U.S. Congressman Don Bacon told local media 75-80 people were detained.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid happened at a plant of Glenn Valley Foods. The food packaging company said it was surprised by the raid and had followed the rules regarding immigration status.

Processor says it followed immigration rules

Chad Hartmann, president of Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, said the plant that was raided used E-Verify, a federal database used for checking employees’ immigration status. He told Reuters that when he said this to a federal agent, the agent responded “the system is broken” and urged him to contact his local congressional representative.

ICE officers have been intensifying efforts in recent weeks to deliver on U.S. President Donald Trump’s promise of record-level deportations. The White House has demanded the agency sharply increase arrests of migrants in the U.S. illegally, sources have told Reuters.

Tensions boiled over in Los Angeles over the weekend when protesters took to the streets after ICE arrested migrants at Home Depot stores, a garment factory and a warehouse, according to migrant advocates.

Local police in Omaha said they were informed by immigration officials about the raid in advance while the company said it got no notice about the operation ahead of time.

Allegations of large-scale illegal employment

Hartmann said federal agents had a warrant that said they had identified 107 people who they believed were using fraudulent documents.

“This was the largest worksite enforcement operation in Nebraska under the Trump Administration,” the Homeland Security Department said on X, adding no law enforcement official was hurt.

ICE said a criminal investigation was ongoing into what immigration officials called a large-scale employment of immigrants who are present in the U.S. illegally.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and federal law enforcement partners, executed a federal search warrant at Glenn Valley Foods, today, based on an ongoing criminal investigation into the large-scale employment of aliens without authorization to work in the United States,” an ICE spokesperson told an ABC News affiliate.

More than half of all meatpacking workers in the U.S. are immigrants, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank.

Rights advocates, including the ACLU of Nebraska, condemned the raid.

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At a roundtable on farm labour at the White House last month, Trump said he did not want to create labour problems for farmers and would look into improving a program that brings in temporary agricultural workers on legal visas.

“He assured us we would have plenty of access to workers,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, one of 14 participants at the April 25 meeting with Trump and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

During the roundtable conversation about agriculture, farmers and representatives of the sector brought up labour and immigration, the details of which have not been previously reported. Some farmers told Trump they often cannot find Americans willing to do the difficult farm jobs, according to interviews with nine of the 14 participants.

They said they were worried about stricter immigration enforcement and described frustrations with the H-2A visa program, the one legal way to bring in temporary seasonal agricultural workers.

The White House declined to comment on the specifics of the discussion, but described the meeting as “very productive.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not respond to a request for comment on the April meeting.

About half of U.S. crop workers are in the country illegally and more than two-thirds are foreign born, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agriculture Workers’ Survey.

During the roundtable, Luke Brubaker, a dairy farmer from Pennsylvania, described how immigration agents had recently picked up half a dozen chicken catchers working for a poultry transportation company in his county.

The employer tried to replace them with local hires, but within three hours all but one had quit, Brubaker told the gathering at the White House.

Trump said he wanted to help and asked Secretary Perdue to look into the issues and come back with recommendations, according to the accounts.

While other issues such as trade, infrastructure and technology were also discussed, participants were more positive after the meeting about the conversation on foreign labour “than about anything else we talked about,” said Bill Northey, a farmer and Iowa’s secretary of agriculture.

Red tape

Tom Demaline, president of Willoway Nurseries in Ohio, said he told the president about his struggles with the H-2A guestworker program, which he has used for 18 years.

He told Trump the program works in concept, but not in practice. “I brought up the bureaucracy and red tape,” he said. “If the guys show up a week or two late, it puts crops in jeopardy. You are on pins and needles all year to make sure you get the workers and do everything right.”

While use of the program has steadily increased over the past decade, it still accounts for only about 10 per cent of the estimated 1.3 million farmworkers in the country, according to government data. In 2016, the government granted 134,000 H-2A visas

Employers who import workers with H-2A visas must provide free transportation to and from the U.S. as well as housing and food for workers once they arrive. Wage minimums are set by the government and are often higher than farmers are used to paying.

Steve Scaroni, whose company Fresh Harvest brings in thousands of foreign H-2A workers for growers in California’s Central Valley, said, however, that he could find work for even more people if he had more places to house them.

