How America’s largest beef producer exploits refugees for profit

Around 7 a.m. on Dec. 12, 2006, half a dozen buses and a small convoy of government vans quietly encircled the Swift & Company beef packinghouse on the northeast edge of Greeley, Colorado. It was just 19 degrees that morning, the sun not fully up, as local law enforcement exited their vehicles and formed a perimeter around the cavernous plant — one of the nation’s largest, where thousands of cattle were butchered every day. Inside, line workers, many of them Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants the government suspected of using false papers to get hired, had already donned hard hats and chainmail gloves and gone to their workstations, hooks and knives in hand, ready for the massive chain-driven conveyor system to bring the first carcasses of the day. Drovers had just begun herding cows into the chutes where they would be slaughtered when more than a hundred heavily armed federal agents, wearing black windbreakers with POLICE ICE on the back, barged through the doors.

Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE — a division of the Department of Homeland Security, which had been formed in 2002 — poured inside. Concepción Sánchez, an immigrant from Chihuahua, had just donned a smock to prepare for her job sweeping blood and waste into a drain in the kill floor. Around her, workers ran for the exits but found them barred, she remembered recently. Others sprinted for the bathrooms and locked themselves inside or jumped into cattle pens or threw themselves into dumpsters. Sánchez says a few even lifted the grate over the floor drain and leaped into the bloody pit, hoping to find a way out. None escaped. All of the captured workers were taken into the cafeteria and separated into two groups — those who claimed to be citizens and those who didn’t — and then they were questioned by agents.

Shortly after the raid started, a representative from the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) arrived and demanded to speak to union members. ICE agents refused, insisting they were “conducting a federal criminal investigation.” The union later claimed that workers were denied the right to make phone calls. “If certain employees needed immigration documents outside the facility to confirm their lawful status,” the government later responded in court filings, “these employees were allowed to contact family and friends by telephone to bring those documents to the Swift plant, and present them to the ICE agents at the gate.” 

Across town, Sánchez’s daughter, Yesenia, a senior at Northridge High School, was pulled from class after her aunt called and explained what was happening. Yesenia, she said, needed to retrieve her mother’s proof that she had residency papers. Yesenia drove to their house. “I ended up grabbing what I could,” she recalled in a recent interview. “And then, I went and I waited.” It was still cold, but she paced outside the plant along the shoulder of the highway, her black hoodie pulled up over her ears, calling family and friends and trying to get any information.

By early afternoon, agents had interviewed all 1,400 Swift employees working that shift. Sánchez was released, but roughly 260 workers were arrested on charges of unlawful entry into the United States. Their hands were zip-tied, their legs shackled, and they were taken outside. One worker later remembered being dragged onto a waiting bus, its windows whited-out. Agents barked orders in English, which he didn’t understand, and wouldn’t tell him where he was being taken. The buses were driven out of the gates while helpless family members stood outside the locked fence, crying and calling out. The workers were driven to the Denver Federal Center, more than an hour away, where they were Mirandized and assigned registration numbers as deportable aliens. After midnight, some were taken to a detention facility in Aurora; others were sent to the Park County Jail and then even farther away, to the Otero County Prison Facility in New Mexico. Eighteen were held in the Weld County Jail in Greeley on charges of identity theft and fraud.

What happened in Colorado that day was unprecedented, but it was not an isolated incident: More than a thousand ICE agents conducted similar raids simultaneously at five other Swift plants in Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah and Minnesota. Nearly 1,300 workers were taken into custody as part of the largest single worksite immigration enforcement action in U.S. history. The government called it Operation Wagon Train, but others remembered it simply as the Swift Raids. The raids not only transformed the racial, religious and cultural makeup of the half-dozen affected communities, they also changed the face of labor in middle America and then its politics. The mass arrests of undocumented immigrants inspired big meatpackers, both American and foreign-owned, to rebuild as an economy of refugee labor. The resulting shift in small-town demographics also gave rise to a predictable backlash that eventually coalesced into a new era of nativism — and culminated a decade later in the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump.

