It’s an open secret: The agriculture industry, in Nebraska and beyond, has long relied on undocumented workers.

Gov. Jim Pillen, responding to concerns about the immigration crackdown’s impact on undocumented farmworkers, said in an interview in summer 2025 that a solution was needed for hard-working families “that have been here for 30 years working, helping us put food on the shelves.”

But what receives less attention is how and why the system allows that undocumented workforce to contribute to the economy – often while businesses themselves remain insulated from legal fallout.

Pillen’s own hog company, one of the largest in the United States, has long employed undocumented workers, a New York Times and Flatwater Free Press investigation recently found. At least a dozen of these workers have been charged with such crimes as identity theft for using fraudulent IDs for work, court records show. 

But the company appears to have faced little legal scrutiny. In fact, Pillen Family Farms hasn’t been investigated by federal immigration agencies in the past 15 years, according to ICE’s response to The Times and Flatwater.

The law seems clear: U.S. employers must not knowingly hire unauthorized workers. Doing so routinely can lead to fines or even prison time.

But the key word is “knowingly.” Pillen has said his family business never knowingly hired people illegally present in the United States. 

And often little is known about what meatpacking plants and livestock operations know when they hire and employ undocumented workers. 

Job-site raids in rural Nebraska remain rare, even as the Trump administration expanded ICE officers by the thousands to supercharge immigration enforcement. The largest worksite raid in the state occurred in June 2025 at Glenn Valley Foods, an Omaha meatpacking plant, where more than 70 employees allegedly used fraudulent IDs for work. 

In the first eight months of 2025, ICE identified at least 18 farm workers it arrested in Nebraska. None were involved in a workplace raid, according to data first obtained by The Guardian. 

So why have few agricultural employers in Nebraska been raided, fined and charged? 

An important tool for documenting immigration status at workplaces is called an I-9 form. On paper, employers must verify the validity of IDs provided by job applicants, which help establish their status and work authorization.

In practice, employers aren’t liable so long as the paperwork they accept appears genuine. Some employers argue that anti-discrimination laws bar them from asking too many questions about how workers present their own identities. Workers check a box on the I-9 forms attesting their citizenship status. 

Employers can voluntarily opt into E-Verify, a government employment verification tool that checks if document numbers are valid. Pillen Family Farms didn’t start using E-Verify until April 7, 2021, the day he announced his campaign for governor.

That setup gives employers a strong defense, said Bassel El-Kasaby, an immigration attorney in Omaha.

“The system is designed so employers can safe-harbor themselves while knowing they are hiring illegally and participating in fraud,” he said. “It shifts most of the liability to the employee.”

Homeland Security Investigations agents are tasked with auditing I-9 forms, which sometimes lead to workplace raids like the one at Glenn Valley Foods.

Gary Rohwer, the owner of Glenn Valley Foods, told Flatwater that a Homeland Security audit months before the raid flagged dozens of IDs used by his employees, but determined his company, which had used E-Verify for years, was in compliance. 

His former HR manager was undocumented herself, he said, which was revealed only after the investigation. 

“We had a record based on that audit that we verified all the employees. And then we got raided,” he said. “Why did they have to do a raid and handcuff and come in with clubs and guns in black uniforms?”

Rohwer blames the federal government for allowing the use of fraudulent IDs to go undetected. He said that it’s human nature that the loophole would be abused by undocumented workers. “The government set these people up by not having an E-Verify program that accomplishes the objective,” he said. “So I think it’s very unfair. It’s disgusting. It’s not right.”

After the raid, Rohwer said, he met with Homeland Security officials and Rep. Don Bacon, who considered him a victim, and told him that he had done nothing wrong and should keep using E-Verify. Rohwer said his company added more background checks for applicants.

It’s important to note: Raids aren’t cheap. They take planning and cost taxpayer money. At Glenn Valley, for example, dozens of ICE officers descended on the plant, and detainees were taken to a jail in North Platte. And these raids come at a price for employers – and sometimes consumers – by shaking up the workforce and halting production. 

Whether to investigate further and pursue sometimes costly charges against employers’ unlawful hiring becomes a decision that presidents and the U.S. Congress must weigh, said Paul Stultz, a retired ICE attorney.

Stultz remembers when Omaha’s Immigration and Naturalization Service office led the nation in sanctioning companies that violated laws in employing undocumented workers in the 1990s. In what became known as Operation Vanguard, agents targeted one industry for I-9 audits: meatpacking. They found paperwork discrepancies, and immigrant workers left in droves. But that effort went away after industry lobbying.

“The agency itself and law enforcement officers working with the agency had the will and were given the resources to do that job,” Stultz said. “And then the industries pushed back and got support from the Congress members and they became allies because they were interested in keeping businesses open.”

Employers can face severe consequences. 

A former manager of a poultry processing plant in Pottsville, Iowa, was sentenced after pleading guilty to harboring undocumented workers in 2014. Following a 2018 raid in O’Neill, farm supervisors and a restaurant owner who conspired in what ICE called a labor trafficking scheme were indicted. 

To establish probable cause that an employer had knowledge, investigators need documents and testimony, often through interviews with employees and human resources personnel. Doing so in rural areas poses significant logistical challenges, Stultz said.

The current administration’s immigration enforcement is removing immigrants at record volume and speed. That may actually hurt investigations on employer compliance, Stultz cautioned, as key sources – potential witnesses of a workplace’s hiring practices –  are now on a fast track to be deported.

Nebraska’s state law penalizes workers for impersonating someone or using fraudulent IDs for employment. But many state identity theft cases are handled as one-offs as they trickle in. 

Carl Hart, the Platte County attorney until 2022, said it’s fairly straightforward to prove an unauthorized person used a fake ID to obtain work. 

But it’s harder to identify a cluster of cases happening at the same workplace. That should prompt further inquiry, he said, but it’s a heavy undertaking for resource-strapped local law enforcement.

There’s no corresponding state law that punishes employers for knowingly hiring undocumented workers. Whether to investigate employers is up to federal authorities, whose agents often rely on referrals from local law enforcement or labor departments. And that discretion varies by jurisdiction. 

There are also economic reasons why agriculture has not seen the level of enforcement that many projected, experts say. 

Food production is a national security issue, and unexpected mass deportation of the industry’s workers would probably drive up grocery prices, said Alejandro Gutierrez-Li, a labor economist at North Carolina State University. 

But the future remains uncertain, even after the Trump administration announced and then quickly retracted a reprieve for certain industries, including agriculture, and as ICE shifts its approach from highly visible raids in metro areas to more discreet ones from communities big and small.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson didn’t respond to specific questions from Flatwater about its approach to worksite enforcement, but said: “illegal employment undermines American workers, destabilizes labor markets, and threatens American communities.”

More I-9 audits assisted by Artificial Intelligence may also be coming. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, recently said that he intended to expand I-9 audit capacity by contracting out certain paperwork inspection tasks and strengthening ICE’s partnerships with other agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Labor.

“We want to hold the employers that circumvent the law responsible,” he told the Center for Immigration Studies in July, saying that it would protect American workers and keep wages fair.

Amy Peck, an Omaha lawyer specializing in worksite compliance, said historically, I-9 audits ramp up and then down no matter which party is in power.

“I think what’s different now is the use of AI is going to enable the Trump administration to scale in a way we haven’t seen before,” she said. “Agriculture likes to believe it’s immune from ICE enforcement, but it’s not. There’s no such thing as a bubble in this legal environment.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/immigration-enforcement-is-rare-at-nebraskas-ag-worksites-why/