Ruth Simon

Mills' signage is multilingual to reflect its workforce. A third of the factory's 155 employees are U.S.-born. The rest are immigrants, and dozens of them are here in the U.S. under an immigration status called humanitarian parole.

It's a status that has come under fire from the Trump administration, and that's putting the Mills factory, its workers, and its ability to keep making parachutes at risk. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Thursday, June 5th. Coming up on the show, these workers make parachutes for the military. Now, they fear deportation.

Mills Manufacturing has been making parachutes since World War II. It's one of just two companies in the U.S. that are qualified to make the MC-6 and the T-11, the military's main personnel parachutes.

Okay, I'll take the in-between. Ruth is being led around the factory by John Oswald, CEO of Mills Manufacturing. Mills isn't just any factory. They make crucial equipment for the U.S. military, specifically parachutes. When a soldier jumps out of a plane, whether on a training mission or in combat, there's a good chance they're trusting a Mills parachute to carry them safely to the ground.

This week, I chatted with Ruth about her visit to Mills.

The man in charge of this tricky production is the one who was touring Ruth around, John Oswald.

Morning. He has short salt-and-pepper hair, a calm demeanor, and knows this factory inside and out. Oswald's been the CEO of Mills for 16 years, but he's worked there for even longer. You've been here for how many years?

Oswald joked with Ruth that he is one of the few people at Mills who doesn't sew, but he keeps the business running. Back in 2020, Oswald had a problem. Mills was getting more orders for parachutes than it could produce. Oswald needed more workers. But the labor market was tight, and his recruiting efforts were coming up short.

The pay at Mills is decent. Workers can earn up to 20 bucks an hour, plus overtime, and they can get raises for mastering additional skills. But the work is difficult. Training a new worker can take months, and some don't stick around for long. Mills' employees cut and sew for 10-hour shifts.

But around the summer of 2023, Oswald noticed that hiring was starting to get easier. At first, he didn't understand why.

One big reason why those people were suddenly showing up was a policy shift from the White House.

Mills started to see more and more job applicants who were in the U.S. through a program called humanitarian parole. It's a special status for immigrants who can demonstrate that they have an urgent need for safety. For example, because their home governments are targeting them or their country is under attack. It's been around for decades, but President Biden expanded it significantly.

His administration opened up humanitarian parole for people from Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. And some of those new immigrants were showing up in Asheville, North Carolina, knocking on the door of the Mills factory.

Mills' workforce has been diverse for decades, with about a third of its employees coming from the U.S., a third from Eastern Europe, and a third from Latin America. Today, dozens of Mills' immigrant employees are on humanitarian parole.

Oswald says employees use Google Translate to communicate. Multilingual staff members often double as interpreters on the factory floor. Many of Mills' employees gather each Friday for a two-hour English class, and they share meals together a few times a year. I want to come to the potluck.

I want to come to the potluck dinner.

During her visit to the Mills factory, Ruth spent part of the day posted up in a small conference room. There, she met with some employees, including a sewer from Nicaragua.

As is common at Mills, his coworker helped translate. And why did you come here?

In 2018, Gonzalez participated in a government protest while he was a student in Nicaragua. That year, hundreds of people were killed while demonstrating against the country's former president.

I'm fascinated. I'm just trying to take it all in. Overhead, fluorescent lights illuminate rows of workstations covered with fabrics, straps, and thread. There are hundreds of sewing machines in the Mills factory, operated by employees who painstakingly cut and stitch each piece of each parachute. So how many steps to make a parachute?

When Gonzalez joined Mills last year, he had no sewing experience. But he proved a quick learner. His job is to sew nylon straps, pockets, and flaps. These parts are made with thicker fabrics that require more strength to maneuver. Gonzalez told Ruth he sees a future for himself at Mills.

But last week, Gonzalez's future at Mills got more complicated. That's after the break.

On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the end of humanitarian parole programs for four Latin American countries. The administration said that humanitarian parole programs were always meant to be short-lived and that the Biden administration used them too broadly to protect immigrants from deportation. That executive order was paused by a federal court.

— About half a million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have lost their legal status as a result of the Supreme Court's move. Many have pending applications for other immigration statuses they hope will protect them from deportation.

including at the Mills parachute factory. Eleven employees are from countries directly impacted by Friday's Supreme Court order.

It sounds like you take one person out of that production line, and you're not just going to miss them, but the people who are connected to them in the process are also going to have problems.

Mills CEO John Oswald told Ruth on her tour that if Mills loses its employees on humanitarian parole, the company might struggle to fill the military's parachute orders.

You spoke with John Oswald just briefly after the court's move last week. How did he seem? How was he thinking about all of this?

How many other employers like Mills could this court move impact?

A single skipped stitch among thousands is considered a major defect. Throughout the factory, signs spell out the company's mission — to bring troops safely to the ground 100 percent of the time.

Workers on humanitarian parole work at companies like Amazon, GE, and Marriott. And at smaller employers, like Eli's Cheesecake in Chicago. And Goodwin Living, which runs senior living communities in the D.C. area. And what about William Gonzalez? What could this ruling mean for him?