For more than 80 years before the Swift Raids, the United States tried to limit immigration with the explicit intent of maintaining the nation’s whiteness.

Over the last year, High Country News, in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, examined the records of nearly a hundred lawsuits, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints, government investigations and union statements — nearly two decades’ worth — in order to chart how the industry’s attempt to create a “deportation-proof workforce” enabled the brutal exploitation of refugee labor while also exposing the nation’s most vulnerable immigrants to virulent racism and religious discrimination.

Now, with Trump back in office and determined to take immigration crackdowns to their extreme conclusion, workplace raids have resumed to the applause of hard-liners in his base. But the raids also threaten to finish off declining rural towns, upend commodities markets for struggling farmers and ranchers, and send the nation’s skyrocketing food prices even higher. More importantly, Trump’s second term seems to be forcing a reckoning: After two decades of relying on refugees as an essential part of the workforce, has our country grown so anti-immigrant that we will allow ICE to deport the people who feed us?

Greeley is a mid-sized city on the eastern plains of Colorado. Over an hour away from the iconic Rocky Mountains, it may seem like a quiet place. There’s a main avenue lined with local businesses — a large brewery, a Mexican grocery store and a mosque discreetly tucked into a strip mall. There’s the University of Northern Colorado with its rolling fields of green grass and the tall bleachers of the football stadium. On the other end of town, the packinghouse sits out where North 8th Avenue turns into Route 85, a hulking concrete structure surrounded by high, spike-topped fencing. It is designed to be inconspicuous — the kind of industrial building you accelerate past without even noticing, much less wondering what goes on inside. In the surrounding countryside, hay fields and cow pastures stretch as far as the eye can see. 

Greeley is cattle country. With an inventory of more than 2.5 million head, Colorado’s beef brings in more cash than any other agricultural commodity in the state. Most of Greeley is deeply connected to meatpacking. And so the 2006 raid was a crisis of epic proportions. The government arrested nearly 10% of the plant’s workers, forcing the company to run at reduced capacity. Swift was the nation’s third-largest supplier of beef and pork, with close to $10 billion in sales most years, but the company announced it expected to lose $80 million in the weeks after the raid. Thousands of ranchers, farmworkers and truckers depended on the labor of the Greeley plant. The uncertainty seemed to embody all of the incongruities of the moment — the isolationist fervor of the post-9/11 era juxtaposed with the industry-friendly anti-regulation administration of George W. Bush.

In announcing the operation, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had explicitly cited The 9/11 Commission Report, noting that valid identification was Homeland Security’s best method “to ensure that people are who they say they are, and to check whether they are terrorists.” And he vowed not to stop with the raids. “We all know that the primary economic engine that draws in illegal migration is work. And when businesses are built upon systematic violation of the law, that is a problem that we have to attack.” Seven of the 18 workers held on criminal counts in Greeley had their cases dismissed in return for testimony against Swift. But no trial ever happened: “ICE dropped the ball,” Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck told the Greeley Tribune one year after the raids. (Buck went on to serve multiple terms in Congress before resigning in 2024.) He said that his office had enough evidence to go after executives at Swift. ICE, however, decided not to press charges. “It was a great injustice,” Buck said, “that higher-up people at Swift were not prosecuted.”

Under such scrutiny, Swift couldn’t risk hiring more undocumented workers. But the company needed to replenish its workforce fast. So executives settled on recruiting a new class of foreign employees: refugees. 

At a corporate office, Swift executives posted maps on the walls and circled target cities to advertise openings. In Colorado, they passed out fliers to workers at other meatpacking plants, particularly the Somali immigrants at a Cargill beef plant in nearby Fort Morgan. They also targeted Tyson beef plants in Kansas, where Somalis had faced prejudice in small towns. The recruiting efforts were aggressive. The company’s HR team advertised on the radio and in local newspapers. They bought space on a billboard and hung posters in restaurants. Swift even offered to help fill out job applications, to provide moving and housing expenses, and to pay signing bonuses of up to $1,500. “Our survival was at stake,” one executive said.

