U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an Invest America Roundtable in the State Dining room, at the White House, in Washington, U.S., June 9, 2025.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
President Donald Trump said in a social media post on Thursday that he is willing to exempt the agriculture and hotel industries from his nationwide immigration crackdown. The surprise move came after executives in both industries complained to Trump about losing reliable, longtime immigrant workers in immigration raids and struggling to replace them.
“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,” Trump wrote.
“In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs,” Trump added. “This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
The New York Times reported the following day that a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official had ordered a pause in immigration raids of agricultural businesses, meat packing plants, restaurants and hotels.
The senior ICE official also advised agents to stop arresting undocumented people who are not known to have committed a crime. Agents were told to continue to investigate and detain undocumented people with criminal backgrounds, according to the New York Times.
In response to a question from NBC News regarding Trump’s pause, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin did not dispute it. “We will follow the president’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” McLaughlin said in a statement.
demanded last month that ICE arrest at least 3,000 undocumented people a day.
Three former DHS officials told NBC News that ICE officials will have to significantly increase raids of large workplaces nationwide to meet those goals. Those sites include farms, meat-packing plants, hotels and restaurants — the industries that Trump appears to have exempted.
One former ICE official said that only raids on “construction, dairy [and] meat processing facilities, carpet mills” would result in the large number of detentions Miller has demanded. “It’s these low-wage jobs, that is where you get the numbers,” the former official said.
During the 2024 campaign and since taking office, Trump has dismissed warnings from experts that such large-scale deportations would lead to worker shortages in the industries he is apparently exempting now.
But groups that support Trump’s crackdown expect him to keep his promise.
“They should be going after them,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesperson for Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that supports a crackdown on undocumented workers. “I don’t think there is going to be a huge swath of the country that will be upset if they bust these companies, if they are employing illegal immigrants and passing on the cost to everyone else.”
largely targeted smaller businesses such as a roofer in Bellingham, Washington, a Mexican restaurant in Harlingen, Texas and a small equipment manufacturer in South Dakota. One of the largest workplace raids to date — which yielded more than 100 arrests —was of a construction site in Tallahassee overseen by a privately owned Florida-based construction company.
Larry Stine, an employment attorney who represents some of the largest meat-packing plants in the Southeastern United States says his clients are “terrified” of a possible raid and have been actively conducting audits of their employees’ paperwork.
