Federal agents tricked out in battle garb were supposed to make us safer here in south Louisiana when they hit the streets in an immigration crackdown. They were also supposed to help boost the economy.
But they arrested relatively few people with criminal records while spreading fear and anger in the Latino community. They also did economic damage: Restaurants and other businesses catering to Central Americans shut down. Construction contractors and other businesses employing Latinos suddenly faced a labor shortage as workers stayed home to avoid harassment and arrests.
Businesses employing Latinos suddenly faced a labor shortage as workers stayed home to avoid harassment and arrests.
Now those operations, dubbed “Swamp Sweep” and “Catahoula Crunch,” have given way to what might be called “Bayou Bog.” It’s a bureaucratic roadblock that is, again, causing economic harm by hamstringing the farming, harvesting, processing and packaging of crawfish, which are a seasonal delicacy here.
Officials say federal statutory limits have been reached on the issuance of H-2B guest worker visas. That means foreign workers are largely unavailable to do the painstaking, messy work of peeling crawfish and packing the meat.
“Some of the plants that normally get 100 to 135 workers have gotten zero,” Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain said during a recent legislative hearing in Baton Rouge.
This all is on brand for the second Donald Trump administration, which from day one has began touting an anti-immigrant policy that includes mass deportation, a famously violent crackdown that got two U.S. citizens killed in Minnesota and a tightening of visa policies.
The irony here is that the administration, in a departure from its policy of limiting visas, announced in January that it would issue an additional 65,000 H-2B visas through September. It was a sop to businesses that say they need seasonal foreign workers to survive. And, according to The New York Times, January’s announcement effectively doubled the number of such visas available this year.
But, apparently it wasn’t enough to ensure Louisiana could get the estimated 2,000 H-2B visas Strain has said the state needs.
Strain is a stalwart Republican in a reliably red state. But he has clearly been unhappy with the administration’s handling of the problem so far.
“I’m a bit frustrated from the answers I’m getting from Washington because they’re basically saying, ‘Well, they’ve met the cap and there’s nothing else we can do,’” Strain said during that March 3 Baton Rouge meeting. “I said, ‘No, that’s not acceptable.’”
He described what sounds like an exasperating bureaucracy faced by processors seeking the visas.
“Many of our entities, they made these applications in November to get these workers. And then, for some reason, they’re being told, ‘Oh, no. You should have waited ’til January,’” Strain told lawmakers. “That’s ridiculous. That answer is unacceptable.”
I’m a bit frustrated from the answers I’m getting from Washington because they’re basically saying, ‘Well, they’ve met the cap and there’s nothing else we can do.’ I said, ‘No, that’s not acceptable.’
louisiana Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain
So now, the economic damage is being done not by masked, body-armored federal stormtroopers, but by a bureaucracy that can’t or won’t issue visas for vitally needed foreign workers.
Red tape works just as well as terror. Of course, the idea behind limiting visas is to make life better for us real Americans by providing us with more opportunities to work. But as one south Louisiana processor told KPLC-TV in Lake Charles, local U.S. citizen workers often lack the skills, reliability or interest in crawfish processing jobs. Thus, more than a dozen plants sit idle, which means millions of dollars in lost revenue for farmers and processors and millions of dollars lost in related spending. “When you add up all together, the direct and the indirect impact, we’re looking at about $300 million. Again, that’s a worst-case scenario,” Dr. Kurt Guidry, who researched the issue for the LSU AgCenter, told KPLC. Even that doesn’t tell the whole story. With no place to process crawfish, prices for the harvest go down. That adds to the woes of farmers who produce them — usually rice farmers who use crawfish as a “rotation crop” when they aren’t raising rice on their boggy land. Trump’s agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, has the unenviable job of persuading the nation’s farmers that they are going to be just fine despite tariffs and tight visa policies that don’t really seem to be helping. She told WVUE-TV in New Orleans last week that the administration doesn’t have the power to raise the cap on H-2B visas any higher after Trump’s approval of the additional 65,000 in January. That’s something Congress has to do statutorily, she said. “What we can do and what we’re looking to do is changing some of the rules … to perhaps allow other programs that these farmers can apply for that are outside of the current restricted cap,” Rollins said. But right now, it’s unclear whether a feckless Congress or the Trump administration — under pressure from the MAGA base to keep a tight lid on immigration — will do what needs to be done quickly enough to diminish the economic harm done in the name of helping the economy.
Kevin McGill is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who has written and reported on Louisiana government, politics and culture since 1978. He retired from full time journalism in 2025 after 41 years with The Associated Press. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, Angie, and writes regularly about public affairs on Substack, https://substack.com/@kevinmcgill3 
