By Tim Reid
MOBILE, Alabama (Reuters) -Under a broiling Alabama sky a frustrated Robby Robertson, a construction site superintendent, surveys an 84,000 square foot, mostly built recreation center close to the Gulf coast port city of Mobile.
The site is eerily quiet. Last month, the $20 million project was on track for on-time completion by November 1. Now Robertson says he is looking at a three-week delay after about half of his workers – scared by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on a job site in Florida 230 miles (370 kilometers) away – have stayed away.
Immigration raids on building sites – part of an expanding crackdown by Donald Trump on work sites across the country – are causing major disruptions to the construction industry, according to Reuters interviews.
“The threats and the reporting of raids have caused workers to not show up at job sites, just whole crews for fear of a raid,” said Jim Tobin, the CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, which has 140,000 members.
While immigration enforcement agents have stepped up their raids on other work sites in recent weeks, detaining farmworkers, restaurant staff, meat packers, and day laborers, the construction industry is especially vulnerable to disruptions in the labor supply, according to Reuters interviews and government data.
Reuters interviewed 14 people in construction – CEOs, trade association officials and site supervisors – who said the raids are causing project delays and cost overruns and exacerbating existent shortages of skilled labor. They said it was too early to quantify the scale of the damage in terms of lost labor and revenues.
Some of the people Reuters spoke to were in Texas and Florida, where there have been several raids. ICE has also been active in California, Illinois, Washington, Louisiana and Massachusetts, construction association officials said.
Of the roughly 11 million people in the U.S. illegally, about 1.4 million work in construction, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank – more than any other industry.
Construction spending hit a record high in May 2024 but then slid 3.5% through this past May, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, an annual drop rarely seen outside of recessions.
The deportation push is beginning to affect public opinion. Trump’s public approval rating on immigration fell to 41% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll this month, the lowest since his return to the White House.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said such raids helped combat dangerous activities such as labor trafficking and exploitation.
“Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to protect public safety, national security, and economic stability,” she said.
COST SPIRALS
It is in places like Robertson’s construction site that the impact of the raids is most obvious, because of the potential for costs to spiral with lengthening delays.
Robertson says the problems started the day after about 100 workers were detained in an immigration raid in Tallahassee, Florida, on May 29.
Most of his workforce of more than 100 workers are immigrants from Mexico and Central America and nearly all of them stayed away from work for several days. Seven weeks later just over half of those immigrant workers have trickled back, leaving Robertson significantly short-staffed.
The 22-person roofing team is down to 12. The roof, which should have been completed by now, is not finished, exposing parts of the interior to rain at a time of year when thunderstorms are common.
Electrical work, plumbing, finishing off the dry wall and installation of sports equipment are all behind schedule.
Robertson said his company is facing potentially $84,000 in extra costs for the delays, under a “liquidated damages” clause of $4,000 for every day the project runs beyond its November 1 deadline.
“I am a Trump supporter, but I just don’t think the raids is the answer,” he said.
He said the company and its subcontractors already verify that workers are in the country legally through the government’s E-Verify program, a widely used online system which checks employment eligibility.
Industry officials noted that the E-Verify system is not foolproof, because immigrants can produce fake documents.
Robertson said even Hispanic workers who are in the U.S. legally are scared of being detained by ICE, “because of their skin color. They are scared because they look the part.”
Tim Harrison, whose company is building the recreation center, said he cannot easily replace construction workers born in Mexico and Central America with native-born Americans, because most do not have the skills.
Finding replacement workers is especially difficult in Alabama, which has a tight job market, he said. The state has only 3.2% unemployment.
“The contractor world is full of Republicans. I’m not anti-ICE. We’re supportive of what the president is trying to do. But the reality of it is our industry has to have the Hispanic immigrant-based workers in it,” Harrison said.
The company CEOs cited a chronic lack of investment in training native-born Americans in construction skills such as plastering, carpentry, roofing and welding.
The White House and Labor Department pointed to an executive order signed by Trump in April that aims to support more than a million skilled apprenticeships a year, including the skills needed in construction.
“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,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said.
The Labor Department in June created the Office of Immigration Policy, aimed at streamlining temporary work visas for foreign workers.
HAZARD PAY
For Brent Taylor, who runs a construction company in Tampa, Florida, the impact of the ICE raids has gone beyond filling jobs. It’s directly impacting his labor costs.
Immigrants count for nearly a quarter of Florida’s population. Taylor said he has lost between a third to a half of his subcontracted workers in trades such as roofing, concrete work and dry wall.
And his subcontractors are having to pay more to replace them, he said.
Some of his subcontracted immigrant workers are demanding extra wages for running the risk of being detained by ICE. That has pushed individual daily labor costs to $400 to $500, up from between $200 and $300 a day.
“They’re factoring in basically a hazard rate,” Taylor said. “And then I’m going to pass it on to my customer, whether it be a homeowner, or a commercial building owner.”
Building trade associations, together with representatives from the agriculture, hotel, restaurant and other sectors, traveled to Washington this month to lobby officials at the Department of Labor, and the Department of Homeland Security for reform.
Most want a process that would grant foreign-born workers in the U.S. who pass background checks temporary legal status to work at construction sites. That is highly unlikely to pass Congress because many Republican lawmakers oppose the idea.
Brian Turmail, vice president of public affairs at the Associated General Contractors of America, said the group stressed the harm being caused by the ICE raids at its meetings with DHS and Labor officials. They urged the Trump administration to focus on people in the U.S. illegally who have criminal records, and find ways to allow others to work.
“For 40 years, this country has done little to encourage or prepare American workers for careers in fields like construction,” Turmail said.
He said the officials listened, but the delegation left with the impression that the Trump administration believes workers in the country illegally can be replaced with lower-income Americans who are now required to work to access health insurance benefits, under the recently signed Republican spending bill.
“Administration officials are very resistant to anything that smacks of amnesty. It is a place they just won’t go,” said another trade association official who has attended meetings with administration officials.
Harrison, the construction CEO in Alabama, said he knows many contractors facing cost overruns and delays because workers have gone into hiding.
“That’s because of the fear that’s out there, the hysteria that’s out there,” he said.
(Reporting by Tim Reid in Mobile. Additional reporting by Jorge Garcia in Mobile and Dan Burns in New York. Editing by Ross Colvin and Suzanne Goldenberg)