If there’s one thing you can depend on from the current Democratic Party leadership in Congress, it’s their total commitment to bringing everything back to the kitchen table. Every fresh controversy or abuse of constitutional rights is almost inevitably driven back in that direction, whether it’s reframing the outrage du jour—regardless of what it is—as a question of affordability or just changing the subject entirely.
Whether Donald Trump is starting foreign wars, ordering military-style occupation of our cities, or praising the murder of Twin Cities mother Renee Good, the question “What about the kitchen-table problems?” is guaranteed to be the first response by leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries—even as members of their party call for defunding and abolishing Trump’s secret police in all but name.
Given their fixation on America’s dining rooms, it may help Jeffries and Schumer understand the problem of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to put it all in their favored kitchen-table terms. While there is no question crimes like the murder of Renee Good and ICE’s mass deportation campaigns in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Louisiana, and North Carolina are a flagrant assault on human rights and American democracy, the agency’s activities are also putting the squeeze on everyone’s pocketbooks. Not only are ICE’s operations hiking up everyone’s grocery bills, they are also, contrary to administration claims, making the housing crisis worse by terrorizing the construction industry and making life unlivable in immigrant neighborhoods.
When it comes to grocery bills, ICE’s raids have frozen large swathes of American agriculture with chilling consequences for consumers nationwide. The American Immigration Council estimated that, as of 2019, nearly half of all farmworkers were immigrants and that 27.3 percent are undocumented. These figures rise even higher when the question shifts to crop production; there, immigrants make up 57 percent of the workforce, with undocumented workers making up 36.4 percent of that total. The United States, in other words, depends on immigrants to stay fed, ensure abundant supplies of food, and keep the costs of grocery bills down.
With these realities in mind, it is unsurprising that ICE’s mass-deportation campaign has significantly disrupted food production. A Bay Area Council–UC Merced study from June 2025 argued that expelling all undocumented immigrants from California would shrink the size of the state’s agricultural sector by 14 percent, putting a serious crimp in America’s most agriculturally productive state. But this damage is not limited to the Golden State. Agricultural advocates were sounding the alarm as early as April 2025 after the American Business Immigration Coalition determined that mass deportation, nationwide, would shrink agricultural output by between $30 billion and $60 billion and push many farms to the breaking point.
Raids in agriculturally rich California, which began last spring, may already be showing up on grocery bills. An August 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics report covering food prices for June and July, mere weeks after ICE and the Border Patrol’s incursion into Los Angeles and nearby regions, found the wholesale price of vegetables had surged by 38.9 percent, the biggest single increase since March 2022. The larger chilling effect of ICE operations prompted Trump’s own Department of Labor to issue a stark warning in October that continued deportations could lead to further increases in food prices. “The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens,” as the report says, “combined with the lack of an available legal workforce is threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.”
Our society’s reliance on immigrant labor to keep the cost of food down doesn’t stop at the production end. In the words of the late, great Anthony Bourdain, Mexican and Central American immigrants are “the backbone of the [restaurant] industry,” who made up “most of the people in my experience cooking, preparing your food.” To put that in numbers: approximately 22 percent, with the number rising as high as 30 percent in states like California, Texas, and New York.
The consequences of these actions are already being felt by restaurants in Los Angeles, Texas, and Minneapolis at the time of writing. All have reported that deportation campaigns have forced them to curtail operations as workers, now afraid of being arrested by ICE, are unable to come in to work, fearful for their safety. For restaurant workers and owners, ICE’s newly aggressive posture means all are constantly on guard for raids, regardless of their legal status. In an industry where an estimated 30 percent of all restaurants failed each year before Trump’s reelection, unnecessary closures and lost work could be the difference between solvency and bankruptcy for many of these businesses.
The grocery bill and restaurant check are only the first of many kitchen-table expenses pushed to new heights by Trump’s campaign of mass deportations. Americans may also discover that ICE’s actions are pushing the price of housing even further out of reach for many, rather than reducing it, as Trump and his officials have consistently promised. The root of this problem lies, again, in the American construction industry’s dependence on immigrant labor to remain operational. The National Association of Home Builders estimated, as of 2023, approximately one in four American construction workers are immigrants; they made up an estimated 32.5 percent of all skilled construction tradesmen, such as plumbers, electricians, and carpenters.
These numbers are why a recent study by the University of Utah’s Troup Howard, Amherst College’s Mengqi Wang, and University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Dayin Zhang, found that increased deportations were most likely to slow the already-sluggish rate of residential home construction to a crawl.
A July Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey found, as the ICE campaign began escalating nationwide, an estimated 92 percent of contractors were struggling to fill job openings in construction, and a third of all construction firms reported delays in project timelines. In the words of Coastal Construction CFO Patrick Murphy, “When there are sudden crackdowns or raids, it slows timelines, drives up costs, and makes it harder to plan ahead.”
Making matters worse is the indiscriminate nature of ICE raids. Even if workers do not face direct confrontation at their job sites, ICE’s assaults on immigrant communities have made their neighborhoods inherently unsafe. Many immigrant residents of cities, thanks to high-profile raids at communal locations such as civic celebrations and Home Depot parking lots, have opted to stay home from work rather than risk being snatched up by masked federal agents. The indiscriminate nature of patently racist practices like Kavanaugh stops have forced immigrants in American cities to hunker down, relying on neighbors to help with critical errands like grocery shopping. Even though Donald Trump has promised to exempt farms and hotels from worksite raids, that matters little when ICE is just as willing to arrest people for existing outdoors as they are to raid a job site.
For all of these mounting pocketbook problems, there is an even more direct kitchen-table reality that ICE has visited on countless homes: empty chairs. Every person detained by ICE means one more family is now missing a parent, sibling, or loved one. This is a loss that cannot be measured in numbers or percentages. No matter how you slice it, ICE’s actions are the preeminent kitchen-table problem for everyone, whether you are balancing your books or sheltering your family from their latest campaign of brutality.
