LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President Trump's immigration policies are changing the workforce, and not just in places where there have been immigration raids. Trump has ended programs that allowed some immigrants to stay and work here legally. Those moves have faced court challenges. Still, it's putting a strain on workers who remain. NPR's Andrea Hsu reports.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: In Holland, Michigan, it's an especially busy time of the year at Kraft-Heinz - green season, when cucumbers are trucked in from nearby farms. And outside the plant, a familiar tangy smell wafts through the air.
TOM TORRES: it's the brine, the vinegar - what they put inside the pickles. That's what you smell.
HSU: That's Tom Torres, who's worked for 13 years as a mechanic at the plant, which also produces mustard, mayo and barbecue sauce. We've met up at a leafy park nearby. Torres is accustomed to working a lot, but lately he's been coming in hours before his normal shift begins.
TORRES: That's really hard, getting up at 3 o'clock in the morning.
HSU: Torres says he's been working these long hours ever since the plant lost workers due to new immigration policies. President Trump has taken steps to expel a number of immigrants who had legal status under former President Biden. Kraft-Heinz says six employees out of roughly 300 at the Holland plant have been impacted. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union believes it's more. Torres, who serves as the local union president, says he's sat in on more than a dozen HR meetings where employees have been told they're no longer eligible to work. He's seen people in the company struggle to deliver the message.
TORRES: There are just tears in their eyes, like, I can't do this no more. It's killing me inside, Tom. I'm like, it's killing me because I'm watching them walk out. I know these people because I work with them every day.
HSU: Torres was born in Michigan to migrant farmworkers who traveled from the Texas border every summer to pick berries and other crops. He sees in his immigrant co-workers the same work ethic he saw in his parents.
TORRES: Whatever you give them, they'll do. Just dumping bottles or sweeping the floors or doing - they'll do whatever. Sort pickles.
HSU: During the presidential campaign last year, President Trump talked a lot about immigrants.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They're taking your jobs. Every job produced in this country over the last two years has gone to illegal aliens.
HSU: He blamed Biden. And he said immigrants, including some criminals, have exploited protections that were supposed to be temporary. But Trump's efforts to open up jobs for American workers are bringing some American workers stress. At the GE Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky, Jaelin Carpenter suddenly lost four of her co-workers on her washing machine line. They left after Trump canceled their humanitarian parole.
JAELIN CARPENTER: They were calling me, asking me if they're on the run. Like, does this mean I'm getting deported today? And I'm like, I don't know.
HSU: As a team leader and a shop steward with her union, IUE CWA, Carpenter is used to getting questions about all kinds of things.
CARPENTER: I never don't have an answer. I always got a answer. I didn't have one. So that kind of, like, tore me down.
HSU: In coming months, American companies could lose more immigrant workers. Trump has canceled Temporary Protected Status for people from a number of countries. Those moves are being challenged in court. But those protections will eventually expire, including for people from Haiti. Michel-Ange Lucas (ph), who builds refrigerators at the GE Appliance Park, says when that happens, there will be gaps, given how many Haitians work there.
MICHEL-ANGE LUCAS: From building 1 to building 5, it's a lot of us.
HSU: He thinks for people who had the government's permission to stay and work under Temporary Protected Status, what's happening now is unfair.
LUCAS: The people was not illegal. It's politics made them illegal, but they was never illegal.
HSU: But under Trump, that looks to be changing .
Andrea Hsu, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAS A WOLF'S "ENGLISH CREAM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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