This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump campaigns for a second term in the White House, the former president has repeatedly promised to enact the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in US history. It’s a bold threat that legal experts say should be taken seriously, despite the significant technical and logistical challenges posed by deporting 11 million people from the United States. 

Even if only somewhat successful, Trump’s hard-line approach to immigration—with its laser focus on removing immigrants who live in the US without permanent legal status—has the potential to uproot countless communities and families by conducting sweeping raids and placing people in detention centers.

Mass deportation would also, according to economists, labor groups, and immigration advocates, threaten the economy and disrupt the food supply chain, which is reliant on many forms of migrant labor.

The ramifications of a mass deportation operation would be “huge” given “immigrant participation in our labor force,” said Amy Liebman, chief program officer of workers, environment, and climate at the Migrant Clinicians Network, a nonprofit that advocates for health justice. Immigration is one of the reasons behind growth in the labor force, said Liebman. “And then you look at food, and farms.” 

“Button your seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken? Like, hello?”

The possibility of deportation-related disruption comes at a time when the US food system is already being battered by climate change. Extreme weather and climate disasters are disrupting supply chains, while longer-term warming trends are affecting agricultural productivity. Although inflation is currently cooling, higher food costs remain an issue for consumers across the country—and economists have found that even a forecast of extreme weather can cause grocery store prices to rise. 

Mass deportation could create more chaos, because the role of immigrants in the American food system is difficult to overstate. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority of them coming from Mexico, legally obtain H-2A visas that allow them to enter the US as seasonal agricultural workers and then return home when the harvest is done. But people living in the US without legal status also play a crucial role in the economy: During the pandemic, it was estimated that 5 million essential workers were undocumented. And the Center for American Progress found that nearly 1.7 million undocumented workers labor in some part of the US food supply chain.

A stunning half of those immigrants work in restaurants, where during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they labored in enclosed, often cramped environments at a time when poor ventilation could be deadly. Hundreds of thousands also work in farming and agriculture—where they might work in the field or sorting produce—as well as food production, in jobs like machine operation and butchery.

The agricultural sector is just one of several industries in recent years that has experienced a labor shortage, which the US Chamber of Commerce has classified a “crisis.” This ongoing shortage makes the Trump campaign’s proposal to force a mass exodus of people without legal status an inherently bad policy, said Liebman. “Part of me is like, ‘Oh, button your seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken?’ Like, hello?”

“With fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s increasingly difficult to find American workers attracted to these kinds of jobs.”

The health and safety risks undocumented immigrants have undertaken to keep Americans fed—both in times of crises and during all other times—have been met with few legal and workplace protections. A bill to give undocumented essential workers a legal pathway to citizenship, introduced by Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, died in committee in 2023. Padilla told Grist he will continue working to “expand protections for these essential workers, including fighting for a legal pathway to citizenship.”

“Agricultural workers endure long hours of physically demanding work, showing up through extreme weather and even a global pandemic to keep our country fed,” he added. “They deserve to live with dignity.” 

If this workforce were to be unceremoniously deported, without regard for their economic contributions to U.S. society or consideration of whether they actually pose a threat to their communities, it would be disastrous, according to Padilla. 

“Donald Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations as a part of Project 2025 are not only cruel but would also decimate our nation’s food supply and economy,” said Padilla, referring to the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a Trump presidency. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

US farmers, who rely on many forms of migrant labor (including undocumented workers and H-2A temporary visa holders), have said that a crackdown on undocumented immigrants would essentially bring business to a grinding halt. In response to federal and state proposals to require employers to verify the legal status of their workers, the American Farm Bureau Federation has said, “Enforcement-only immigration reform would cripple agricultural production in America.”

The Farm Bureau, an advocacy group for farmers, declined to comment on Trump’s mass deportation proposal, but a questionnaire the group gave to both presidential candidates states, “Farm work is challenging, often seasonal and transitory, and with fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s increasingly difficult to find American workers attracted to these kinds of jobs.”

Small farmers agree. A first generation Mexican-American immigrant who works in Illinois as an urban farmer, David Toledo says that the consequences of mass deportation for the country’s food system would be hard to imagine, especially since he believes that “many Americans don’t want to take the jobs” that many undocumented workers currently fill for very low pay.

“We need people who want to work in fields and in farmlands. [Farmworkers] are waking up way before the sun because of rising temperatures, and living in horrible conditions,” said Toledo. He added that the US should remember “that we are a welcoming community and society. We have to be, because we are going to see a lot more people shifting [here] from countries all over the world because of climate change.” 

