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Poultry Companies Quietly Met With Democrats Over Immigration [1]

['Lisa Held', 'The Civil Eats Editors', 'Ben Seal', 'Rebekah Alvey', 'Sam Delgado', 'Jennifer Cole', 'Elena Valeriote', 'Follow']

Date: 2026-01-14  

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By July 2025, President Donald Trump was already overhauling U.S. immigration. A month earlier, he had sent the National Guard to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in Los Angeles, and he’d issued travel bans for 19 countries, including Haiti and Venezuela.

As these and other anti-immigration operations ramped up, Maryland’s executive secretary for agriculture emailed a group of farmers and industry representatives, asking how new restrictions on immigrants’ ability to access federal benefits might impact agricultural operations in the state. He was asking on behalf of Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat.

Maryland has a massive poultry industry, shared with Delaware and Virginia on the Delmarva Peninsula, home to the highest concentration of industrial chicken production in the country.

Zach Evans, an executive manager at Mountaire Farms, the fourth-largest chicken company in the U.S., was among the recipients of that email, which Civil Eats obtained through a public records request. Within the hour, he wrote back to say that those particular policy changes would not affect Mountaire’s employees.

However, he wrote, he wanted to call attention to another federal policy change that would threaten food processors, including Mountaire.

“My company alone will lose approximately 15 percent of our total workforce within the next 45 days—nearly 1,300 employees, including over 900 on Delmarva—on top of prior losses resulting from changes.”

Trump’s decision to revoke a designation called Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for immigrants from certain countries, he continued, combined with the end of other humanitarian programs for immigrants and refugees, would likely result in the loss of more than 20 percent of jobs at chicken processing plants on the Delmarva Peninsula.

“My company alone will lose approximately 15 percent of our total workforce within the next 45 days—nearly 1,300 employees, including over 900 on Delmarva—on top of prior losses resulting from changes,” Evans wrote, including supervisors, shift leads, managers, and superintendents.

“Individuals under TPS or Parole have been fully contributing to Social Security and federal programs but will now be cut off from those same programs,” he wrote. “Additionally, many are being compelled to liquidate their 401(k) and profit-sharing accounts as we are compelled to terminate their employment.”

Evans referred Civil Eats to Mountaire’s director of communications, Catherine Bassett, who declined requests for an interview. Bassett did not respond to later emails that detailed Civil Eats’ findings in the documents and again requested an interview or comment.

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[1] Url: https://civileats.com/2026/01/14/poultry-companies-quietly-connect-with-democrats-on-immigrant-policy-concerns/

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