Inside Trump’s extraordinary turnaround on immigration raids

WASHINGTON — On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump took a call from Brooke Rollins, his secretary of agriculture, who relayed a growing sense of alarm from the heartland.

Farmers and agriculture groups, she said, were increasingly uneasy about his immigration crackdown. Federal agents had begun to aggressively target worksites in recent weeks, with the goal of sharply bolstering the number of arrests and deportations of immigrants living in the country illegally.

Farmers rely on immigrants to work long hours, Rollins said. She told the president that farm groups had been warning her that their employees would stop showing up to work out of fear, potentially crippling the agricultural industry.

She wasn’t the first person to try to get this message through to the president, nor was it the first time she had spoken to him about it. But the president was persuaded.

The next morning, he posted a message on his social media platform, Truth Social, that took an uncharacteristically softer tone toward the very immigrants he has spent much of his political career demonizing. Immigrants in the farming and hospitality industries are “very good, long time workers,” he said. “Changes are coming.”

Some influential Trump donors who learned about the post began reaching out to people in the White House, urging Trump to include the restaurant sector in any directive to spare workers living in the country illegally from enforcement.

Inside the West Wing, top White House officials were caught off guard — and furious at Rollins. Many of Trump’s top aides, particularly Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, have urged a hard-line approach, targeting all immigrants without legal status to fulfill the president’s promise of the biggest deportation campaign in American history.

But the decision had been made. Later on Thursday, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tatum King, sent an email to regional leaders at the agency informing them of new guidance. Agents were to “hold on all worksite enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”

It remains to be seen how effective the order will be and whether Trump will stick with his decision. Raids at other worksites, like the one in Los Angeles’ garment industry that led to mass protests, are still allowed. On Friday, the day after Trump issued the new guidance, farmworkers were being rounded up in the fields of Oxnard, 50 miles north of Los Angeles, according to advocates.

But the president’s decision to shield farmers and the hospitality industry — a business he knows well from his years as an owner of luxury hotels — reveals the tension between his deportation efforts and concerns about maintaining crucial support in his political coalition.

This account of Trump’s retreat is based on interviews with 11 people, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

“President Trump has always stood up for our farmers, who were a major part of his November victory, by working to negotiate fairer trade deals and cut red tape,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “He will continue to strengthen our agricultural industry and boost exports while keeping his promise to enforce our immigration laws and remove the millions of unvetted illegals who flooded into the United States under Joe Biden.”

‘Let’s go after the criminals’

The scope of Trump’s immigration crackdown has unsettled some Republicans as the raids on farms began disrupting operations. More than 40% of the nation’s crop workers have no legal immigration status, the Agriculture Department has estimated.

On Tuesday, federal agents started fanning out across California’s vast agricultural area, from along the coast to the Central Valley. The raids spread chaos in Oxnard, which grows much of the nation’s strawberries, as well as in Kern and Tulare counties, where vegetables, grapes and delicate fruit, like peaches, are starting to be harvested.

Growers reported that 30% to 60% of workers stopped reporting to the fields in the days after the raids.

Agricultural associations in California, Idaho and elsewhere, whose members are typically Republicans, have been bombarding their Senate and congressional offices to voice concerns.

“We all need to focus on convicted criminal aliens,” Rep. Tony Gonzalez, R-Texas, said on CNN last week. “If we focus there and we’re not going after the milker of cows who’s, you know, in 103-degree weather, going after that guy and we’re going after the convicted criminal, I think we’re on the right path.”

Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., the chair of the House Agriculture Committee, said ICE raids at farms were “just wrong.”

“They need to knock it off,” he told reporters last week. “Let’s go after the criminals and give us time to put processes in place so we don’t disrupt the food supply chain.”

During an agriculture committee hearing Wednesday, he pressed Rollins about what the administration was doing to ensure ICE raids were not “impacting food security.”

Rollins said she had spoken about the issue to Trump on Tuesday in the Oval Office and Wednesday morning.

“This president’s commitment to ensuring that all laws are followed remains paramount,” Rollins said. But she added that Trump understood “the significant challenges” in finding the necessary farm labor.

Still, some of the president’s most fervent supporters say they are unhappy with the change.

Jack Posobiec, a right-wing activist, said Saturday that Rollins was under pressure from outside groups, including Big Ag and wealthy donors, to scale back the president’s deportation plan.

“Why not focus on all illegals?” he said. “Sure, you know criminals go first. The violent illegals go first. But the policy should focus on all illegals.”

Mike Howell, the head of the Oversight Project, a conservative group, pointed to the news as proof that a mass deportation campaign was not happening in the way some expected.

“I think it would be to everyone’s benefit if we could end the shared fiction that mass deportations are happening,” he said on social media. “Elements of both the right and left know it to be false but pretend it is true, for different reasons.”

Seth W. Christensen, a spokesperson for the Agriculture Department, said Rollins “fully supports President Trump’s immigration agenda, starting with strong border security and deportations of all illegally present.” He added, “This agenda is essential to fixing a broken farm-labor economy and restoring integrity to the American workforce.”

Protecting farmers

Trump has often made policy exceptions for farmers, a key base of support. In his first term, he provided farmers with billions of dollars in aid amid a trade war with China. He deemed agricultural laborers to be essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic. He even allowed their employers to provide them with letters to show law enforcement so they would not be deported.

In his second term, Trump has weighed a new round of emergency relief to farmers this year because of Trump’s tariffs.

“It’s entirely predictable that Trump would backpedal on enforcement in the sectors he cares about — hospitality, where his own businesses operate, and agriculture, where his voters are over represented,” said Wayne Cornelius, a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, who researched immigrant labor.

Farmers say they routinely resort to hiring workers without work authorization because they cannot find Americans willing to do the physically onerous work. Often, the workers have been paying Social Security taxes and other federal taxes for decades.

Half of the farmworkers interviewed for the National Agricultural Workers Survey, released in 2022 by the Labor Department, had spent 11 to 30 years on farms, and nearly 1 in 5 had done so for more than three decades. They were earning an average of $20,000 a year.

On Friday, there were reports that some immigration raids were still happening, according to groups that represent growers and farmworkers in California.

Immigrant advocates received a rash of calls from children trying to locate their parents who were being transported to detention facilities in Oxnard. Agents had been in the area much of the week, arresting workers in packing houses and in the fields, according to the Ventura County Farm Bureau. Many farms remained closed because of the presence of roving federal agents, particularly Border Patrol.

“Agents were driving by, they would see workers and they would go into the fields to detain them,” said Teresa Romero, the president of the United Farmworkers Union, which represents 10,000 field workers in California, Oregon, Washington and New York and presses for their interests nationwide. (In most states, farmworkers have no legal right to unionize.)

She said that Trump’s guidance did not go far enough to protect vulnerable, essential workers because it allowed enforcement to continue in rural towns.

“If Trump is serious about protecting farmworkers then the raids in the streets in agricultural areas have to stop right now,” Romero said.

“Even if ICE and the Border Patrol are not going directly to the field but are driving around agricultural areas,” she said, “that is enough for farmworkers out there to be scared and still be detained.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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