Stephen Miller, the advisor who shaped Trump’s hard-line immigration policy, has touted mass deportations as a labor market intervention that will boost wages for American-born workers. But analysts point out that previous programs aimed at restricting the flow of immigrant workers have failed to raise wages for native-born citizens.

For example, when the US in 1965 ended the Bracero Program, which allowed half a million Mexican-American seasonal workers to labor in the US, wages for domestic farmworkers did not increase, according to analysis from the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Additionally, a recent analysis found that a Bush- and Obama-era deportation program known as Secure Communities—which removed nearly half a million undocumented immigrants from the US—resulted in both fewer jobs and lower wages from domestic workers. One reason is that when undocumented immigrants were deported, many middle managers who worked with them also lost their jobs.

Such a shock to the agricultural labor force could result in higher food prices, too. If farmers lose a large portion of their workforce due to mass deportation, they may not have enough people to harvest, grade, and sort crops before they spoil. That sort of reduction in the supply of food could drive up prices at the grocery store. 

Many experts note that even attempting to deport millions of immigrants would disrupt the nation’s economy as a whole. “It will not benefit our economy to lose millions of workers,” said Debu Gandhi, senior director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “There is no economic rationale for it.”

For instance, mass deportation would deprive governments of essential tax revenue. A report from the American Immigration Council found that a majority of undocumented immigrants—or three-fourths—participated in the workforce in 2022. This tracks with other analysts’ understandings of the undocumented workforce. “Undocumented immigrants, when they get to the United States of America, they have an intention to work, to make money and contribute not only to their families, but also to the federal, state, and local government,” said Marco Guzman, a senior policy analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. A recent report co-authored by Guzman found that undocumented immigrants paid a whopping $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.

Moreover, advocacy groups worry about the impact mass deportation would have on families. “What does this look like on the ground?” said Liebman, who wondered who would be tasked with enforcing mass deportation, and whether it would require local law enforcement agencies to carry out raids in their own neighborhoods and communities. She noted that the bulk of migrant families across the country are “mixed status”—meaning that some members of a household have documentation while others don’t. “Are we going to go into people’s houses and rip families apart?”  

“My sense is that it would be impractical and then impossible to implement [mass deportations] a way that doesn’t inevitably violate the Constitution.”

Immigration is the purview of the federal government, and for decades, elected leaders across the political spectrum have failed to pass policies to fix America’s strained immigration system. “It has been very hard to find solutions on immigration reform,” said Gandhi. “And we do have bipartisan solutions on the table. But we just have not been able to get them through.”

In the absence of other policy solutions—such as addressing the root causes of migration to the US from other countries, including climate change—all-or-nothing imperatives to “close the border” have become popular among conservatives. In fact, a Scripps News/Ipsos poll released last month found that a majority of American voters surveyed support mass deporting immigrants without legal status. 

Experts have debated the feasibility of Trump’s promise to enact mass deportations—pointing out that deportations during Trump’s first term were lower than under his predecessor, Barack Obama. (The Biden administration has also enacted considerably more enforcement actions against immigrants than were carried out during the Trump administration.) Although the specific details on how the proposal would be carried out and enforced have yet to be clarified by Trump’s campaign, Paul Chavez, litigation program director at Americans for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit law firm, is highly skeptical about the likelihood of such a move holding up in federal court. 

“I can’t imagine any sort of mass deportation program that doesn’t result in racial profiling of both immigrants and those perceived to be immigrants,” said Chavez. Any form of racial profiling that came out of such an enforcement process would be in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which effectively prohibits a state from adopting policies that target any person in its jurisdiction based on race, color, or national origin. A mass deportation operation would lead to people being profiled across the country and treated in “a discriminatory fashion based on national origin,” said Chavez—triggering all sorts of lawsuits. 

“My sense is that it would be impractical and then impossible to implement in a way that doesn’t inevitably violate the Constitution,” said Chavez. 

But whether or not courts upheld mass deportation, the threat of raids would send a strong message to workers, according to Antonio De Loera-Brust, an organizer with United Farm Workers, a labor union for farmworkers that represents laborers regardless of their immigration status. He posited that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is purposefully designed to have a chilling effect on US residents without legal status. “The point is not to remove millions, it’s to scare them,” said De Loera-Brust.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Early into his new book, The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos, ecologist Mark Easter poses a playful, but loaded, question: “How could a morning piece of toast or a plate of dinner pasta be such a world-altering culprit?” This, like many ideas Easter digs into in his illuminating debut, is a glimpse at how the author goes about breaking down the climate toll of the US agricultural system: One dish at a time.  

Seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and pie are just some of the quintessentially “American” kitchen table staples Easter structures the book around as he tries to help readers understand how greenhouse gases move into and out of soils and plants on land across the country. Each of the nine chapters examines how a single dish is made; from the soil needed to grow the ingredients, to the people who manage the land and the laborers who toil to get it to the table, and the leftovers that remain—documenting the emissions created each step of the way. 

The Blue Plate also takes a look at some of the innovative practices being implemented around the US to make such culinary favorites more climate-friendly. Stopping off at an Arizona produce farm, a Wyoming fertilizer plant, a Colorado landfill, an Idaho fish farm, and several dairies, Easter shows how small businesses are making conscientious changes to how they work. He theorizes how each could be applied at scale while quantifying how the widespread adoption of such techniques, and minimal shifts in consumer purchasing and consumption habits, could reduce agriculture’s gargantuan role in warming. 

It’s a topic driven by Easter’s own family history. His great-grandmother was a farmer during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s who, along with others growing grain at the time in the Great Plains, unknowingly contributed to the release of one of the greatest known pulses of carbon emissions. The book uses her story to probe how the Great Plains was transformed from one of the planet’s most carbon-rich grasslands into one of its largest agricultural complexes. 

By analyzing the emissions released when food is grown, produced, harvested, and shipped, The Blue Plate makes the case that curbing the carbon footprint of what we eat won’t require an agricultural revolution. It’s already happening, in bite-sized cases across the country. 

Grist sat down with Easter, a research affiliate at Colorado State University, to discuss what his vision of eating our way out of the climate crisis would look like in practice. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

In The Blue Plate, you dig into the emissions impact of the production and consumption of everything from husks of corn to hunks of meat. What led you to decide to focus on the ingredients of, in your words, “a typical meal at an American weekend dinner party”? 

I sat down one evening with a plate of food in front of me, and I looked at it, and I realized that there were critical stories tied to the climate crisis in every single item of food that was on the plate. I also realized I’ve been working with farmers and ranchers around the world who were already implementing the practices that could help reduce and actually reverse those emissions. And I saw the basis for the book in that moment. 

At Colorado State University, you belonged to a team of “greenhouse gas accountants” who tally the tens of billions of tons of carbon that move each year between the Earth’s plants and atmosphere—a huge focus of the book. What, exactly, does that look like? 

It’s very much like what an accountant for a business or a bank does. We’re basically trying to tally the flow of carbon and nitrogen back and forth between the Earth and the atmosphere and try to understand, “Do we have too much flowing in the wrong directions?” And that’s basically what’s been happening. Not just from the fossil fuel industry, and for generating electricity, for heating homes, for transportation, but also from the way we’ve been growing food and managing forests. We’ve been essentially exhausting the ecosystem capital of organic matter and sending that into the atmosphere. When really, what we need is for that flow to be stabilized and reversed, so that we have that flow of carbon back into forests, into pastures, into crop fields, and into the plants that sustain us through agriculture. 

The carbon and nitrogen in ecosystems, they’re really like the capital in businesses. If you’re burning through your capital, that’s a warning sign for business, and they can’t sustain it very long, eventually they’ll go bankrupt. And that’s essentially what’s been going on with agriculture. 

Let’s talk more about that, through the lens of bread. Something that has stayed with me is a line in the book where you note that although humans eat more of it than any other food, bread and grains have some of the smallest carbon footprints, on average, of any food—about a pound and half of CO2 equivalent for every pound of bread, pasta, or tortillas. But you argue that the emissions impact of producing bread and grain is larger than that, because of its soil impact.  

This is one of the most interesting stories when we think about the food that’s on our plates: the role that carbon, organic matter, has in the soil, supporting the crops that we grow. The more organic matter we have in the soil, the more fertile the soil is going to be, the more abundant the crops will be, the more resilient the plants will be in terms of being able to fight off disease and be able to deal with drought. 

It’s part of that ecosystem capital. The carbon that’s in the soil there accumulates over millennia. It can take five to ten thousand years for that ecosystem capital to build up and fill what we call the soil carbon vault that sustains the ecosystem. If we’re not careful, we can burn through that soil carbon vault over a short time. We essentially exhaust that capital. Burning through that vault, and that’s just an enormous amount of carbon in the soil, that is essentially a climate burden that comes with every loaf of bread. 

You visited a Colorado farm where the farmers have eliminated things like mechanically tilling the soil or leaving land fallow, both of which degrade soil. They’ve also weaned off of chemical fertilizers and planted cover crops. In what way are these compounding practices restoring the carbon that past generations of farmers have mined from their soils? 

