Trump Reiterates His Promise To Protect Farm and Hospitality Workers From ‘Pretty Vicious’ Deportation
During a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, last Thursday, President Donald Trump said his administration is working on legislation that would allow undocumented workers in the farm and hospitality industries to remain in the country despite his crackdown on unauthorized immigrants. “We’re gonna work with them,” Trump said, referring to employers in those two sectors. “We’re gonna work very strong and smart. And we’re gonna put you in charge; we’re gonna make you responsible. And I think that’s gonna make a lot of people happy.”
This is not the first time that Trump has signaled that he is inclined to protect employees of certain businesses from deportation. “In the face of public protests and an apparent lobbying effort by businesses and members of his administration,” Reason‘s Eric Boehm reported on June 16, Trump “ordered a pause on some workplace immigration raids.” But that pause did not last long, as Boehm noted the very next day: “The Trump administration is reportedly restarting workplace immigration raids just days after pausing them amid public outrage and a behind-the-scenes lobbying effort by farms and the hospitality industry.”
As Trump has acknowledged, he is torn between the economic concerns of business owners, including many of his own supporters, and the demands of hardliners like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. That tension is apparent in the contrast between the administration’s immigration rhetoric, which emphasizes the removal of dangerous criminals, and workplace raids that target peaceful, productive people with strong, longstanding ties to the United States. And it reflects the general public’s mixed attitude toward immigration enforcement, which includes an openness to legal pathways that would allow people in the latter category to remain in the country.
“In 2020–22,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports, “32 percent of crop farmworkers were U.S. born, 7 percent were immigrants who had obtained U.S. citizenship, 19 percent were other authorized immigrants (primarily permanent residents or green-card holders), and the remaining 42 percent held no work authorization.” But as Trump tells it, he was not aware of how his deportation campaign might affect U.S. farmers until Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who att
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