But it wasn’t enough. The raids had crippled the company, and in May 2007, Swift announced it was being sold to the Brazilian-owned company that owns meatpacker JBS in a deal worth about $1.5 billion. With the purchase, JBS became the largest beef processor in the world — and immediately stepped up Swift’s refugee hiring, in order to maintain and then increase production. 

JBS’ decision would have a radical impact. Its strategy spread throughout the industry and eventually reshaped entire small communities across the middle of the country, from Texas to the Dakotas, from Utah to Iowa, as refugee protections were expanded to other groups of asylum seekers through executive authority, temporary protected status (TPS), humanitarian parole and visas for victims of trafficking or violence. More broadly, however, the raids triggered a shift in how the country resettled refugees seeking safety within the nation’s borders. People who once landed in cities now increasingly found themselves in rural areas, navigating profoundly alien cultures and small-town dynamics with limited support. 

Widespread resistance to new arrivals is nothing new. For more than 80 years before the Swift Raids, the United States tried to limit immigration with the explicit intent of maintaining the nation’s whiteness. In 1924, as the notion of fencing the U.S.-Mexico border was first being seriously discussed, the U.S. Immigration Act barred migrants from Asia and lowered quotas for legal new arrivals based on the 1890 census — literally aiming to return the country to the 19th century. (An earlier version had proposed using the levels of 1790, when the Naturalization Act had only allowed “free white persons” to apply for citizenship.) Public support for these constraints weakened in 1939, after an ocean liner carrying more than 900 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution was denied permission to land on the coast of Florida, sending many to their death in the Holocaust — a decision that the U.S. State Department formally apologized for in 2012. To avoid repeating such tragedies and establish our new role as a leader of the free world, the government began to recognize “refugees” as a separate category of immigrants.

Congress passed a series of piecemeal legislative measures — the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, the Refugee-Escapee Act of 1957, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 — but it wasn’t until 1980 that comprehensive legislation capped annual admission at 50,000 refugees (roughly 10% of overall admissions). Almost as soon as it was enacted, President Jimmy Carter extended temporary status to additional Cuban and Haitian refugees. In so doing, he established a precedent.

Throughout the Reagan era into the Bush years, the government tended to grant entrance to immigrants who had fought for democracy against communist states or were fleeing repressive regimes. In 1990, Congress formalized temporary protected status (TPS) to grant asylum to Salvadorans fleeing the civil war. But that temporary designation created a sense of vulnerability. People who are officially refugees have legal immigration status, which protects them from deportation, but the process to get official status often takes years. In the meantime, many asylum seekers also apply for employment-based resident status under a provision of U.S. law that welcomes unskilled laborers to perform work “for which qualified workers are not available in the United States.” To do so, they have to prove they have “a permanent, full-time job.” From a management perspective, this makes asylum seekers perfect employees: hard-working, compliant, desperate to keep their jobs.

For a long time, the federal government settled refugees in urban areas where there was a concentration of service agencies and jobs. St. Louis became a mecca for Bosnian culture. Many Southeast Asians ended up in Louisiana and California. Iraqis tended to settle in Michigan. But then, after the Swift raids in 2006, that started to change. Refugees were increasingly resettled not just in Greeley but in dozens of other rural meatpacking towns — elsewhere in Colorado and also in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota and Texas.

Paul Stein, who was the coordinator of the Colorado Refugee Services Program around the time of the raids, noticed that more and more refugees were moving to Greeley. A local Denver newspaper reported that recruiters were visiting the city’s mosques and African-owned businesses, offering people $1,500 if they signed up for a job, and more if they referred a friend. In a matter of months, more than a thousand refugees, many from Somalia, came to Colorado. But they needed translation services and help navigating local aid resources — how to find the food pantry, how to register kids for public school — none of which was available in Greeley. In response, the nonprofit Lutheran Family Services opened an office for refugee resettlement. “It is a story of backing into a plan rather than having the plan,” Stein said recently. “It totally started because of meatpacking. It was employer-driven.”