What these growers are doing is reversing that process of degradation that started when the land was first settled, and what we now know as industrial agriculture was brought to those fields. And they are restoring it through these really straightforward practices that have been around in some form or another since the beginning of agriculture, and they’re implementing it at a scale that’s very focused on ending that cycle of degradation and actually restoring, regenerating, the soil. 

A story I tell in my book is of Curtis Sayles, who talks about how his soil had hit rock bottom. His focus has pivoted entirely to looking at the health of the soil, and he tracks that through the amount of organic matter, the carbon, that’s in his soil. And he’s steadily adding back the carbon into his soil. It’s extraordinary to see it come back to life. 

What would scaling this require? The book notes that many US farmers still intensively till cropland every year. Is it feasible to imagine large-scale changes? 

It’s important to understand that the decisions to regenerate soil, and to improve soil health, and to increase the organic matter in the soil, happen one farmer at a time, one rancher at a time, one field or pasture at a time. And there are hundreds of thousands of farmers and millions of pastures and fields around the country where the effects of those decisions can play out. 

There’s been a tremendous emphasis upon soil health within the farming and ranching community today. As soon as the US Department of Agriculture started talking about this in the context of soil health, it really started getting people’s attention. And now, we see some of the fastest-growing practices in the country are changes to reduce tillage and to start to incorporate cover crops. There’s still a lot of barriers to it, and those barriers are cultural and social. And some people are uncomfortable with change. But that said, farmers are increasingly seeing this as an opportunity for them to increase their yields. 

In the book, you pay homage to your great-grandmother and how she lost her farm during the Dust Bowl. How do you see her story, and historical accounts of farmers like her, reflected in how we talk about the role of agriculture in driving climate change? 

The story of my great-grandmother Neva and the story of her farm was a story that played out on literally billions of acres across the world. And not every farmer at the time was generating the kinds of emissions, degrading the soil, the same way that she was. But her story was not unique. What she did on that 160 acres of land in southeastern Colorado was similar to what was happening on farm parcels everywhere across the US, especially where people were homesteading under the Great Plains. 

In the process, they emitted as much carbon dioxide from the soil as we produce in a single year, in total, for all the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The magnitude of that was just extraordinary. And that is what really made my great-grandmother Neva’s story so personal to me. To realize that one of my ancestors had played a role there, unwittingly, in just trying to live a good life and fight for herself, and for her family. 

Soil is a cornerstone of the global food system, and very much a focus of The Blue Plate. But it’s not the only focus. For one, you examine the emissions footprint of things like steak and salmon, but you notably do not advocate for Americans to stop eating meat or seafood or dairy altogether. In fact, you explore what the solutions could look like if these emissions-intensive foods remain on kitchen tables. Can you explain how you came to that conclusion? 

A lot of people are asking me about meat and their consumption of meat and “Do we need to stop eating meat?” I think what’s become clear is that we eat too much meat, whether it’s cattle or pigs or poultry. But I don’t think the answer is as simple as stopping eating meat. In some parts of the world, where millions of people live, trying to grow wheat or tomatoes, or other crops, would be an environmental disaster. It would completely deplete the soils. And some of those places, the best choice for the landscape, where it’s compatible with local wildlife and with the ecosystem as a whole, is to graze livestock. We have to be cognizant of that. 

I think the message that I’m trying to get across to the public is that if they eat meat, they need to consider pastured poultry, or try to source from regeneratively grown livestock herds and dairy products, wherever possible. And farmed shellfish, which can help restore oceans, estuaries, or our coastlines. People should search for foods in the grocery store that have a “regeneratively farmed” label attached to them. Finally, to avoid foods that travel by air, and the carbon emissions that come from that. And I know that’s not possible for everybody.

The through line of The Blue Plate is this question: “Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis?” You wrote that the answer is “a partial yes” but that we need to reframe the question. How would you like to see it reframed? And how would you answer it? 

How can we end the process of burning fossil fuels? And then what role can the way we grow, process, ship, cook our food, and deal with the leftovers, play in reducing the impacts of more than a century of burning fossil fuels? 

We are burning fossil fuels at such a high rate and the impacts are so large we have to stop, as quickly as possible. Growing food differently, using regenerative methods, using these carbon farming methods, has the greatest potential to draw down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and back into the soil, back into the Earth, where we need more of it to lie. In that process of drawing down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we’re going to be helping to cool the planet, and reduce the impacts of more than a century of burning fossil fuels.