Trump officials reverse pause on immigration raids targeting farms and hotels
The Trump administration is reportedly reversing a recently formulated plan to refrain from conducting immigration raids against undocumented migrants in the agricultural, hotel, and restaurant industries, just days after adopting the original policy.
The Department of Homeland Security announced the return to raids on such workers on a Monday morning call with representatives from 30 Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices, The Washington Post reports.
Late last week, the department announced it would be pausing worksite enforcement and investigation operations across the industries in question, after the president admitted his attempts to rapidly deport millions of people were draining workers from those sectors.
'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,' the president wrote last week on Truth Social.
'This is not good,' he added. 'We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!'
He reinforced the message later that day in remarks to reporters.
'Our farmers are being hurt badly by, you know, they have very good workers, they have worked for them for 20 years,' Trump said during a press conference on Thursday, offering rare praise towards undocumented migrants, a group he frequently demonizes as overwhelmingly dangerous despite data showing the opposite. 'They're not citizens, but they've turned out to be, you know, great. And we're going to have to do something about that. We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have, maybe not.'
The message was at odds with that of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of much of the administration's immigration policy.
Miller has argued for the validity of rapidly deporting all undocumented immigrants arguing that opposition from Democrats in places such as Los Angeles to raids targeting those without criminal records was tantamount to trying to overthrow the U.S. government.
The split came as the Trump administration ordered hundreds of Marines and thousands of National Guard troops into LA in response to widespread protests against immigration raids there.
By Sunday, the brief moment of goodwill seemed to evaporate, and the president was once again calling for mass deportation raids across the country, telling ICE agents in a Truth Social post to 'do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.'
'You don't hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!' the president added, despite having just entertained giving unlawful migrants in rural farming communities a reprieve from deportations earlier that week.
Trump administration officials including Miller have been pushing immigration agents to ramp up the pace of deportations, with a goal of 3,000 ICE arrests every day, though the administration has acknowledged it is not yet hitting this target.
In the meantime, ICE could reportedly run out of money as soon as next month amid the administration's wide-ranging deportation efforts.
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