[Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series exploring disruptions, potential solutions and homebuilding’s business impacts of recent immigration enforcement initiatives. Part 2 will focus on the push for policy solutions and domestic efforts to build skilled construction labor capacity. Part 3 will report on how these disruptions compound homebuilding business headwinds, putting businesses at risk.]
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showed up at a construction site in Martinsburg, WV, earlier this week, leaving workers shaken and adding to scores of incidents in an intensifying months-long ordeal that has left homebuilders in dozens of U.S. local markets short on labor and pushed to their construction, finance, operations and business planning limits.
A homebuilding executive with operations in the region, who spoke candidly on condition of anonymity, recounted what unfolded. According to the executive, ICE agents “swarmed the site with drones and battering rams” and detained about 30 construction workers.
“The guys on the ground, the field guys, said, ‘This is the most unsettling thing I’ve experienced.’ You know, [ICE] was demanding that, if they don’t unlock all the doors, they’re gonna bust all the doors down and take [everyone] with them, all that kind of stuff. It was pretty brutal. It’s probably the most aggressive that we’ve seen,” the executive told HousingWire TBD.
ICE operations began ramping up noticeably in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, some 60 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., during the spring, and have persisted since. Builders in the region say the raids have made it increasingly difficult to staff job sites, with many construction crews now refusing to show up for work and builders left scrambling for workers as the labor pool dries up.
Builders have escalated their concerns to state lawmakers, but efforts to address them have done little to resolve the issue. If anything, the situation has progressively worsened.
“It has, over the last, I would say, two to three weeks, ramped up in the panhandle significantly, more than we’ve seen in the last several months,” the executive said. “It’s very, very bad. It’s the worst I’ve seen it.”
ICE arrests set new records
What’s happening in West Virginia isn’t an anomaly. According to newly released data from the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkley and UCLA, July 2026 set a record for ICE arrests.
In January, the federal agency made 37,933 arrests, but that figure dropped after high-profile encounters in Minneapolis forced authorities to recalibrate their strategy. Arrests fell to roughly 30,000 a month in February and stayed relatively stagnant through May.
Then, on June 5, the U.S. Senate passed a nearly $70 billion immigration enforcement bill, which helped push June’s monthly arrest total to 43,021. In July, that number ballooned to a record-setting 49,571. The Trump administration and ICE have set a target of 2,000 arrests per day, suggesting the monthly totals could rise further in the months ahead.
Amid a heightened number of ICE operations since June, homebuilders and residential contractors in some markets say that their workers, even those who are here legally, are getting caught in the crosshairs. Residential construction, an already understaffed industry where immigrants make up about 25% of the workforce, is a frequent target.
However, the uptick in enforcement impacting builders has not been uniform across the country. Some homebuilding leaders report seeing no increase in ICE raids in their markets. However, for some builders in affected states like Texas, West Virginia, Idaho and Pennsylvania, the impacts have been significant.
HousingWire TBD spoke with more than a dozen homebuilding management executives, revealing a pattern playing out on job sites nationwide.
ICE raids on construction sites are disproportionately concentrated in states or jurisdictions where local law enforcement agencies cooperate with ICE.
Builders say these ICE operations are creating a culture of fear and uncertainty. Workers, particularly those who are of Hispanic origin or speak Spanish, they argue, are often unfairly profiled or harassed, whether on job sites or in transit.
While the raids are meant to target undocumented frontline skilled workers, some legal residents or even U.S. citizens have been detained for up to three or four hours if they don’t have the proper documentation on hand. Some builders report that even office workers of Hispanic origin have been wrongfully detained by ICE after visiting construction sites when a raid was unfolding.
As a result, construction workers are reluctant to show up to build homes in certain heavily affected areas, straining an already tight construction labor supply. In some cases, this has driven labor costs higher and caused significant construction delays. These delays, or subcontractor no-shows, put even more pressure on builders already grappling with their own costs and ongoing pricing imbalances between finished home price tags and what local homebuyers can afford.
