ABC correspondent Steve Portnoy stood in front of a camera on Sunday's World News Tonight and explained, with a straight face, that ICE enforcement raids are causing a "massive chilling effect on legal documented workers" in the meatpacking industry. The segment, anchored by David Muir, then pivoted to a joint statement from Texas and Oklahoma cattlemen groups warning that "these types of disruptions will lead to higher beef prices for consumers."

So the argument is that enforcing immigration law makes beef expensive. Which means cheap beef required not enforcing immigration law.

That's the part ABC didn't linger on. The entire segment assumes — without ever saying it plainly — that the American meatpacking industry was built on a workforce that shouldn't have been here. Portnoy's framing treated the presence of illegal workers on slaughterhouse floors as a baseline, and their removal as the disruption. Not their hiring. Not the companies that recruited them. Not the years of looking the other way. The disruption, per ABC, is that someone finally checked.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin responded directly: "ICE is targeting heinous criminals and immigrants with final orders of removal." That's the actual policy — go after people with existing deportation orders and violent criminal records. Portnoy's segment made no distinction between criminal aliens with final removal orders and the broader meatpacking workforce. The viewer was left to assume the raids were random sweeps of honest laborers.

The cattlemen's statement is worth a closer look. Texas and Oklahoma ranchers warning about workforce disruptions aren't wrong about the short-term economics. Meatpacking has operated on razor-thin margins subsidized by cheap labor for decades. When that labor disappears, processing slows and wholesale prices climb. That's real. What's also real is that the wages were suppressed precisely because the labor was exploitable. Undocumented workers don't file OSHA complaints. They don't negotiate overtime. They don't call lawyers when they get hurt.

Portnoy didn't stop at beef. He connected Trump to broader grocery and gas inflation and tied it to Trump's "rejection" of the Iran deal, building a daisy chain of blame that stretched from a meatpacking plant in Oklahoma to the Persian Gulf. One correspondent, one segment, zero acknowledgment that grocery inflation predated every ICE raid by years.

The meatpacking industry's labor model has been an open secret since the 1990s. Major processors moved plants to rural towns, recruited immigrant labor — legal and otherwise — and watched wages in the sector fall in real terms for three straight decades. When COVID hit those same plants in 2020, the story was worker exploitation. When ICE shows up in 2026, the story is consumer prices. The workers went from victims to economic necessities depending on which narrative hurt Trump more.

ABC's story was a clear attempt by the democrat-friendly media to reframe immigration enforcement as an economic attack on American families. The framing requires you to accept that an industry running on illegal labor was functioning correctly, and that fixing it is the problem.

ABC spent three minutes on September 28 explaining why deporting people with final orders of removal will make your hamburger cost more. They never once asked why your hamburger was cheap in the first place.