President Trump said in a social media post on Thursday that he is willing to exempt the agricultural and hotel industries of his repression of national immigration. The surprise movement occurred after the executives of both industries complained to Trump about losing reliable immigrant workers and for a long time in immigration raids and fighting to replace them.
“Our great farmers and people in the hotel and leisure business have affirmed that our very aggressive immigration policy is removing very good workers and a long time of them, and those works are almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote.
“In many cases, the permitted criminals in our country for the very stupid Open Border Policy of Biden are requesting those works,” Trump added. “This is not good. We must protect our farmers, but take out the criminals from the United States. Changes are approaching!”
The New York Times reported the next day that a senior immigration and customs compliance had ordered a pause in agricultural business immigration raids, meat packaging plants, restaurants and hotels.
The upper ICE official also advised agents to stop arresting undocumented people who do not know that they have committed a crime. Agents were told to continue investigating and stopping undocumented people with criminal record, according to the New York Times.
In response to a NBC News question about Trump’s pause, the spokeswoman for the National Security Department, Tricia McLaughlin, did not play it. “We will continue the president’s direction and continue working to obtain the worst of the worst illegal criminal foreigners in the streets of the United States,” McLaughlin said in a statement.
An immigration crossroads
The potentially significant change in the administration approach towards immigration occurs when Trump faces a political crossroads. Immigration raids in Los Angeles caused days of violent protests there and helped boost Anti-Trump protests throughout the country on Saturday.
At the same time, Trump repeatedly promised his supporters during the 2024 campaign that would deport one million people a year, the greatest mass deportations in the history of the United States.
To meet that goal, the White House Cabinet Deputy Director Stephen Miller, demanded last month that the arrest against ice of at least 3,000 undocumented people per day.
Three former DHS officials told NBC News that ICE officials will have to significantly increase the raids of large workplaces throughout the country to meet those objectives. These sites include farms, plants full of meat, hotels and restaurants, the industries that Trump seems to have exempted.
A former ICE official said he only attacks in “Construction, dairy [and] Meat processing facilities, carpet factories “would result in the large number of arrests that Miller has demanded.” These work of low wages, that is where you get the numbers, “said the former official.
During the 2024 campaign and since he assumed the position, Trump has dismissed the warnings of experts that such large -scale deportations would lead to the shortage of workers in the industries that is apparently exempt now.
But the groups that support Trump’s repression hope he will maintain his promise.
“They should go after them,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the American Immigration Reform Federation, a group that supports an offensive against undocumented workers. “I don’t think there is a large strip of the country that will get angry if they reverse these companies, if they use illegal immigrants and transmit the cost for everyone else.”
Attacking slaughterhouses
For years, slaughterhouses have been one of the best known in the industry for trusting the newly arrived immigrant work, in part, due to the difficult and dangerous nature of work. And many slaughterhouses are found in red states scattered throughout the west and southeast. Texas only has almost 500 food and food processing plants, according to USDA data.
Earlier this week, ICE agents raided a local property slaughterhouse in Omaha, Nebraska and arrested at least 80 undocumented workers, according to local officials. Chad Hartmann, a spokesman for Glenn Valley Foods, in a statement that federal agents sought in the company’s installation “for people who believed they are using fraudulent documents to obtain employment.” He said that the company strives to operate within the law, which is cooperating with the agents and that “it is not being accused of any crime.”
But so far large slaughterhouses have not been constantly attacked by ice throughout the country.
Since Trump assumed the position in January, the raids in the workplace of ICE seem to have largely addressed to smaller companies, such as a roof in Bellingham, Washington, a Mexican restaurant in Harlingen, Texas and a small team manufacturer in Dakota del Sur. One of the largest work raids to date, which produced more than 100 arrests, was from a construction site in Tallahassesen for a private construction company based in Florida.
Larry Stine, an employment lawyer who represents some of the largest meat packing plants in the southeast of the United States, says that his clients are “terrified” of a possible raid and have actively audits the paperwork of their employees.
Few raids from the construction industry
Trump did not mention an exemption to the construction industry, which also uses a large number of immigrant workers. Until now, however, the construction industry has experienced relatively few ice raids, industry officials said.
Brian Turmail, vice president of Public Affairs of the associated general contractors of America, said that to date, he only knows sporadic reports of raids in the place of construction, such as one in Tallahassee on May 2, where more than 100 supposedly undocumented people were stopped.
The Contractors Association continues to prepare members on how to respond if the pace of compliance actions increases. “We have been publishing compliance information now that it is a bit more real,” Turmail said.
Turmail said that the president is still sure that the needs of the construction industry, whose shortage of the workforce of decades has only become more acute in recent years. It is a reason why construction costs have increased, he said, something that, in turn, has resulted in the decrease in construction spending year after year for the first time since 2019.
“Between the highest labor and the highest material costs, it is putting developers out because the projects are no longer made pencil,” Turmail said.
The members of the Association of Contactors continue in the hope that the promises of the administration to reorient more of the workforce towards vocational skills will become federal expenses to do so.
Turmail predicted that the shortage of workers will persist and will probably worsen if the repression of immigration continues. A way in which the administration could help address them, he added, would be to create ways for construction workers to legally enter the country.
“Even if we got all the funds we wanted, we would still have to find some temporary legal routes so that people enter and work on construction,” Turmail said.
Democrats say that Trump’s promises of millions of mass deportations are reaching economic realities. John Sandweg, who served as ICE director during the Obama administration, said that to maintain its 3,000 arrests per day share, the Trump administration would have to assault factories owned by large corporations. “Without a doubt, some Fortune 500 will be beaten,” he said.
