What ICE Arrests Looked Like in Farm Counties Last Year

This piece was originally published at Investigate Midwest. 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.

About a third of counties most dependent on farm labor for their economies had ICE arrests in 2025, more than in previous years, according to an analysis of federal data.

The increase came as the Trump administration pursued mass deportations of immigrants throughout the country. The campaign largely focused on sending law enforcement agents to major cities, which resulted in the deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis (and less employment). However, rural communities faced activity as well, such as a large raid in Idaho last year that threatened the harvest season.

Increased ICE activity led to concerns about farms losing their labor force. In March, Michigan State University researchers released the results of a survey they conducted of California farmers in late 2025 and early 2026. Less than 1% of surveyed farmers reported losing workers as a direct result of immigration enforcement on their farms.

However, more than 14% reported losing workers over general fears of encountering ICE.

It is unclear exactly how many workers in the agriculture industry — i.e, those harvesting crops, packaging meat or milking cows — have been affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown. Data showing the occupations of those arrested by ICE is not available.

But rural corners of the U.S. that rely on farming have experienced more ICE activity than in previous years.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 453 counties are considered “farming” counties. Last year, 145 of these counties saw at least one ICE arrest — the most since 2018, President Trump’s second year in office. The total number of arrests in “farming” counties also increased in 2025.

Some well-known agricultural areas, such as western Wisconsin (dairies) and California’s Central Valley (specialty crops), are not included in the USDA’s definition. The federal data also does not show the ICE arrestees’ occupations. It appears many of the arrests in these counties occurred while people were already in custody, such as in a county jail.

Overall, the number of ICE arrests in the U.S. has skyrocketed since Trump returned to office. More than 300,000 arrests were recorded in the data, more than double the number in any previous year over the past decade.

To address labor shortage concerns, the Trump administration will allow dairy farms to access H-2A visa labor, Bloomberg reported last month. The industry, which milks cows year-round, was not qualified to bring in labor from overseas because the visa is meant for short-term, seasonal jobs, such as harvesting crops.

House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, has proposed codifying the change into law, according to Politico. More and more workers come to the U.S. temporarily through the program every year.

HOW WE ANALYZED THE DATA

To identify “farming” counties, we relied on the USDA’s definition. The department defines “high farming concentration counties” as those where at least a fifth of the county’s average earnings came from farming, or where at least an average of 17% of a county’s labor force worked in farming over a three-year period. Under that definition, there are 453 “farming” counties, mostly in the center of the country.

We then compared the list of USDA “farming” counties to the locations of ICE arrests since 2015.

For the arrests, we used data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, which sued ICE for the records. The data includes arrest locations and goes back to 2023. For more context, we used similar data that the University of Washington Center for Human Rights obtained and released publicly. That data also includes arrest locations for the years 2015 through 2023.

The locations are imprecise. For instance, many arrests in Chicago are listed as “Chicago general area,” making it difficult to assess location trends in that city. The Deportation Data Project also cautioned that arrest locations did not appear to be consistently entered into the database.

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