In some markets, builders have turned to email threads and group texts with their homebuilding peers to stay in touch on the matter and share the latest developments.
They’ve raised the issue with lawmakers; however, many feel those concerns have been largely ignored.
“It’s close to crippling the trade base”
In West Virginia, the executive who recounted the ICE operation in Martinsburg said that immigration enforcement activity began to pick up around April and has since intensified to the point of severely disrupting the construction labor force.
Local sheriffs, state labor board officials, local IRS field agents and federal ICE agents are teaming up on immigration enforcement efforts using the 287(g) program, which grants ICE the power to delegate state and local law enforcement the authority to perform immigration enforcement.
Initially, ICE conducted raids in local new-home subdivisions nearly weekly. More recently, enforcement has shifted toward checkpoints at borders with neighboring states and major intersections.
“Now they’re setting up checkpoints at the borders and the major intersections, and they’re just pulling anybody over that looks Hispanic and has a work vehicle,” the executive said.
In the last 30 days, this homebuilding operator’s framing costs have tripled, as workers from neighboring states like Maryland and Virginia have begun refusing to work in the Eastern Panhandle.
“Delivery drivers are turning around right at the West Virginia line,” the executive noted. “They don’t want to go into West Virginia, and if they do go, it’s at their own risk, and they’re charging a ton of money to go down there and work.”
The labor shortage in the region has gotten so bad that many local contractors have resorted to bringing in workers from far-away states such as Florida or Minnesota to fill the gap. These out-of-market workers are put up in lodging and get paid “exorbitant amounts of money,” which is then passed on to homebuilders.
“A lot of the guys are… putting [workers] up in housing. They are paying them per diems for food. They are renting them cars that aren’t construction vehicles to drive to and from the job site, so there’s less chance of them getting pulled over. What’s going on is an entire racket,” the executive said.
Trades crews that work in areas like concrete, siding and framing are among the most impacted by labor shortages.
“We have foundations sitting for 30 days plus … trying to get framing crews to come in,” the executive noted. “I had 15 to 20 houses sitting in foundations that I couldn’t get framers on for over a month and a half.”
All of this, the result of targeted and consistent ICE raids in the region, has put immense pressure on the local homebuilding market.
“The intensity [of raids] across the Eastern Panhandle has been insane to the point that it’s close to crippling the trade base,” the executive added. “I’ve never seen anything like this in all the years I’ve been doing development and homebuilding—and it’s crazy.”
The impacts have been so stark that some homebuilders are questioning whether building in the state is even worth it until the situation is resolved.
“I have heard other builders talk about… and now, even ourselves… you’ve got to start questioning if you want to stay in this market for a long time, or if you bug out for a while until they get this straightened out,” the executive said. “If you can’t build houses and you can’t get manpower, you can’t be profitable.”
The impacts of ICE raids have also been severe in South Central Pennsylvania, in cities like Harrisburg, Carlisle, Gettysburg and York, where the executive also operates. One project in Southern Pennsylvania, for example, has been getting raided every two weeks for the last several months.
“The enforcement is still aggressive in Pennsylvania in certain areas, but the difference is that the development…is a little bit more spread out, so the frequency is less because they have to go to different areas to get to different job sites,” the executive said.
Enforcement in neighboring states like Maryland and Virginia has been much more infrequent, and mostly limited to rural counties where local law enforcement are cooperating with ICE.
“All of our masonry crews have quit, with almost no notice”
A division president at another homebuilder with West Virginia operations, who was also granted anonymity, went as far as to say that ICE operations have “effectively shut down housing in the panhandle.”
Even workers with legal status are refusing to work in the state. They are turning down jobs in West Virginia and instead electing to work in communities in Maryland or Virginia where ICE operations are far less frequent.
“These workers get very, very nervous when they’re held on the side of the road for three or four hours,” the division president said. “They’re based in Maryland or Virginia. They get the work orders that come in that day and say, ‘Oh hey, your crew is going to West Virginia,’ and they say, ‘No, we’re not. We’re not taking that. It’s too risky.”
