'Left to rot': Farmer reeling over decaying crops as workforce flees ICE raids

President Donald Trump's immigration raids are already having a devastating effect on agriculture, CNN reported on Wednesday, with one farmer in The Dalles, Oregon, seeing huge portions of his cherry crop decay because there's no one to pick them.

Ian Chandler "said he’s built up a loyal seasonal workforce for his Wasco County operation called CE Farm Management, about 90 minutes from Portland, with the same people coming year after year and staying in touch with birth announcements and Christmas cards in between," said the report. "But this year half of them did not arrive, and many of his neighbors were scrambling for pickers too. All told, Chandler said he will lose $250,000-$300,000 of revenue, left to rot on the trees."

Not only have Trump's mass deportations and raids eliminated a large part of the workforce, but they have also prevented those who remain from being willing to work at all, Chandler said.

“It’s lost revenue for the operation, which is one thing, but it’s also lost revenue for the workers that would have been able to pick them had they been here,” he said. “The beginning of the season, it coincided, unfortunately, with a lot of really strong immigration enforcement down in southern California, where our workforce comes from, and that had a chilling effect on people wanting to move.”

Since taking office, Trump has ushered in massive new operations to hunt down and remove any undocumented people he can find.

It has led to a string of legal and political controversies, from the summary transport of migrants to foreign megaprisons with no due process to Florida officials' establishment of a brutal migrant camp in the Everglades.

The Trump administration has shrugged off the risk of the immigration crackdown disrupting agricultural supply chains, with Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins suggesting 34 million people on Medicaid can be pressganged to work on farms instead.