Immigration raids upending Chicago's construction industry amid worker shortage, higher costs

Residential projects across Chicago are being postponed because construction companies are struggling to find reliable labor, prompting some contractors with projects west of Interstate 355 to operate with leaner crews and driving up day rates and overtime pay to attract workers.

President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement has been affecting Chicago’s labor market, notably tradesmen like roofers, framers, concrete layers and landscapers.

The reverberations are difficult to aggregate given the off-the-books nature of the gray economy and insiders’ reluctance to speak out. But the ongoing threat of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol enforcement actions in Chicago have put added pressure on an industry already struggling with long-running worker shortages, stagnant wages and rising costs, construction experts say.

As a result, consumers are seeing project delays and higher costs.

“When enforcement activity ramps up, even temporarily, employers tell us they see crews thin out almost overnight,” said Sam Mattingly, a former construction project manager who founded Indianapolis-based JobsinConstruction.com to help companies find workers. “ICE activity doesn't just reduce workforce numbers. It increases uncertainty, which discourages smaller contractors from taking on new projects. I don’t see the situation getting any better."

The worker shortage in Chicago and nationwide has been worsening for decades — fueled by an aging workforce, forces like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Recession and a dearth of younger workers entering the field, industry experts say.

Illinois faces a shortage of trade worker this year exceeding 200,000 jobs. Demand for certain positions are significant, including laborers (58,958), carpenters (42,113) and masons (19,907), according to data from Construction Industry Resources.

“There’s a clear shortage across every level of the trades, but it’s most acute at the journeyman level due to retirements and a thin pipeline behind them,” said Alicia Martin, president of the Illinois chapter of Associated Builders & Contractors. “The biggest gap is in experienced, highly skilled workers. And that’s not something you can solve quickly.”

Over the years, Chicago-area companies have become more reliant on foreign-born workers, according to federal data. In the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin market, 83,522 construction workers identified as foreign-born, 32.5% of the area's workforce, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau figures.

For residential and smaller projects, day laborers have played a key role in meeting project deadlines and keeping costs lower for consumers, according to Nik Theodore, a University of Illinois Chicago professor who has studied the day labor industry since the early 2000s.

Before the proliferation of big home improvement stores, contractors would buy appliances and home furnishings from wholesalers at a much steeper discount than retailers could offer, allowing for a reliable profit.

That equation changed when big-box home stores like Menard’s, Home Depot and Lowe’s expanded nationwide, providing consumers with cheaper options on everything from cabinets to kitchen sinks. So labor costs became the competing factor for contractors, who started turning to day laborers, Theodore said.

“The industry has been struggling for skilled labor for years now, and immigrant workers in particular have been filling a number of the gaps, especially in occupations like drywall, plaster or roofing here in Chicago,” he said.

But challenging circumstances, in part fueled by the federal deportation efforts, have driven some employers to exploit workers, undercutting pay to $50 a day, compared to the average $150, or foregoing payment altogether after a day’s shift, according to the Albany Park nonprofit Latino Union of Chicago.

In the 1990s, Theodore said, the city’s first day labor site, a Shell gas station at Belmont Avenue and Pulaski Road, primarily attracted people of Polish descent and other Eastern Europeans. Today, the workforce is overwhelmingly Mexican, Central American and South Americans, with many day laborers congregating at a dozen or so hiring sites around Chicago outside Home Depots and few gas stations.

‘Afraid to be outside,’ worker says

On the North Side, a 40-year-old day laborer who said he doesn't have legal immigration status and declined to give his name for fear of deportation, said he has painted houses around the city and suburbs for 15 years. He said that, in October, he evaded an ICE raid in Avondale, where immigration officials picked up laborers and a female tamale vendor. He had been picked up at the same location in 2016 by federal agents and eventually released.

Since the most recent incident, he said he has kept a low profile and rarely leaves home except to look for work.

“I’m afraid to be outside,” he said through a translator from the Latino Union. “I’ve had to decline some work because of safety concerns. There's no work opportunities if I don’t go out.”

