Trump orders Ice raids on farms and hotels after pausing them days earlier
Donald Trump has abandoned his brief immigration and customs enforcement (Ice) reprieve for farm and hotel workers, ordering the agency's raids in those sectors to resume after hardliners crushed a pause that lasted just four days.
The whiplash reversal, first reported by the Washington Post, exposes the dysfunction gripping the president's deportation agenda, where competing advisers battle over policy while Trump lurches between contradictory positions.
'The president has been incredibly clear,' Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday. 'There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine Ice's efforts.'
The flip-flop also follows Trump's erratic pattern on major policies – from threatening then retreating on mass global tariffs to wavering on federal spending cuts – as different factions fight for his ear.
Trump first blinked last Thursday, posting on Truth Social that his 'very aggressive' raids were hurting farmers and hotels. The next day, Ice officials reportedly told staff in an internal email to largely lay off raids and arrests in the agricultural, hotel and restaurant industries.
But now, according to the Post, immigration hawks led by the deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, crushed the pause – after the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, had secured the temporary reprieve amid industry pressure.
By Sunday, Trump had publicly reversed course entirely, ordering agents via a Truth Social post to deliver what he called the 'single largest Mass Deportation Program in History' – focusing particularly on America's largest cities, almost all being run by Democrats.
The administration desperately wants workplace raids to hit Miller's target of 3,000 daily arrests. Daily arrests have been stuck at about 2,000, according to a recent DHS statement.
Single operations at meatpacking plants can net hundreds of detentions.
Yet Trump's brief wobble revealed his unease with the economic fallout. Undocumented immigrants make up 4.6% of the US workforce – more than 7 million people concentrated in agriculture, hospitality and construction, according to the American Immigration Council.
Labor groups like United Farm Workers (UFW), which represent a large number of immigrant workers, dismissed the temporary pause on workplace raids in California as never actually being in place.
'As long as Border Patrol and ICE are allowed to sweep through farm worker communities making chaotic arrests the way they did TODAY, they are still hunting down farm workers,' UFW posted on Instagram on Saturday. 'If President Trump is actually in charge, he needs to prove it.'
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