Trump recently signed another executive order titled “Buy American, Hire American,” calling for changes to a program granting temporary visas for the tech industry, but not to visas used by farmers and other seasonal businesses, including Trump’s own resorts.

Farmer concerns

Trump also signed two executive orders, just days after taking office, focused on border security that called for arresting more people in the U.S. illegally and speeding up deportations.

Roundtable participants said that many farmers have worried about the effect of the stepped-up enforcement on their workforce, but Trump told them his administration was focused on deporting criminals, not farmworkers.

“He has a much better understanding about this than some of the rhetoric we have seen,” said meeting attendee Steve Troxler, North Carolina’s agriculture commissioner and a farmer himself.

The farmers at the meeting said they stressed to the president the need for both short-term and permanent workers. They said there should be a program to help long-time farmworkers without criminal records, but who are in the country illegally, to become legal residents.

Last Tuesday, Democrats in the House and Senate said they would introduce a bill to give farmworkers who have worked illegally in the country for two consecutive years a “blue card” to protect them from deportation.

Brubaker, the Pennsylvania farmer, said he liked what he had heard about the bill and hoped it would get the president’s support to make it a bipartisan effort.

“The administration has got something started here,” he said of the meeting with farm leaders. “It’s about time something happens.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Mica Rosenberg in Washington; additional reporting by Julia Love in Salinas, California.

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“Yields were good this year and crop prices are real good right now, so guys have been spending some money,” said Lichtenberg, who has worked as a salesman for Johnson Farm Equipment in Fremont for 10 years. He estimates sales have risen by as much as 40 per cent this year.

Surging grain prices and growing investor interest are lifting farmland prices in the Midwest, and bank regulators fear that another U.S. bubble may be inflating.

Farmland prices are 58 per cent above their 2000 levels in inflation-adjusted terms, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. That’s about how much residential real estate prices rose in the United States from 2000 through 2004.

Those soaring land values reflect the largely unsung prosperity of U.S. states that shrugged off the downturn.

That’s good news, but many analysts wonder what would happen to the lenders who finance farmland operations and purchases if prices fall.

“If commodity prices plunge from the current levels and you think they’re in a bubble, which I tend to think they are, there is risk” for agricultural banks, said Rochdale Securities analyst Richard Bove.

Investors like farmland because they see it as a safe asset that generates income. They also benefit from the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates, which are prompting investors to seek high yields in commodities.

These factors may not last, Bove said.

FEDS WATCHING

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is monitoring credit to U.S. farmland, said Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., last month in Baltimore,

The loan market does not seem frothy now, but there is still risk there, Bair said.

“A sharp decline in farmland prices similar to the early 1980s could have a severe adverse impact on the nation’s 1,579 farm banks,” Bair said in October.

The $245 billion farm loan market is small compared to the $11.5 trillion U.S. home loan market and the nation’s $2 trillion of farmland assets.

But a downturn in rural land values could hit Midwestern states hard, and some smaller banks could end up hobbled. As the U.S. government deals with a financial crisis that has already ruined more than 300 banks, a farmland bubble could add to the taxpayers’ cleanup bill.

As land prices rise, bank exposure grows. In 2004, banks had about $95.7 billion of farm mortgages. In the middle of 2010, that figure was closer to $132 billion.

“Every bank is working hard to find creditworthy customers. When you see a sector like agriculture that’s doing well, suddenly they like to swing towards it, whether they have the expertise and understanding to deal with it or not,” said Wells Fargo agricultural economist Michael Swanson.

For over a year, some Midwestern state regulators have been eyeing potential weaknesses, and national bank regulators are starting to join them.

Prices and yields of crops in South Dakota have been “extremely strong” in the absence of drought and large-scale flooding, said Tim Ahartz, deputy director at the South Dakota Department of Banking.

For the past year, Ahartz has asked banks to be more specific about what types of agricultural loans are on their books, to ensure that lenders better understand the risks of those portfolios.

“Our fear is if drought, for example, were to reoccur, or if input costs of farming continue to rise and the yields of the crop can’t keep up, where is the cash flow going to come from?” Ahartz said.

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