And the refugees continued to come. In a matter of months, JBS decided to bring on a second shift, and the plant began to operate roughly 18 hours a day. But that required 1,300 additional workers, and so even more refugees — including Black Muslims from Somalia — were hired. Refugee resettlement agencies always needed jobs for new arrivals and, due to the high rate of injury and worker turnover (as high as 50% in a year), the meatpacking plants always needed new workers. It was the perfect match. Meatpacking has had the fifth-highest concentration of refugee workers in the U.S., after nail salons, manufacturing, taxi and truck driving. And it offers an entry point to other opportunities: Refugees have been more likely to start a business and have a higher rate of employment than native-born Americans.  

Still, they often struggle: Refugees are overrepresented in low-skilled work and earn less at first than all other immigrant groups. Getting an education or learning English is a luxury. Even those refugees who have a profession rarely find work in their chosen field because the certification process is so complicated. Worse still, many face overt racism and religious discrimination.

By 2007, just one year after the raids, the foreign-born population of Greeley had exploded to around 12,000 — more than 12% of the town and a 60% increase from just seven years earlier. Somalis, many of whom had fled discrimination in Kansas, were now under increasing attack. A local mosque that had been in the area for years and served students from the local college was shot at in broad daylight, leaving three holes in a  cracked window. A Greeley resident organized an “Anti-Sharia Law” protest outside the plant. Forty people gathered, waving American flags and holding signs that read “Make steaks not Sharia.”

And it wasn’t just Greeley. When comprehensive immigration reform failed to pass Congress in 2007, local governments made their own rules. In Fremont, Nebraska, where immigrants made up the workforce of a Hormel pork-processing plant, the city government sought to require proof of citizenship before a person could obtain an apartment lease. Similar measures were introduced or passed in other small towns, including Farmers Branch, Texas; Hazleton, Pennsylvania; and Valley Park, Missouri. These measures, which faced lawsuits, were drafted in part by Kris Kobach, a Kansas attorney and politician who later became the de facto leader of  Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity, which claimed that “millions” of undocumented immigrants cast illegal votes in 2016. Stein, who left his role as coordinator in 2014, says a Colorado county commissioner called him up one day out of the blue and said, “So, you get federal money to work with refugees. Can you use those dollars to bus those people out of here?

Even as locals struggled to adjust to their new immigrant neighbors, the new arrivals had trouble adapting, too. Many were unprepared for Greeley’s long and unrelenting winters. They didn’t have cars to traverse the sprawling Western town. Many were traumatized victims of war who now found themselves without mental health services; alcoholism and reports of spousal abuse increased. The Somali workers, who made up the majority of the first wave of new arrivals at JBS, were overwhelmingly Muslim and found the post-9/11 environment in the United States to be hostile to their beliefs, both inside and outside the plant. After months of mounting pressure, the volatile mixture finally exploded days after the start of Ramadan in September 2008.

Abdirizak Amed came to the U.S. from Somalia in September 2007 and, less than a year later, found a job at JBS-Swift on the cutting line — what the company euphemistically calls “fabrication.” In a complaint submitted as part of a subsequent class action suit, he testified that he quickly learned the plant’s not-so-invisible hierarchies. “Swift gives new employees white (hard) hats and tells them that once they learn the job satisfactorily, they will become ‘qualified’ for a raise and will receive a gold hat,” Amed said in his filing. But he claimed that Somali employees never qualified or got promoted. Instead, they were moved laterally from department to department, in order to avoid having to promote them. Amed said it often took Somali employees weeks or even months to qualify for raises that other workers received in a matter of days. By the start of Ramadan, on Sept. 1, Amed had been at the plant for more than a month and still hadn’t received a gold hard hat. “When I asked my Hispanic supervisor why,” he said, “he told me it would happen any day.”