One way he's trying to do that is by applying for asylum, which, if granted, would allow him to remain lawfully in the U.S. Gonzalez submitted his application for asylum a few months ago, back when Trump returned to the White House. Most of Mills' employees impacted by last week's decision have also applied for asylum. What Gonzalez doesn't want to do is go back to Nicaragua.

When Ruth was at the factory, he told her he was afraid of what might happen to him if he returned.

A couple months ago, our colleague Ruth Simon took a trip to Asheville, North Carolina to tour a factory there.

Gonzalez is weighing his options. But for now, he's still coming to work, still sewing the parachutes that'll keep U.S. troops safe. That's all for today, Thursday, June 5th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like the show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

So Mills has quite a lot of workers who are immigrants. About a third of their workers are US born and the rest of them are immigrants. What we're talking about here is one subset of the group, which is about a quarter of their workers who are legally allowed to work in the US, but they have a temporary status. There are different programs that have allowed people to come to the U.S.

and given them the right to work legally and live here legally. But those protections for that group of workers could be going away.

Es könnte potenziell eine große Höhle in ihrem Arbeitsplatz verlassen. Diese Art von Arbeitnehmern mit diesen legalen Verteidigungen sind weltweit vertreten. Sie arbeiten für große Unternehmen, sie arbeiten für kleine Arbeitnehmer.

Now I know in the case of Mills and some of the other companies I've spoken with, they're trying to figure out how they can help these workers achieve some sort of permanent legal status. That's a hard process, it's time consuming, and there's no guarantee. These are companies that are trying to employ workers who are legally allowed to work in the US.

Es könnte potenziell eine große Höhle in ihrem Arbeitsplatz verlassen. Diese Art von Arbeitnehmern mit diesen legalen Voraussetzungen sind weltweit verantwortlich. Sie arbeiten für große Unternehmen, sie arbeiten für kleine Arbeitnehmer.

They want to find ways for them to legally stay, but they could be left with gaps in their workforce if they aren't.

What John Oswald, who runs the company, said to me is if they lose all these workers, they would have to go back to the military and say, what do you want us to prioritize? This is a very complicated operation. They wouldn't be able to get all their work done. And so it would require some tough choices.

And it would also take quite some time for the company to recover because they would have to find more workers and They would have to train those workers. Those workers would have to get up to speed.

In the case of Mills, they've brought in a local immigration group to talk to their workers about what their options are. The head of Mills has lobbied for immigration reform. He's been to Washington, D.C. and is trying to call attention to the problem.

I think they're also hoping and praying that they won't have this problem because it's a big one and it's going to be hard enough for them to crack.

Pleasure to speak with you.

Wir machen eine kulinarische Reise.

Even some companies that manufacture in the U.S. are feeling some softness because their customers are uncertain and they're not investing as much.

There are a whole bunch of different reasons why that's the case. For one thing, small businesses have thinner cash cushions and they often operate with narrower profit margins than big companies. They also are just smaller. They don't have big product and big diverse product lines. to spread things around. They're more likely to have production concentrated in one or two places.

And perhaps even as important or more important, their staffs are small, so they don't have teams of supply chain experts. And when somebody has to focus on tariffs, it's taking them away from other roles that they might have, other things that they need to do.

And that makes what we've been seeing lately, this stop-start, today it looks like one thing, another day it looks like something else, particularly difficult for small companies to manage.

There is a wide range of small businesses that are feeling pressure. One of the most obvious ones are companies that do a lot of importing from China and who have things like, I talked for this story, to a hat maker. There are people who make aprons, who make all sorts of stationary products, all kinds of different things.

But we also have companies that get components from China or components from Mexico or have moved some of their manufacturing to Mexico because they thought, hey, there are going to be more tariffs on China and suddenly Mexico is in the crosshairs too. Even some companies that manufacture in the U.S. are feeling some softness because their customers are uncertain and they're not investing as much.

Okay, that seems like kind of a tough situation for some of these small businesses.

So some of the small businesses that I talked to tried to move product to the U.S. ahead of the tariffs to at least give them a little bit of a cushion. They also have to figure out what to do. How much do you pass on tariffs to your customers? Do you put fewer items in a package? Do you make things a little differently? And finally, they're just taking a very close look at their costs.

If small businesses are suffering, that can lead to economic weakness, particularly if small businesses slow their hiring or have to lay off employees or they scale back their investments.

It was a pleasure to join you.

It's like every day they wake up and it's a new reality that they're trying to adjust to.

There are a whole bunch of reasons. They operate with smaller cash cushions. They typically have thinner profit margins. They're less diversified, both in terms of the goods they offer and where those products are made.

And they just don't have the economic muscle of big companies to try to push back hard and get their suppliers to accept some of those tariff increases to negotiate for better deals. They also have fewer people just to deal with all these issues. So for companies that have imports that are affected by these tariffs, what are they doing about it? They're scrambling.

Some of them will have to pass on price increases to their customers, but they're struggling to figure out what those tariffs are and what's going to stick and what isn't. And so it's hard for them to make any big moves. Some companies Small businesses I've talked to say their order volume has softened because the companies that are their customers are nervous about spending money.