Trump’s deportation vow alarms Texas construction industry

Clear signals President-elect Donald Trump plans to make good on his campaign pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants in his second term has sparked concerns among some in Texas’ business and economic sectors who say mass deportations could upend some of the state's major industries that rely on undocumented labor, chief among them the booming construction industry.

“It would devastate our industry, we wouldn’t finish our highways, we wouldn’t finish our schools,” said Stan Marek, CEO of Marek, a Houston-based commercial and residential construction giant. “Housing would disappear. I think they’d lose half their labor.’”

Talk of a mass round up comes as Texas is booming. Texas cities regularly appear on lists of the country’s fastest growing communities, and construction cranes and workers donning safety vests are common sites in most major cities.

That Texas relies on undocumented labor is one of the state’s open secrets, despite Republicans’ tough-on-immigration stances.

In 2022, more than a half million immigrants worked in the construction industry, according to a report by the American Immigration Council and Texans for Economic Growth. Nearly 60 percent of that workforce was undocumented.

“The state needs to leverage both U.S.-born and immigrant talent to fill construction jobs that power the Texas economy,” the report notes.

“It’s not remotely practical to round up and deport everybody,” said economist Ray Perryman, the president and CEO of the Waco-based Perryman Group.

He said the reason Texans need so many immigrant laborers is simple: The Texas workforce isn’t large enough to keep pace with its growth. Like Marek, he worries that a massive roundup could have a chilling effect on the Texas economy.

“And, we simply don’t have an economic structure that can sustain that. There are more undocumented people working in Texas right now than there are unemployed people in Texas,” Perryman said.

A sustainable workforce, he added, will be harder to come by as the population wanes.

“The bottom line is if you just look across the country, our birth rates are at historic lows, our population growth is at historic lows, we just simply are not making enough people, so to speak, to sustain our economy,” Perryman said.

Trump’s sweeping campaign pledges likely have the support of Republican border hawks in Texas, where a state-led border mission called Operation Lone Star started in 2021 and has cost taxpayers more than $11 billion. The effort has included deployment of thousands of Texas National Guard and state police officers to the border, construction of barriers that include fencing, walls and razor wire on or near the banks of the Rio Grande, and a floating buoy barrier in the river.

All signs show Trump will try to make good on his deportation promises. He has tapped Tom Homan, Trump’s former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who also served in that official capacity under former President Barack Obama. Trump has also named Stephen Miller a deputy chief of staff for policy and advisor on homeland security issues. Miller served in Trump’s previous administration and was the architect behind the zero-tolerance policy that led to family separations after parents who entered the country illegally were incarcerated.

Meanwhile the state’s undocumented workforce is bracing for the second round of Trump policies. Veronica Carrsaco is an undocumented immigrant from Honduras who has worked as a house painter for a Mesquite-based company for 12 years. She said that though she’s lived through one Trump administration, he seems more intent to follow through on his threats this time around.

“His administration is going to be more forceful than it was in the past. I don’t think there is anything holding him back now. And it does make me a little sad. It makes me frustrated and worried. I am a single mom. I have three children,” said Carrasco, whose husband died in 2022.

She said she’s had to have difficult conversations with her children — one who she said is in the country with legal status and two who are U.S. citizens — about how to prepare if she’s deported to Honduras. They’ve sought legal advice about obtaining power-of-attorney for a relative should she be sent back.

“Imagine it, I am a father and a mother. They would never want to be separated from their mother,” she said. Carrasco also pushed back on the rhetoric about immigrants taking jobs from American citizens or legal residents. She said she does work that few line up to do.

“I didn’t come to take an opportunity from anyone. What happens is that no one wants to do the dirty work. No one wants to do the hard work,” she said.

As Trump continues to take steps to implement his agenda, economist Perryman said the incoming administration could still scale back its plans.

“It’s easy to have a soundbite that you can say at a rally or put on a bumper sticker. But to translate that to policy is difficult. And you normally see presidents move in the direction of what they campaigned about but not all the way. And I think that’s what you’ll see here," he said.

Marek, the construction mogul, said Trump’s threat could spur Congress to pass meaningful immigration laws for the first time in decades.

“The thing that [Trump] is doing that Obama couldn’t do, he’s challenging Congress — ‘either you fix this, or I’ll fix it.’ And that’s the way we got to look at this,” he said. Marek said Trump can solve the problem by backing a guest-worker program similar to the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA: Applicants can live and work in the country legally, but only after agreeing to backgrounds checks, paying a fine or application fee and working for a company that pays payroll taxes.

“It’s so simple. The right likes it because we’ve [identified] the people for national security and they’re paying taxes. The left likes it because we’ve basically given them a legal status and we’ve given them the protection of wage and hour laws,” he said.

So far, Trump has signaled he’s intent on carrying out this campaign promise. He recently reiterated that he’s prepared to use the U.S. military to assist in mass deportations. And the Texas General Land Office recently offered the incoming Trump administration more than 1,400 acres of South Texas land “to construction deportation facilities.”

Earlier this week another Trump ally, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, said during an appearance on FOX News that the Lone Star State stands ready to assist the incoming administration’s efforts.

“We just want to make sure that the Trump administration understands, we are here to help. Whether it be to deny illegal entry, whether it be to arrest those who are here illegally, whether it be to assist in the deportation process,” Abbott said.

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