An ICE raid Tuesday morning at Delta Downs in Vinton, Louisiana, where more than 80 backstretch workers were reportedly detained, should be a wake-up call for an industry that would simply not be able to function without a workforce of grooms and hotwalkers and stall cleaners who are, by some credible estimates, roughly 75% immigrants.
Immigrants come from Venezuela, Panama, Colombia and Mexico, working low-wage jobs to care for horses that are worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Many of the workers at glamorous tracks like Churchill Downs and Saratoga are here on H-2B visas secured by the prominent, well-sourced, and well-connected barns.
The industry is by and large unabashed Republican and Trump supporters.
Many in the industry believed Trump would not target their businesses with mass deportations.
“They were convinced that he was only going after the bad guys,” said Will Velie, an immigration attorney who specializes in the horse racing industry. “But the definition of bad guys to a lot of people in the administration is anyone here without status.”
“The head of the New York Racing Association, Marc Holliday, is business partners with (Trump’s son-in-law) Jared Kushner, so he had pretty strong assurances there would be some type of executive action protecting the horsemen and agriculture workers,” Velie said. “But I think there’s a lot of competing factions inside the administration battling over this.”