Near midnight on Sept. 1, as the B shift ended, according to a complaint filed with a Colorado district court, dozens of Muslim employees went to the superintendent’s office to request that their meal break be moved from 9:15 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., so that they could complete the final daily prayer of Ramadan and break their fast within 15 minutes of sunset. At first, the company agreed. Then, after some white and Hispanic workers complained about what they perceived as special treatment, the Somali workers were informed that their break had been moved back. Supervisors shut off restroom sinks and water fountains to prevent the Somalis from washing for prayers. “Management made it clear that they did not want us to pray,” Amed said. The Somalis decided to break at 7:30 anyway. They left the line, pursued by supervisors into restrooms, locker rooms and the break room. “When we attempted to take our break,” Amed said, “management called security.”

Guards hauled praying workers out of the bathrooms. Even before this melee, multiple workers later reported in affidavits, guards and other white and Hispanic workers had shouted insults and slurs. In the men’s room, Abdirashid Hussein alleged he was kicked and called “Saddam.” Raawi Sahal claimed her prayer mat was taken from her and she was called the N-word. Other men said they were called “monkeys” and told to go back to Africa. One woman who wore a flowing jilbab said she was told that she “must be ugly underneath.” Numerous workers reported being called terrorists.

“Some supervisors pushed Muslim employees into the lunchroom like they were herding cattle,” Amed claimed. Workers were eventually told that they had participated in an “unauthorized work stoppage,” in violation of the collective bargaining agreement. They protested that they had simply been trying to pray, as their religion required. Some said they wouldn’t go back to work until they were allowed to complete their prayers. Others, who tried to return to the line, were blocked. “They told us to leave,” Amed said. “So we left the building.” Between 100 and 150 workers were fired, including Amed; dozens of others later joined a class action suit against JBS, alleging that they suffered systematic abuse and discrimination throughout the remaining weeks of Ramadan.

And anti-Muslim sentiment spread to other JBS facilities. In Grand Island, Nebraska, at another plant that was hit during the 2006 Swift raids, more than a thousand Hispanic employees protested changes to the work schedule to accommodate Ramadan prayer times. “They are arrogant,” one Mexican American worker told the New York Times. “They act like the United States owes them.” Margaret Hornady, then mayor of Grand Island, said the sight of Somali women wearing hijabs on the streets of her town made her think of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. “I know that that’s horrible and that’s prejudice,” she said. “I’m working very hard on it.” Inside the plant, Christian workers from South Sudan joined protests against Somali workers. By 2009, police were warning of an alleged gang war that had broken out between Somali and Sudanese immigrants at the Autumn Woods apartments on the edge of Grand Island.

In 2010, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought suit against JBS on behalf of Somali former employees, alleging that the company engaged in a pattern and practice of discrimination, retaliation, hostile work environment and failure to accommodate the plaintiffs’ religious needs. After more than a decade, JBS agreed to pay $5.5 million. A subsequent suit alleged that the company’s corporate leadership had not done enough to improve its treatment of Muslim workers. “Unfortunately, such harassment, discrimination and retaliation continues to be its standard operating procedure,” the suit claimed. In fact, the complaint alleged that anti-Muslim mistreatment had grown and gotten worse with the presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump.

Shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI announced that it had arrested a ring of Trump-inspired anti-Muslim militia members in Garden City, Kansas, who were plotting to blow up an apartment complex housing hundreds of Somalis who worked at a Tyson meatpacking plant nearby. “You are safe,” the local police chief assured the community, “and we will continue to make every effort to make sure you are safe.” But the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that there was a 200% increase in the number of anti-Muslim hate groups in just one year — much of that rise in small towns. In Colorado alone, town officials had to ask a Longmont man to remove an anti-Muslim yard sign, a man in a hoodie smashed out the windows of the Fort Collins Islamic Center, and in Fort Morgan, Somali workers at the Cargill beef plant claimed that they were prevented from buying land to open a mosque. The county sheriff there told the Associated Press: “There’s a general feeling out there of, ‘Let’s slow this train down a bit.’”

