Even though ICE agents are under pressure from the White House to make 3,000 deportation arrests daily, the Trump administration is also under lobbying pressure from Big Ag to exempt illegals who are picking crops and working in meat packing plants.
That pressure was evident in President Trump’s own social media post, published June 12. It stated that “our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
That same day, President Trump told reporters that farmers “are being hurt badly” by deportations. He also described their illegal workers as “very good workers” who are reliable, long-time employees.
Those workers are also illegal aliens, however, who are working for an under-the-table paycheck without acquiring an H-2A farm work visa to work legally.
A related story by The New York Times quoted an unnamed ICE official who said agents were ordered to avoid raids on farms, meat packing plants, and at restaurants and hotels.
That avoid-the-farms policy comes at the same time ICE agents have been ordered to find and arrest virtually any adult who is a non-citizen. That order came from Stephen Miller, the White House chief of staff, who told Fox News in late May the goal is 3,000 arrests daily.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, tells AFN there is no doubt the White House was under pressure to back off. He suspects President Trump was being lobbied by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who was being lobbied by Big Ag to ignore their workers.
“We estimated that would have meant a kind of defacto administrative amnesty for two million illegal workers,” Krikorian, referring to CIS’s own research, says.
Rollins, a Texas A&M graduate, served as a White House aide during President Trump’s first term. She was leading the America First Policy Institute when then-President-elect Trump nominated her for agriculture secretary last year.
A story about Rollins’ nomination, published by The Hill last November, predicted she would face farm-related issues from Trump’s plans for tariffs as well as his plans for mass deportations of illegal aliens.
According to Krikorian, President Trump seemed to be backtracking after only a couple of days in a Truth Social post. The post, published June 15, promised the “single largest” mass deportation in U.S. history.
A related story in The Washington Post, quoting two ICE officials, said the Dept. of Homeland Security officially announced a policy reversal in a June 16 phone call to 30 field offices.
Krikorian credits outrage among Trump voters, and uproar from others within the Trump administration, for forcing a reversal at the White House.
“So the official story,” Krikorian says, “is they're back enforcing immigration law wherever there are violations.”
