Trump Immigration Crackdown Triggers South Texas Construction Crisis as ICE Arrests Top 9,000

Under President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has made more than 9,000 arrests in South Texas so far in 2026. In 2024, the agency, which detains and deports immigrants, made about 400. Washington Post figures count arrests at homes, at work, and in public, not in jails.

Builders in the Rio Grande Valley, which backed Trump in 2024, blame the arrests for stalled projects. BLS payroll counts fell near Brownsville, not McAllen. David Reyna's new build in Rio Grande City has sat untouched for months. Reyna, a Trump voter, told the Post the crackdown is 'completely devastating the local construction industry.'

Who Is Being Detained

ICE covers the region from a field office in Harlingen. Since January 2025, nearly 80 per cent of the people its officers arrested outside jails had no criminal record, the same review found. In January, then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said 70 per cent of people in ICE detention had criminal convictions or pending charges. PolitiFact found that, as of 7 January, about 52 per cent of detainees had a criminal conviction or pending charges. Those figures cover the US, not Harlingen alone.

Mario Guerrero, a builder who voted for Trump three times, leads the South Texas Builders Association. He says agents have held people with valid papers, and others in the trade say labourers now avoid job sites. 'The aggressive ICE enforcement has huge economic consequences in South Texas,' Guerrero told reporters on 15 January, according to Border Report. Mission-based firm 57 Concrete filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2025. Its filing blames raids on building sites for a labour shortage.

Construction Payrolls Split Across the Valley

US payroll figures only partly match Guerrero's warning. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counts construction, mining, and logging jobs as one group. Around Brownsville and Harlingen, the bureau found about 3,600 such jobs in August, in early data. August's total sits 5.3 per cent below the 3,800 of a year earlier and down from 4,000 in August 2024. In the larger McAllen area, the count moved the other way, as the chart below shows.

McAllen-area payrolls rose from 9,700 to 9,900 over the same 12 months. Across the two areas, the count held at 13,500. Payroll data cannot settle the cause. Yanling Mayer, an economist at Texas A&M University, told the Houston Chronicle in January that the effect of too few workers is 'difficult to quantify'. She said builders can plan for higher costs more easily than for a worker shortage.

Lobbying in Washington

Guerrero went to Washington in February to put his case to top Homeland Security officials. He told them Republicans would lose South Texas voters who turned to Trump in 2024 if worksite arrests continued, the Post reported. Henry Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat in Congress, arranged the meeting.

Housing chief Scott Turner told Congress that American workers can fill building jobs. A poll for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas found 63 per cent of adults surveyed in the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso think ICE tactics have gone too far. Every House seat is on the ballot in the midterms on 3 November.