Crews that work in niches like masonry, concrete and landscaping have been among the most affected since they work outside and are most visible, the division president said. However, all of the trades are being impacted.
“We have lost the ability to have any regularity. All of our masonry crews have quit almost apologetically, but with almost no notice, and it has ground new starts to a halt,” the division president said.
The Eastern Panhandle has seen a surge of new residents since the pandemic, with people priced out of costly Maryland and Virginia suburbs moving west in search of more affordable housing. The population of Berkeley County, the region’s largest county, grew 14.3% between 2020 and 2025, even as the statewide population continues to decline.
With construction workers refusing to work in the state, builders are struggling to meet high demand. The division president said they have multiple active communities in the Panhandle. Under normal conditions, they could begin construction on roughly 10 to 18 homes per month. After the ICE Raids, they were down to about one start per month.
They aren’t only having a hard time starting homes. They’re also struggling to finish and close homes already under construction because masonry and concrete crews are now so scarce.
The builder expected to close a large volume of homes in one key community this fiscal year, but they have now sharply reduced that forecast because many of those deals are likely to fall through before year-end. Many homes are now at risk of not closing because they simply won’t be able to finish and deliver them in time.
This has left buyers in the dark.
“We’ve got people who can’t close on homes, and we can’t tell them when the home is going to [be ready],” the division president explained.
Builders that operate in this region of West Virginia are all feeling the impacts. Local homebuilders regularly communicate with each other about the issue, and most have reached out to state government officials, but without success.
“Meetings have happened with the governor’s chief of staff, with the attorney general’s chief of staff, with the Department of Labor, with all of these government figures in the West Virginia state government. They all kind of say the same thing. They all say, ‘We completely understand. We will look into it’, and nothing happens,” the division president said.
“It feels like a form of profiling and harassment”
ICE raids haven’t been impacting builders equally across the country. Representatives from homebuilding associations in markets like Indiana, Arizona and Kansas City, for example, say that they haven’t seen any recent uptick in operations.
Steve Martinez, a national state delegate with the Idaho Home Builders Association and President of Tradewinds General Contracting, an Idaho-based custom homebuilder, said ICE enforcement was rare in Idaho in 2025 and much of 2026.
However, he’s noticed an increase in ICE operations in Idaho in the last couple of months.
“The enforcement of immigration has been, at least from an ICE perspective, very targeted in certain states,” Martinez said, explaining that “it does feel like Idaho has now hit that radar.”
“I’m in a group text of people that are letting us know what’s going on in the field and where it’s happening. I would say, probably over the last two months, it feels like there have been … instances where they are picking up people that just look the part. Like I said, it feels like a form of profiling and harassment,” Martinez added.
Ken Burgess, a lobbyist for the Idaho Home Builders Association and the Building Contractors Association of Southwestern Idaho, said ICE operations affecting homebuilders in the state seem to have ramped up in August. Recent construction-site raids in the Boise-area communities of Emmett, Nampa and Eagle made the local news.
“I hadn’t heard of any that occurring really much before, at least not on any of our single-family home construction sites, until about… three or four weeks ago,” Burgess said.
Texas and Florida were also big hotspots for ICE operations in July. A reported 1,600 frontline workers were rounded up for detention in one week of paralyzing fear in the San Antonio area. Texas and Florida accounted for nearly 20,000, roughly 40%, of July’s almost 50,000 ICE arrests.
In Texas, some builders and residential contractors report that arrests in recent weeks have been indiscriminate when it comes to legal or undocumented frontline workers.
Nicholas Riley, owner of Driftwood Builders Roofing, said his employees, who are legal residents, have been personally affected by ICE raids. The roofing contractor operates mainly in the Austin area, but services clients as far south as San Antonio, where word of extensive ICE operations began quickly spreading over the past couple of months.
