As cars and trucks zoom by, Rurick Palomino points to the underside of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge that spans the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., where his crew of about 30 workers is doing demolition work and pouring concrete as part of a $128 million federally-funded refurbishment.
A Peruvian immigrant who came to the United States 25 years ago, Palomino — a U.S. citizen — built his construction firm from scratch after earning an engineering degree and learning the trade firsthand. He once employed 45 workers but has since scaled back. "There's plenty of work — a lot of mega-projects coming — but I'm afraid to take more because I don't have the manpower," he says.
For years, the construction industry — in which on average one in three workers is foreign-born — has struggled with a yawning labor shortage that President Trump's immigration crackdown is making worse, industry officials warn. In D.C., for example, that has meant Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checkpoints that have swept up Latino workers on their way to and from work.
"I personally saw a checkpoint here on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway," Palomino says. "All construction pickups. So, it's happening."
"People are scared," he continues.
As ICE agents fan out to detain and deport undocumented immigrants, their enforcement actions are creating unease among both undocumented and documented workers on building sites across the U.S., deepening the already severe labor shortage, slowing the pace of construction and driving up costs, industry officials and contractors say.
From the first day of his second term, Trump began issuing executive orders and proclamations aimed at reversing the flow of migrants at the southern border — apprehending and deporting undocumented individuals and seeking to end birthright citizenship. In September, the Department of Homeland Security said that ICE had deported 400,000 people since the start of Trump's second term and that an estimated 1.6 million had self-deported.
Day laborers — many of whom are undocumented — often gather in Home Depot parking lots and in August, federal agents carried out raids near the construction supply stores in the Los Angeles area. In one instance, a Guatemalan migrant fled across a freeway where he was struck by a vehicle and killed. The Department of Homeland Security says ICE arrested more than 100 people in June at a construction site in Tallahassee, Fla. In October, four construction workers were arrested during a similar raid in St. Paul, Minn.
A survey by the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) conducted over the summer found that 92% of construction firms struggle to fill positions. In the past six months, 28% of the surveyed firms said they were affected by immigration actions — 5% said ICE agents had visited a jobsite, 10% said they had lost workers due to actual or rumored ICE raids, and 20% reported those concerns caused subcontractors to lose staff.
"Firms say it's extremely disruptive when workers fail to show up or leave in the middle of a task," says Ken Simonson, chief economist at AGC — the construction industry's largest and oldest trade association. It means jobs are completed more slowly, driving up costs for the owner and contractor, he says. "A building project is step by step. So it's fine if you get the foundation poured and the beams up to hold up the building. But if you can't put on the roof, you're not going to be able to finish things off," he says.
Simonson says he is concerned that if the enforcement actions are stepped up, "this is just the cusp of what we'll be seeing."
NPR reached out to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, but received no reply to specific questions about how raids are affecting the construction industry. However, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in an emailed statement: "There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump's agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration's commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws."
A palpable anxiety among Latino construction workers
Palomino says he doesn't hire people who can't provide proof that they have a legal right to work in the U.S. — even though allowing people to work without that proof is common in construction, he says. The members of his workforce — originally from Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia and his native Peru — are all employees with a Social Security number and a driver's license. That's a necessity to work on a government project. For Palomino, playing by the rules means competing for an even smaller labor pool.
But workers with work permits and green cards worry they too could be detained. Recently, Palomino said, several of his employees were stopped by ICE on their way into work, with agents holding them for hours before eventually releasing them. "I guess they were checking their background or whatever," he says. "We could not accomplish what we were supposed to do that day. And that, in turn, put us behind schedule."
Sergio Barajas, head of the National Hispanic Construction Alliance, notes that although the number of actual ICE raids has been limited so far, the anxiety among Latino workers — documented and undocumented alike — is palpable. "That in and of itself is resulting in crews not showing up or a reduced number of persons on a given crew showing up," he says.
That wariness is so pervasive, he adds, that some Latino-owned firms are removing business signs from their trucks and vans to avoid being identified as construction crews so they won't be targeted.
Barajas says there's "a bit of a hierarchy" in the industry, with infrastructure work like Palomino's firm does at the top, followed by commercial contractors, then mixed use and residential. At the lowest rungs, immigrants make up a higher percentage of trades such as plasterers and stucco masons, drywall and ceiling tile installers, roofers, painters and flooring installers, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). Those jobs are desperately needed in the home-building industry, where the ongoing shortage of workers costs $11 billion annually, the Home Building Institute (HBI) estimates. In the U.S., the gap between supply and demand in the housing market is roughly 1.5 million housing units, NAHB says.
Scott Turner, a homebuilder in the Austin, Texas, area, says where he is located, ICE raids haven't yet been high-profile enough to be a major source of cost increases, but they "can only have one effect on the cost of building a home, and that's to raise it."
A labor shortage that goes back decades
To be sure, the labor shortage predates the current crackdown on immigration, according to Jim Tobin, NAHB president and CEO. "Even when we were building more homes than we needed in the early 2000s, we still were facing a labor shortage," he says.
