The companies attempted to merge to avoid the suit, leading to the 1905 Supreme Court case of Swift & Co. v. United States.

By the 1920s Swift and Company operated their largest and most modern meat processing plant in South St Paul, Minnesota.

Swift processed fresh, smoked, table-ready, canned meats, such as PREM, and baby foods, along with soap, lard, shortening, adhesives, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, hides and animal feeds.

[6] In 2002, ConAgra sold a majority stake in Swift & Company to Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, a Dallas-based private-equity firm, and Booth Creek Management.

[9] JBS also announced in 2008 its intention to buy National Beef Packing Company for $560 million, but canceled the plan after the U.S. Department of Justice raised antitrust concerns.

[citation needed] In 2009, JBS USA Holdings filed notice with the SEC that it desired to float an IPO, and listed 38 subsidiaries.

Four accounting firms were listed on the Prospectus, the last to file being BDO Seidman LLP based in Dallas, Texas on 21 July 2009.

[14] In December 2006, six of the company's meat-packing facilities in Colorado, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Iowa, and Minnesota were raided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, resulting in the apprehension of 1,282 undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Peru, Laos, Sudan, and Ethiopia, and nearly 200 of them were criminally charged after a ten-month investigation into identity theft.

This followed evidence from investigative journalist Dom Phillips of links in the JBS supply chain to illegal deforestation in the Amazon.

[20] The beef products were produced on April 21 and 22, 2009, and were shipped to distributors and retail establishments in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.

[22] On December 2, 2010, JBS announced that it would use Arrowsight, a remote video auditing company, to monitor proper sanitation to prevent cross contamination during processing.

[23] The Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration assessed a $175,000 civil penalty against JBS/Swift on December 22, 2010, for violations of the Packers and Stockyards Act by failing to disclose when missing Fat-O-Meat’er data had prevented JBS from calculating the lean percentage of a particular pork carcass or carcasses in a seller's lot, and substituting an undisclosed lean value for pork carcasses with missing data when calculating carcass-merit payment for hogs delivered to JBS’ Worthington, MN, Marshalltown, IA, and Louisville, KY, processing plants.

[24] In 2019, the Trump administration allocated US$62.4 million to JBS USA from a fund to intended help U.S. farmers affected by the trade war with China.

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and Attorney General Jeff Sessions requested the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate a possible case of corruption.

[31] Outbreaks of COVID-19 have also been found in six other JBS beef processing plants, in Souderton, Pennsylvania; Plainwell, Michigan; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Cactus, Texas; Grand Island, Nebraska; and Hyrum, Utah.

[32][33][34] The United States House Select Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a report in May 2022 detailing the relationship between the Trump administration and the meat packing industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.