“Our main crew leader has been reluctant to take jobs in San Antonio because of concerns about being stopped or detained,” Riley said.
A couple of Riley’s workers, who have legal status, were recently detained temporarily in San Marcos, located halfway between San Antonio. After that incident, some employees have been reluctant to work in the city, causing scheduling delays.
A few weeks ago, another one of Riley’s workers was detained.
“We had a worker who’s a legal immigrant, and he was detained. They pulled him over, held him for three hours, and then let him go because he’s legal. When I saw him on the job site, he was just incredibly shaken up by the experience,” Riley said.
“A bidding war” for scarce labor emerges
Mario Guerrero, Executive Director of the South Texas Builders Association and owner of Rich Heritage Construction, has been outspoken for more than a year about the ramifications of ICE raids on homebuilders in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. But the impacts have worsened since the DHS funding bill passed in June.
“We saw a surge of these raids in our job sites, particularly after the administration passed the new funding bill,” Guerrero said. “It got bad, and what I mean…is that the fear took off. It skyrocketed. People are in fear of going to work.”
Builders in markets throughout Texas, like Houston, Austin and San Antonio, are seeing this surge, Guerrero said, but many are scared of speaking out since it is a highly sensitive issue.
Guerrero recounted a story a local builder told him. The builder hired a bricklayer, paid a $4,000 deposit, and had already begun the work when ICE arrested the bricklayer, despite his valid documentation to work in the U.S. During another instance, a local Texas builder sent a project manager to a job site. When ICE showed up, they detained her despite her being a U.S. citizen.
Guerrero said he agrees with the administration’s efforts to deport criminals and secure the southern border. This was a key issue in border towns in Texas that were overwhelmed by a surge in illegal border crossings under the Biden administration.
However, Guerrero and other members of the South Texas Builders Association, regardless of political affiliation, have been united in speaking out about the impact ICE operations have had on the local homebuilding community and its workers. On July 29, the organization hosted an immigration forum to discuss this very issue because they don’t believe their concerns are being addressed.
For many builders in the region, the average build time for homes has roughly doubled since ICE operations began, as the available labor pool has become severely constrained.
“It’s a tough market to sell a home right now, and then you’re adding more pressure because now you’re making it more difficult to build homes,” Guerrero said. “So what this is going to cost is more companies coming out negative than anything else, and this is going to make companies go under.”
A senior-ranking manager at a large homebuilder in Austin, TX, who asked to remain anonymous, said ICE raids have been picking up in the Austin market and throughout Central Texas over the last couple of months. Some of the workers getting detained are undocumented. Others are in the country legally and now fear showing up to work.
Even when a crew’s lead is legally authorized to work, losing just a couple of assistant laborers to ICE enforcement or fear-driven resignations immediately reduces the crew’s capacity. With fewer workers available, builders start bidding against each other for labor, stretching out construction timelines and pushing prices higher.
“What we’re seeing is that capacity is decreased, so there’s a bidding war between my peers and me to try and get labor on the job. Our labor pool right now is very fragile…as it is, and now you have this other hit,” the manager explained.
Framing, roofing, landscaping, painting, masonry and electrical crews are among the most affected categories of labor. While labor impacts haven’t necessarily affected their ability to start enough homes—new construction has recently tapered in Austin amid a glut of new supply—the cost of doing so has gone up.
“Framing labor is probably the most impacted category. In the last month, I’ve seen anywhere from a 25% to a 50% jump in labor costs in that category alone,” the manager said.
Those cost impacts can range from $2,000 to $5,000 per home. With buyers struggling to afford homes at current prices, builders may have to absorb the bulk of those cost increases.
The manager mentioned that Texas homebuilding representatives recently went to Washington, D.C. for a hearing on immigration enforcement to better understand the Trump administration’s position on ICE enforcement.
“The message from the administration is that enforcement’s not going to let up. It’s going to continue. In fact, they’re going to double down or triple down on enforcement efforts because it’s part of…the platform they ran on,” the manager said.
