Trump’s immigration policies could wreak havoc on this rural town powered by mushroom farms

“I don’t know what the government thinks would happen. Sadly, many families could end up without food on their tables, or at least they would have to pay a lot more for every product that ends up on their table,” he said in Spanish.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration said it had made more than 33,000 immigration enforcement arrests in the first 50 days of its administration. It has also moved to end legal protections for immigrants, including temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people and parole programs for another 530,000 people who arrived in the U.S. from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

One multigenerational farm owner told NBC News that Avondale and businesses in nearby Kennett Square are “almost completely dependent on the mushroom farm industry.” NBC News is not naming the farm or farm owner due to their concerns they could be targeted with potential immigration enforcement actions.

“Everybody who lives here either works on a mushroom farm, does something adjacent or caters to the employees of the mushroom farms,” he said, adding that the workers’ presence can be felt in the proliferation of Latino restaurants in the area.

“The town would be dead without us.”

Difficult, year-round work 

The work on these farms starts early. Between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. every morning, workers begin gently harvesting white mushrooms at one farm in Avondale. The pay is modest: Depending on the quality of the mushrooms, pickers can make around $1.00 to $1.70 per pound for mushrooms they harvest, generally earning between $100 to $170 per day, depending on the worker, they said.

Like other farms in the area, this one is family-owned, passed down through generations of farmers in an area where Quakers first began growing mushrooms.

The farm owner said that because mushroom picking is tough work, where employees are bent over for hours at a time to gently harvest the mushrooms, and because farms can only afford to pay so much, it’s nearly impossible to get American-born citizens to do the job.