Kacem Andalib, a Muslim from Morocco, started working at JBS in late 2014. He began by overseeing workers trimming fat from carcasses and was soon promoted to HR supervisor over the entire B Shift. Andalib was the only Muslim employee in human resources, so he was frequently put in charge of disciplining and firing Somali workers. He had a reputation as a tough manager. But when Anthony Rickoff, a white employee, joined the HR department in spring 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Andalib alleged in a complaint that Rickoff accused him of favoritism toward Muslim workers. According to court documents, when Andalib expressed concern that Trump’s travel ban on majority-Muslim countries, including Somalia, might make it impossible for many workers at JBS to visit family back home, Rickoff flew into a rage. “It’s all your fault, you freaking terrorists!” Andalib remembered Rickoff saying. Later, when Andalib questioned Rickoff about why he had fired a Somali employee, Andalib claimed in court documents that Rickoff said he was “doing his share of making America great again!” After Andalib was fired in early 2018, he sued; his claims of racial discrimination and retaliation were later dismissed after he was cited for “failing to follow court orders.” Rickoff was promoted and is now the head of human resources for JBS’s pork division.

Tensions reached a peak in April 2020, as COVID-19 outbreaks at JBS beef plants in Greeley, Colorado; Cactus, Texas; and Grand Island, Nebraska, became early hotspots of the pandemic. Amid thousands of worker illnesses and mounting deaths, the UFCW called on JBS to provide enough personal protective equipment, such as masks and face shields, for workers to get safely through shifts on their crowded packinghouse floors. By then, restaurants had closed, supply chains collapsed, grocery stores declared shortages. Food prices were soaring, and the op-ed pages and airwaves were filled with pundits stating what seemed obvious: We simply couldn’t go on as before. Even JBS seemed to acknowledge this. Amid an April outbreak that eventually claimed at least six workers in Greeley, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and county public health officials ordered the company to suspend operations for almost two weeks — and JBS publicly announced that it would obey.

But emails later obtained by ProPublica revealed that the company had appealed to Gov. Jared Polis and then to Vice President Mike Pence, asking that its plants be declared “critical infrastructure” and protected from being shut down. Within days, the North American Meat Institute, which counted the largest meatpackers’ leaders among its executive board members, sent a draft executive order to Trump officials that allowed meatpacking plants to remain open, despite the risk to workers. Trump issued an order with similar wording a week later. At the same time, Republican politicians began to blame the largely refugee and immigrant workforce for the spread of the illness. Kristi Noem, then governor of South Dakota, defended the Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls, where OSHA reported nearly 1,300 workers were sickened. “We believe that 99% of what’s going on today wasn’t happening inside the facility,” Noem said in an interview with Fox News. “It was more at home, where these employees were going home and spreading some of the virus because a lot of these folks that work at this plant live in the same communities, the same buildings, sometimes in the same apartments.”

In Greeley, Kim Cordova, president of the UFCW Local 7, says that the deaths of the JBS workers had a galvanizing effect. “We started to see workers mobilize, stand up, fight back,” she said in an interview in the union offices near Denver. By then, more than 45% of meatpacking workers were foreign-born, according to a report by the American Immigration Council. Cordova estimated that the number in Greeley was much higher — perhaps 80% or even 90% of the workforce. But because workers at JBS felt so unprotected, employees who had other options began quitting and seeking jobs elsewhere. JBS and other meatpackers tried to cover the shortage by requesting permission from the federal government to fill vacancies with temporary foreign workers holding H-2B visas. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Labor issued more than 20,000 temporary work visas to meat industry employees.

But it still wasn’t enough. The big meatpackers faced critical labor shortages and were in a weakened position politically. The largest companies were all facing a civil lawsuit alleging price-fixing, not to mention a Department of Justice probe into allegations of monopolistic and antitrust practices. A bribery scandal in Brazil forced JBS’s parent company to settle a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in October 2020. The agreement, which included consenting to a finding of what the SEC called “brazen misconduct,” saved JBS from criminal charges but its parent company pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to violate the FCPA,” effectively ending its bid to be publicly traded.

