President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to bring back the workplace raids that were commonplace during his first tenure in the White House.

In 2018, 104 immigrant workers were arrested at a meat processing plant in Tennessee. Shortly after, 114 immigrants working at a large-scale nursery in Ohio were arrested during a raid. In 2019, 680 people were arrested in a single day after poultry plants across six towns in Mississippi were raided.

President Joe Biden reversed the policy and stopped the practice, but when Trump returns to office, he plans to reinstate workplace raids.

Historically, the operations have not led to a spike in deportations.

“They are flashy, they are disruptive, they are controversial — therefore, I would expect them” during Trump’s presidency, John Sandweg, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama administration, told Time. “But from a numbers perspective, they are not going to materially increase the count.”

Trump campaigned on cracking down on immigration as a top priority for his administration, stressing that the matter was one of the nation’s biggest problems. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance said the influx of illegal immigrants was causing the national housing crisis.

Trump has not shied away from reports that he is planning to carry out mass deportations, commenting “TRUE!!!” to a Truth Social post reading, “GOOD NEWS: Reports are the incoming @RealDonaldTrump administration prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”

However, workplace raids are expensive operations and disrupt the economy surrounding workers. The plans for raids could generate pushback from pro-business Republicans who see them as harmful to the economy.

A study by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of the public says immigrants take jobs U.S. citizens do not want, making mass deportations risky business in labor sectors that depend on their immigrant workers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers accounted for 18.6% of the U.S. civilian labor force in 2023.

Immigrants also make up 73% of U.S. farm labor, half of which the Agriculture Department estimates to be undocumented, and roughly one-fifth of all construction workers lack permanent legal status.

The legal director for the American Immigration Council, Michelle Lapointe, stands against Trump’s immigration plans and the message they project.

“Part of the strategy is to terrorize people — and these worksite raids do exactly that,” she said.

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Lapointe said the American Immigration Council is prepared to defend immigrant workers if workplace raids are revived under Trump’s administration.

“They promised to carry these out again and we take them at their word, unfortunately,” she said.