Factories are losing immigrant workers, stressing those who remain

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Jaelin Carpenter was stressed. Four people on her team of 26 at GE Appliances had learned that their immigration status had changed.

Under former President Biden, they’d been allowed to stay and work in the U.S. for two years, protected by a program set up to help people fleeing humanitarian crises back home. But the Trump administration abruptly canceled that program, revoking their legal status and their authorization to work. Carpenter fielded call after call from her panicked coworkers.

“They were calling me asking me if they’re on the run. ‘Does this mean I’m getting deported today?'” she recalls them asking.

As a team leader on a washing machine line and a union shop steward for IUE-CWA Local 83761, Carpenter was used to fielding all kinds of questions at work. But she wasn’t prepared for this.

Her coworkers were desperate for answers. Carpenter had none. That tore her down, she says.

Carpenter says the four team members were doing some of the most difficult tasks on the line, installing the hoses on the washers as well as affixing the platforms that hold the motors.

“These are people who are on critical jobs,” she says.

And suddenly, they were gone.

Sudden departures leave companies with holes

In recent months, immigrants working in manufacturing, food production and other industries have lost their jobs due to President Trump’s immigration policies — not as a result of immigration raids, but because Trump ended Biden-era programs that had provided them temporary permission to remain in the U.S. and get jobs.

Those affected include more than a half-million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who had been granted humanitarian parole for two years through a program known as CHNV — an acronym for the countries it covered. The changes also affect close to one million immigrants who were allowed into the U.S. after securing appointments at the U.S.-Mexico border via a U.S. government app.

Those programs were part of Biden’s efforts to create a safe, orderly process at the border for those fleeing war, violence or political unrest. The Trump administration says they achieved the opposite.

“Programs like CHNV were abused to admit hundreds of thousands of poorly vetted illegal aliens. It was exploited by bad actors, undercut American workers, and encouraged more illegal immigration,” wrote White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement.

Trump’s cancellation of those programs has been challenged in court, delaying his efforts to get people to leave immediately. Also facing legal challenges is Trump’s cancellation of Temporary Protected Status for people from a number of countries. Those protections, in some cases granted decades ago, were aimed at providing temporary relief for people escaping unsafe conditions due to war or environmental disasters. The Trump administration argues those conditions have long passed, despite ongoing violence and instability in some places.

Even with the legal battles still unfolding, the reversal in immigration policies has left employers with holes to fill as they’ve scrambled to remove from their payrolls those no longer authorized to work or even stay in the U.S.

“This is a new area for us. We’ve certainly consulted with other people just to understand — what does this mean? How are we supposed to do this?” says Julie Wood, head of corporate communications for GE Appliances. To date, Wood says the company has seen 148 employees lose their eligibility to work.

Wood says the departures have not caused a major disruption at the plant, which employs some 5,000 production workers across five buildings. The company always keeps replacement workers on hand to fill in for absences, and Wood says they’ve added to that pool during the current uncertainty.

Still, the sudden exits are felt deeply in some parts of the appliance park. For Carpenter, training new people has been taxing. She worries mistakes will be made. She’s uneasy, wondering who’s going to be on the job on any given day.

“I can’t control it,” she says. “Nothing I can do about it.”

A vow to protect American jobs

During the presidential campaign last fall, Trump warned American workers that Biden’s immigration policies had cost them.

“What’s going on with African American workers and with Hispanic in particular — just taking your jobs. They’re taking your jobs. Every job produced in this country over the last two years has gone to illegal aliens,” Trump told a crowd in Wilmington, N.C., last September. “What we’re doing to this country is so sad.”

But Tom Torres doesn’t see things that way.

A mechanic for Kraft Heinz in Holland, Mich., Torres says immigrants have long played key roles at the plant, which is best known for making pickles. Born in Michigan to Mexican farmworkers and raised in Texas, Torres grew up making the annual summer migration from Texas to Michigan to pick berries and other crops. He sees in his immigrant coworkers the same work ethic he saw in his parents.

“Whatever you give them, they’ll do,” he says, whether it’s dumping bottles, sweeping the floors or sorting pickles, hunched over the conveyor all day. “No complaints.”

Under Trump, some of Torres’ coworkers are now gone, stripped of their authorization to work.

Kraft Heinz says six employees have been affected by Trump’s immigration policies. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which represents about 270 employees at the plant in Holland, believes it’s more.

Torres, who serves as the local union president, says he’s sat in on more than a dozen human resources meetings where employees have been told they’re no longer eligible to work. He’s watched people in the company struggle to deliver the message.

“Just tears in their eyes,” he says, adding that it’s been difficult for him, too. “It’s killing me, because I’m watching them walk out. I know these people because I work with them every day.”

Chamber of commerce calls for more immigration 

Even as companies like Kraft Heinz and GE Appliances maintain they are adequately staffed for now, there are growing concerns across the broader business community that Trump’s immigration policies could create problems in the not-too-distant future.

Greater Louisville Inc., the regional chamber of commerce, has long advocated for more immigration, not less.

“In today’s exceptionally tight labor market, decreased legal immigration has contributed to stifling our economy,” the chamber states in its 2025 Federal Agenda. “American businesses are experiencing significant workforce shortages despite investments in expanding domestic pipelines.”

Shelby Somervell, senior vice president of government affairs for Greater Louisville Inc., was part of a delegation that traveled to Washington, D.C., this summer to lobby for an expansion of legal immigration, among other issues.

“The workforce participation rate in Kentucky is lower,” Somervell says. “Any way that we can fill those jobs legally is what we want to do.”

Filling at least some of them with immigrants appears necessary, given Louisville’s changing demographics. Domestic migration to the region has been down, while international migration is on the rise.

“Louisville metro itself would have lost population last year without international migration,” says Sarah Ehresman, director of labor market intelligence at the workforce development board known as KentuckianaWorks.

She notes some 10,000 Cubans and Haitians settled in the area in the last fiscal year alone. “So it’s definitely an important part of the city’s population growth, and as a result, its workforce,” she says.

Ehresman says manufacturers in particular are going to need workers because of their aging workforce. More than a quarter of the sector’s workers are 55 and older.

Meanwhile, GE Appliances recently announced two new production lines. They’ll need another 800 workers by the year 2027 to build a new front-loading washer and a washer-dryer combo.

Before then, though, the company could lose more workers. Trump has canceled Temporary Protected Status for people from Afghanistan, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti and other countries. Although there are legal challenges pending in court, TPS protections have expired or will expire in coming months unless Trump changes his mind and extends them.

Michel Ange Lucas, who builds refrigerators for GE Appliances, says the current February 3 expiration date for TPS for Haitians will leave big gaps at the plant, given how many Haitians work there.

“From Building 1 to Building 5, it’s a lot of us,” says Lucas, who is of Haitian descent but is not a TPS holder.

He thinks for people who had the government’s permission to stay and work in the U.S., what’s happening now is unfair.

“The people is not illegal,” Lucas says. “Politics made them illegal. But they was never illegal.”