At the same time, meatpacking workers began to embrace their influence as “essential workers.” “There were walk-offs, not just here, but around the country,” Cordova said. “Workers were not going to die for their job.” After the Trump administration forbade plant closures, workers demanded hazard pay, lobbied to be among the first to receive vaccinations, and pushed the Colorado Legislature to mandate sick leave for meatpackers and other food workers. The workforce at JBS in Greeley was so united that it did not approve the collective bargaining agreement reached between the company and the UFCW International. “We actually went back to the table,” Cordova said, “and we were able to bargain an even stronger collective bargaining agreement, not with just more money, but we put a lot of language in around safety interventions, a stop to the work-while-sick culture. We fought for respect and dignity here at this plant.”

The jobs at JBS are among the most dangerous in America. And, at the same moment that federal restrictions on JBS are loosening, Trump’s White House has begun turning up the heat on JBS’s refugee workforce.

Quickly, however, the workers, many of them refugees, saw their newfound power undercut by the same process that had brought them into the plant. JBS “really started to be aggressive with their discipline against current workers,” Cordova said, firing workers who refused to work while sick or pushed for the independent bargaining agreement. JBS could dismiss them, Cordova says, because the company had found a new source of refugee labor: Haitians who had recently received temporary protected status from the Biden administration. As with the Somali, South Sudanese and Burmese workers before them, these workers arrived in the U.S. with few English language skills, little cultural knowledge and a desperate need for jobs.

In December 2023, a Haitian would-be social media influencer, after allegedly consulting with a Beninese middle manager in HR at JBS, created a simple TikTok video to recruit Haitians for shifts at the Greeley plant. They hoped to fill 60 openings. But the video went viral, and hundreds of inquiries poured in. The Haitian influencer claimed the JBS hiring manager encouraged him to keep recruiting more refugees, to keep picking them up at the airport and delivering them to Greeley. The new workers were crowded into rooms at a highway motel near the plant — four people and then six and then eight or even 10, in rooms that had only one bed. And workers alleged they were charged for application services, for rent, for driving.

Worse still, in a complaint filed by the UFCW Local 7, the Haitians said that inside the JBS plant they were being asked to work at “dangerously unsafe” speeds — sometimes almost twice as fast as workers on the day shift. In September 2024, the union publicly accused JBS of abusing immigrant workers and claimed that the misrepresentation of their work and living conditions during recruitment constituted human trafficking; they filed complaints with the Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Labor Relations Board and other government agencies. JBS denied the allegations, and a spokesperson insisted that the company followed all laws and regulations. But the Haitians said that they were essentially being held in slavery. 

Less than two months later, Donald Trump was elected to a second term. In January 2025, Pilgrim’s Pride, one of JBS’ subsidiaries, was the largest single donor to Trump’s inauguration — offering more than Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and PayPal combined. Within weeks, Trump’s administration had removed key members of the agencies that had been asked to investigate JBS. By executive order, he paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and in April, the SEC allowed JBS to offer shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Forbes expressed shock at the move, citing the company’s convictions for “bribes to Brazilian meat inspectors, kickbacks to government financiers and illegal campaign contributions to more than 1,800 Brazilian politicians,” in addition to “accusations in the U.S. of JBS and companies it owns price-fixing, wage-manipulating and violating child labor laws, plus allegations of discrimination and harassment.” In June, Wesley Batista Filho, the CEO of JBS USA, stood with his father, Wesley Batista, and grandfather, José Batista Sobrinho, and rang the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. When the Wall Street Journal asked the new CEO about his vision for the future, Batista Filho deflected. “It’s just doing what we’re doing, having fun, growing the business,” he said. “When you do stuff that you like, when you’re having fun, you don’t work.”

