”
Industry groups similarly estimated that visa revocations could impact 23 percent of the workforce in the Delmarva Peninsula, home to the nation’s highest concentration of poultry producers. Another analysis projected that the loss of workers with TPS could drive food prices up by 14.5 percent by 2028. When it threatened their profits, industry leaders who otherwise stayed silent about the administration’s scorched-earth immigration policies acknowledged they were “strategically sharing this with key elected officials and agencies where possible.”
Trump’s policies impact so much more than business — they take a real human toll. The prolonged uncertainty surrounding TPS inflicts lasting harm on Haitian immigrants who don’t know if they will lose their jobs or status, or worse. They fear detention, separation from loved ones, and deportation back to Haiti, which, for some, could be a “death sentence.”
“There are some situations that you are living, and you think to yourself you’re better off dead than living them,” one Haitian TPS holder told reporters in Florida. ICE’s indiscriminate enforcement actions and recent killings in Minneapolis have only deepened that fear. “They’re killing American citizens,” said another Haitian, who is a U.S. citizen. “What’s going to happen to me? I’m a Haitian. I look like a Haitian.”
That kind of fear is useful to Big Ag. It helps ensure that workers lay low, stay quiet, and do the work.
What’s clear from the court rulings, the industry’s public silence and private lobbying, and Haitians’ own words, is this: Ending TPS for Haitians was never simply about immigration enforcement. It was about using racism to make deportation politically palatable, even as corporations quietly admitted they could not function without the very workers being targeted. Big Ag will always do whatever it takes to preserve a food system built on the labor of Black and Brown people it considers disposable.
The courts have drawn a line — for now. The question is whether we will continue to accept a system that treats refugee and immigrant workers as temporary inputs rather than human beings, or whether we will finally reckon with the truth that our food system runs on their labor, their risk, and their lives.
In this climate of fear and oppression, we couldn’t be prouder to represent the plaintiffs in the JBS Greeley case who have chosen bravely to assert their rights and their dignity.