The painter and home repairman, who is appealing a 2016 deportation order, is one of about 800 day laborers affiliated with the Latino Union. The organization, one of the city’s oldest hiring centers — established in 2000 by female temporary workers — isn't a labor union. The organization provides job training and recruiting services for low-income immigrants and U.S.-born workers.

The Latino Union has ramped up worker rights awareness campaigns and training for volunteers to document immigration enforcement operations in the streets and alert workers of nearby sightings.

Immigration raids have affected Chicago’s day laborers before Trump took office, according to Miguel Alvelo Rivera, the Latino Union’s executive director, noting that the Obama administration also carried out mass deportations, though not on as large a scale.

“What this all really points to is a concerted but really badly coordinated attack on our communities, particularly working-class communities that are predominantly Black and brown,” he said.

Immigration enforcement has an immediate effect on day labor activity, the North Side worker said, with some large hiring sites seeing the number of people hoping to pick up work falling from 100 workers or more to a few dozen or less after raids.

But the workers come back, Rivera said: “Eventually, they have to show up again to be able to pay for rent, to be able to take care of themselves or their families."

The North Side resident said he's struggling to pay rent for a shared apartment and to provide for his mother in Mexico City.

On the front lines

Chicago attorney Kevin Herrera represents day laborers in immigration proceedings and worker claims. One of his clients, Willian Gimenez, was pulled over by ICE agents in September while driving to a barber shop in Little Village. Gimenez was handcuffed and taken to a detention center in Michigan, where he was kept for seven weeks before a judge ordered his release.

Community organizers and family members say they think he was targeted because Gimenez is one of five day laborers who filed a lawsuit last year against Home Depot and the city of Chicago. The workers said they were beaten by off-duty police officers working security and other employees from the Home Depot at 4555 S. Western Blvd.

In late January, an Illinois judge partially denied motions to dismiss the suit.

Herrera said some businesses benefit greatly from day laborers, attracting business as would-be employers stop to buy supplies as they look to hire workers.

“Home Depot, particularly, has been a huge beneficiary,” he said. “There's a real hypocrisy.”

The Atlanta-based home-improvement retailer posted revenue of $164.7 billion in fiscal year 2025, with a net profit of $14.2 billion.

Community organizers have pushed for boycott campaigns against Home Depot in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities, accusing the retailer of cooperating with ICE. In January, a group of Home Depot investors asked the company to review its partnership with third-party surveillance vendors as it "already faces reputational risks stemming from frequent immigration enforcement raids occurring near its stores and heightened public concerns regarding data privacy," Reuters reported.

Home Depot says it has a longstanding policy prohibiting the sale of goods and services in their parking lots and doesn’t communicate with ICE or the Border Patrol.

“We aren’t notified that immigration enforcement activities are going to happen, and we aren’t involved in the operations," the company said in a written statement. "We cannot legally interfere with federal enforcement agencies, including preventing them from coming into our stores and parking lot."

Exodus of workers

Despite the construction industry’s increasing reliance on an immigrant workforce, there's no federal visa worker program.

The industry in 2024 employed 3.5 million foreign-born workers, nearly 30% of its workforce and the highest percentage of any sector, according to the Census Bureau.

“Since about 2012, our members’ top concern nationwide has been a shortage of construction workers,” said Brian Turmail of the Associated General Contractors of America.

Those concerns could grow as the immigrant population in the United States is declining for the first time in 50 years, according to government data analyzed by the Pew Research Center. The think tank estimates more than 1.2 million people have left the workforce since January 2025, when Trump started his second term.

Many were authorized to work under temporary protected status programs, according to Turmail.

“Twenty percent of those people, best we can tell, worked in construction,” he said.

The contractors group is backing two bipartisan legislative proposals that would create legal pathways for immigrants to work construction jobs in the United States, similar to the agriculture sector’s carve-out.

“No one should be surprised that undocumented workers work in construction,” Turmail said. “This is the logical consequence of decades of federal under investment in workforce development for fields like construction.”