It’s a strangely naive statement. The jobs at JBS are among the most dangerous in America, and few, if any, people would describe the work as fun. And, at the same moment that federal restrictions on JBS are loosening, Trump’s White House has begun turning up the heat on JBS’s refugee workforce. Exploiting the weakness of executive authority as a tool for lasting change, Trump has eliminated temporary protected status for millions of people, arguing that he is returning TPS to its “original status” as “temporary” — and the Supreme Court has affirmed his power to do so. As of this month, September 2025, TPS has been canceled for people granted humanitarian entry from Haiti, Venezuela, Afghanistan and several other countries, forcing them to prepare to leave the country. Also, new entries have been entirely banned from these countries as well as from Burma, Somalia, Sudan and several other Central African nations. In essence, the entire workforce of the U.S. meatpacking industry — as pioneered by JBS 20 years ago — has been ordered out of the country and been blocked from re-entry under any circumstances.

On the day that the Supreme Court affirmed Trump’s power to cancel TPS, a Haitian former JBS worker, who is now employed at the Immigrant and Refugee Center of Northern Colorado in a suburb of Greeley, prepared for the uncertainty ahead. “It’s going to be overwhelming,” he said. “What can I do? What can I do? What will be the next step?” It’s a question we will all have to answer.

Under the guise of offering safe haven, we have brought refugees from around the world and relegated them to brutal manual labor in one of the most dangerous and least-regulated industries.

What do we owe refugees? Given that we brought them to the U.S. and offered them a new life here, is it fair that they should suddenly face deportation? These are people who entered the country legally, via rigorous and well-defined programs — men and women who had demonstrated that their lives were in imminent danger in their home countries. Is it right to just send them back — or, as the Trump administration has also proposed, to send them elsewhere, to some other third country?

On June 10, law enforcement agents raided the Glenn Valley Foods meatpacking plant in Omaha, Nebraska. The plant sits near another JBS beef plant, and initial reports on social media spread that the JBS plant was also being raided. It wasn’t true — but more than 70 Glenn Valley workers were taken out in handcuffs, including five who were criminally charged with resisting or impeding a federal officer. Glenn Valley now reports that its company is struggling to stay afloat. “It’s a wipeout,” owner Gary Rohwer told the New York Times. “We’re building back up from ground zero.” For people in Greeley, it was a frightening echo of the Swift Raids.

Concepción Sánchez was released by ICE on that frigid December day in 2006 and worked for JBS for another 15 years — until fears over COVID and persistent pain from a workplace injury forced her to retire. Still, she worries now that the administration will revoke her green card. On a recent trip to Chihuahua, she was concerned that she might be held at the border and prevented from re-entering. This is precisely the fear and unease that the latest round of immigration crackdowns are intended to create, in order to encourage self-deportation, or, at the very least, maintain a workforce that feels freshly vulnerable and is unlikely to complain about unsafe or unfair conditions.

JBS declined to comment on the specific history contained in this article, but a company spokesperson did offer a statement. “We are focused on hiring team members who are legally authorized to work in the United States, and will continue to follow the guidance provided to us by the U.S. government. If that guidance changes, we will act accordingly,” it reads, in part. “At this point in time, our facilities are operating normally and our production levels remain unchanged.” But for how long?

Almost from the dawn of the meatpacking industry, U.S. beef, pork and poultry have been processed under brutal conditions by people fleeing war and tyranny around the world. In the two decades since the Swift Raids, the largest meatpackers and the federal government have worked together to formalize that system. Under the guise of offering safe haven, we have brought refugees from around the world and relegated them to brutal manual labor in one of the most dangerous and least-regulated industries. This is what we have presented to the world’s most desperate refugees as their gateway to the American dream. Now, having exploited their labor and left many with lifelong injuries, is it right that we should simply discard them? If Trump gets his way, if the workforce at JBS is rounded up and deported, if the number of new refugees is shut off or slowed to a trickle, who will work all the jobs they’ve been doing?

What makes us think that this country will function without immigrants?