He blames a long-running emphasis in the U.S. on four-year college degrees that, in turn, has devalued education in the trades. It's a point of view that gets a lot of nods of agreement among contractors. "Since we've done a terrible job of educating our domestic workforce, we've had to increase the pull from across our borders," Tobin says.
Kenny Mallick, a plumbing and heating contractor based in Gaithersburg, Md, says that's created a broken labor system that hurts the economy and is unfair to hardworking migrants. "They're taking risks every day by coming to work. They could be locked up and deported," he says.
Mallick says he voted for Trump and agrees with the president's stance that people who have committed crimes should be deported. However, he says one thing is clear: "We can't do what we do in this country without these people," he says. "They're stitched into every element of our fabric — from the people cooking in restaurants to the ones pouring concrete or laying brick." In return, he says, "we exploit the s*** out of these people."
Mallick has worked in the construction industry for 30 years. But as he turns 59, he is planning to step back from the business — in large part, he says, because of these frustrations. He believes he and other contractors like himself need to stand up and tell the government "stop taking our people. We need them."
The roots of the labor shortage go back at least 25 years. In the early 2000s, as the labor shortage grew amid a building boom, immigrants were filling many of the openings, especially in residential construction. "Undocumented immigrants became a key source of profitability in the industry," says Nik Theodore, the director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
That trend accelerated with the Great Recession, when the bottom fell out of the industry. Many U.S.-born workers left construction jobs and sought employment elsewhere. During the recovery, "contractors increasingly turned to immigrants to meet the shortage," Theodore says.
Now the Trump administration's enforcement efforts are leaving the construction industry to cope with an ever-widening shortage of workers, Theodore says. Contractors, he says, are "going to have to pay more for the available workers" because "we're not just losing workers — we're losing workers who know how to drywall, lay flooring. There are real skill gaps."
A 2023 report by NAHB shows that California and New Jersey have the highest percentage of foreign-born construction workers at 41% each, but that concentrations are nearly as high across the south, where construction is booming and wages are low. Texas and Florida both had 38%, Georgia 30% and Virginia and North Carolina at 27% each.
Theodore sees an irony in that "most contractors in the South are lifelong Republicans" who voted for Trump: "They agreed with him on deregulation and taxes, and they convinced themselves [that] Trump's rhetoric would focus on criminals, not the day-to-day construction workforce."
Mallick says he has always tried to run an "open shop" — one where employees aren't required to join a union. But he's competing against contractors who hire cheaper undocumented workers recruited through middle men called labor brokers. Those workers, he says, "are probably getting $25 an hour. The open-shop guy, $40. The union guy, $60."
Meanwhile, the union worker has all but disappeared. An Associated Builders and Contractors analysis published earlier this year shows that the percentage of unionized workers in the construction industry has fallen to a record low of just over 10% from nearly 40% in 1973.
Mark Erlich, a fellow at the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School and a former head of the New England Carpenters Union, says declining unionization is partly responsible for "real wage stagnation" in the industry, adding: "There's tension between the political imperative of deportations and the interests of contractors who want certainty in planning their business."
Will U.S.-born workers fill the construction labor gap?
The White House suggests that mass deportations open up new job opportunities for U.S.-born workers; in that August statement, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote, "as illegal aliens continue to exit the labor force, more Americans are finding steady and gainful employment."
Deportations leave holes to fill in the construction industry, but Mallick, Palomino and others say there are few U.S.-born workers willing to take them. In a report published in July, the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute, concluded that if the Trump administration meets its goal of deporting 4 million people by the end of 2028, 1.4 million immigrants who work in the construction industry would be lost. And there would be a net loss of 861,000 jobs among U.S.-born workers, partly because the sudden removal of part of the work force could force contractors to rapidly scale back or shut down entirely.
Palomino, for one, doesn't buy the administration's argument. "Contrary to whatever the government thinks," he says, the industry is not attracting new, native-born workers. "They don't want to come to work in construction." Nor Mallick: "There's not anyone sitting on the sidelines. Unemployment is low. Where are you going to get them at? The trades aren't sexy."
In April, Trump issued an executive order promising to modernize the skilled trades workforce. But the order offered few details. In June, the Department of Labor also established a temporary Office of Immigration Policy that the administration says is a one-stop-shop aimed at helping employers secure the workforce they need and to create legal pathways for immigrants to work.
Erlich thinks the industry could bring in more U.S.-born workers if the pay and conditions were more attractive. "When conditions have become so degraded — both compensation and safety — [it's] no surprise people don't join," he says. "Attracting people to an industry depends on whether they can have a legitimate career and prospects. It's not about kids not wanting to work — it's about the opportunity structure."
Palomino echoes a common refrain in the construction industry — the solution, he says, is a visa program for immigrant workers: "Maybe [the government] can create a path — even if not for citizenship — for good workers to be allowed to work without fear," he says. Most workers in his business, he says, "just want to live and go day by day."
That's the way Palomino sees himself. "I came to the U.S. with one suitcase," he says, "and now I have three families working for me. I think I've fulfilled my American dream — doing everything the right way, one step at a time."
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