Dan Osborn, the Democratic Party–backed independent running for Senate in Nebraska, has spent part of his campaign courting voters critical of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement.
He has sharply condemned the president’s tactics, criticizing the use of masked agents, saying that immigrant labor is essential to Nebraska’s economy and that federal raids on factories and restaurants are hurting business owners.
Complicating that message is Osborn’s role as a labor leader during a bitter strike five years ago at an Omaha Kellogg’s cereal plant. In the midst of the strike, Osborn and his union worked to alert federal immigration authorities to allegations that Kellogg’s replaced striking workers with undocumented immigrants.
“Kellogg’s bringing in replacement workers, we have it on good authority that they’re replacing us with a good percentage of undocumented workers,” Osborn said in December 2021 on a pro-union podcast. “We have been in contact with Homeland Security and ICE. We’ve made our claims. I hope they do the right thing and investigate our claims.”
Osborn offered no evidence in the interview that Kellogg’s was employing undocumented workers, and CNN could not independently verify the allegation. While reporting at the time documented Kellogg’s use of temporary replacement labor, no public reporting identified any of those workers as undocumented, and CNN’s review of the record found no evidence supporting the claim. Kellogg’s did not respond to a request for comment.
