Immigration arrests and deportations in Iowa have tripled. You think Iowa is hollowing out now? It’s about to get worse.
Pascual Pedro-Pedro, the 20-year-old West Liberty man whose only crime was being brought here by his dad when he was 13, was deported to Guatemala last week.
He helped his high school soccer team get to state, and recently worked in construction, an industry facing a dire shortage in which an estimated 30% of workers are immigrants.
President Donald Trump’s deportation quotas, which are rounding up plenty of folks who have no criminal record and are abiding by regular immigration court hearings in order to become legal citizens, are estimated to eventually cost the US around 6 million jobs, per a new Economic Policy Institute study. Around 2.6 million of those jobs will be jobs held by US-born workers. Half of the losses will be in construction and childcare, but agriculture will suffer too.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds should be screaming about the federal government’s masked goons deporting people—workers she desperately needs in Iowa—without due process. But because it’s Trump, she can only muster mealy-mouthed pleas for “discussions” begging him to at least leave the agriculture sector alone. He said he’d consider it, but his administration says otherwise: They literally think they’ll replace highly skilled ag and construction workers with the people they are kicking off of Medicaid.
Meanwhile, crops are going unharvested in the fields, which cannot bode well for grocery prices already getting hit with inflation caused mainly by Trump’s tariffs.
But let’s also think about these workers as members of our communities.
My former colleague Ty Rushing wrote about Watsonville, California, and how an entire community is so fearful of being caught up in the disappearances that they’re not eating out at restaurants, going to stores, or even watching the annual Fourth of July parade.
“It’s still whiplash how we can be so many things at once,” wrote Chuy Renteria, who also grew up in West Liberty. “The hardest workers doing the jobs others won’t do; the best player on the school soccer teams; the most depraved, vicious murderers and rapists; the biggest, most effective scapegoat.”
There are things we can do.
Workplaces are hosting Know Your Rights trainings to help prevent workplace deportations. Labor unions are mobilizing against ICE elsewhere. In some states, people have formed “neighborhood watch” groups to document ICE raids. There is a bill in Congress to unmask ICE agents, and make them wear identifiable badges.
Iowa City Catholic Worker is calling on people to pressure Iowa’s congressional members to bring Pascual home (numbers: Senator Joni Ernst – 202-224-3254; Senator Chuck Grassley – 202-224-3744; Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks – 202-225-6576).
And there’s always the good old-fashioned protest.
This article first appeared in the Iowa Worker’s Almanac, a weekly Iowa Starting Line newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
