This week, Senator Dick Durbin met with small business owners in Waukegan, Illinois, who told him ICE enforcement has made it harder to keep their doors open. The internet argument that followed was entirely about politics. Nobody talked about the math.
Here’s the math. A company with 500 employees loses two or three people to an enforcement action and barely notices. A company with 50 employees, half of them working the trucks or the kitchen, loses two or three people and might not open Monday.
The Size Nobody’s Accounting For
Small businesses employ 62.3 million people, 45.9 percent of the entire private-sector workforce, according to the SBA Office of Advocacy. That’s not a rounding error in the economy. That’s nearly half of it, sitting inside companies too small to absorb a sudden staffing shock. A 500-person company loses two workers and HR updates a spreadsheet. You lose two workers and you’re the one running the register, working the line, and explaining to the delivery driver why nobody signed for the shipment.
Some industries are more exposed than others. Foreign-born workers make up roughly two-thirds of hired crop labor, per USDA’s National Agricultural Workers Survey. Restaurants aren’t far behind, with immigrants filling over 23 percent of the workforce and 43 percent of chef roles, according to National Restaurant Association data. Ag and food service aren’t side industries. They’re where a huge share of $1 to $3 million businesses live.
Most Owners Are Actually Trying
Here’s what gets lost in the online shouting match. Most owners in these industries are trying to hire people who are legally authorized to work. They run E-Verify, they check documents, they do exactly what the law asks of them. Congratulations, that apparently isn’t the same thing as being protected by it.
Some owners don’t bother checking closely. That happens too. But even in that case, the person on the payroll is just as essential to getting the harvest in or the dining room open. The business doesn’t run a background check on who it depends on. It just depends on them.
The Number Nobody Can Verify
Here’s my actual take. Even if you fully support strict enforcement, you should still want an honest count of who’s getting swept up, and right now nobody has one. As of November 2025, nearly three-quarters of people in ICE detention, 73.6 percent, had never been convicted of a crime, according to TRAC, the nonpartisan data clearinghouse at Syracuse University. That’s not proof anyone did anything wrong. It’s also not proof they didn’t.
Mistakes happen on top of that. A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 U.S. citizens, most of them Latino, detained by ICE in the first nine months of the administration. One of them, Alabama construction worker Leonardo Garcia Venegas, says he was detained three times between May 2025 and May 2026, each time carrying a valid Alabama REAL ID that agents dismissed or ignored, according to a federal class-action lawsuit reported by Newsweek. If a legally authorized worker can get swept up three times with a valid ID in his hand, you can’t lecture a small business owner about due diligence like the system is airtight. It isn’t.
Why This Isn’t a Fair Fight
A 500-person company that loses a few workers reshuffles a schedule. A crew of 15 in the office managing 60 people in the field, half of them immigrant labor, is one bad morning away from not making payroll, let alone opening on time. Nobody’s writing headlines about the corporate account that barely blinked. They’re writing about the guy whose whole crew didn’t show up.
That’s the actual story here. Not whether enforcement should happen. Whether the businesses least equipped to absorb the hit are the ones taking it hardest, while the companies big enough to shrug it off stay out of the conversation entirely.
What You Can Actually Do This Week
You can’t fix federal policy from your office. You can fix how exposed you are to a single bad morning.
Pull your I-9 files this week and make sure every one is actually complete, not just signed and filed. Half-finished paperwork is the easiest thing in the world to fix before you need it and the hardest thing to explain after. Nobody ever finds time to finish them when business is good, which is exactly the excuse you’ll be using at the worst possible moment.
Cross-train so no single person, or single group of people, is the only one who knows how a shift runs. If losing three workers can shut you down, you’ve already told yourself you have too much depending on too few.
Have a name and number for an immigration attorney before you need one. Not after ICE is already in your parking lot. Post know-your-rights information where your managers can see it, so nobody on your team is improvising during a stressful ten minutes.
None of this fixes the underlying problem. It just means one bad morning doesn’t end your business.
The Real Takeaway
The businesses running 100,000 employees will be fine no matter how this plays out. They always are. The ones running 50 or 75, with half their team doing work most Americans won’t, are the ones actually exposed, and almost nobody talking about this seems to notice the difference.
You don’t need an opinion on immigration policy to have one about that.