The Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement is careening headlong into pressure from business owners who stand to lose huge portions of their workforces if President Donald Trump fulfills his campaign promise of deporting millions of immigrants. The deportation crackdown might even be impossible to pull off without undermining the U.S. economy.
A series of high-profile raids earlier this month have put a chill on the agriculture sector, with employees now terrified to show up for work, leaving cows unmilked and crops unpicked, Bloomberg reported. Trump has cited complaints from farmers and hoteliers that ICE raids were “taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” according to a Truth Social post that presaged a brief pause in enforcement for those industries.
The reprieve lasted barely a day, though, with Trump vowing to double down on immigration raids, with an emphasis on Democratic-controlled states and worksites. In a Truth Social post, Trump decreed ICE officers “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” including “expand[ing] efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.” The following day an email went out directing ICE to continue raids at food and agriculture businesses.
The sudden and complete reversal highlights a fundamental schism within the party of Trump: Wealthy hotel, hospitality, and agriculture executives and business owners have complained to Trump about losing a reliable workforce. But the MAGA base and immigration hardliners see the most stringent immigration enforcement policies as a core promise of the Trump campaign. The conflict between the two factions is playing out in real time as workers fear for their jobs and relatives while business leaders—many of whom believed that promised ICE raids would focus on criminals and gang members rather than law-abiding workers—watch their revenue streams go up in smoke.
“Fear is really the common thread,” said Emily Knight, president and CEO of the Texas Restaurant Association, a trade group that advocates for the restaurant industry in Texas, which employs 1.4 million workers. “The fear is not only the workforce not coming but customers staying home, and what that economic reality is.”
Foot traffic to restaurants has been dropping since Trump’s inauguration, with a particularly steep drop in heavily Mexican areas, according to data the TRA shared with Fortune.
“It’s a ridiculous fantasy that somehow you can deport the immigrants that are doing the work of this country and not blow up this economy,” said Ted Pappageorge, head of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents 60,000 hotel and hospitality workers in Las Vegas at hotels, restaurants and casinos.
The group represents a vastly diverse membership with immigrants from some 170 countries. Pappageorge noted that recent rapid-fire policy changes, such as revoking Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, quickly turned “legal” workers into “illegal ones.”
The change affected “thousands of workers in the state of Nevada, hundreds on the [Las Vegas] Strip,” he said. “They had permission; were law-abiding, going to work every day and powering this economy—they had their status revoked.”
‘Guns pointed at cows’
Immigrants, many without legal status, work throughout the food chain. One in five food production workers—a 22-million-strong chain that stretches from fields to meatpacking plants to restaurants and supermarkets—is an immigrant, according to the Migration Policy Institute and the National Restaurant Association. In some niches, like the dairy industry, more than half the 160,000-strong workforce is foreign-born.
It was a videotaped ICE raid on a New Mexico dairy that reportedly changed the president’s mind.
A routine check on June 3 escalated, and half the farmer’s workforce was arrested and ICE enforcers “even came into milking parlors with guns out pointed at cows,” Beverly Idsinga, executive director of Dairy Producers of New Mexico, told reporters this week. The dairy owner went from 50 employees to 24 employees overnight, she said. “He’s getting high school students on break; he’s stopping his farming operations,” Idsinga said.
Notably, following this raid and other high-profile clashes including at a popular San Diego Italian restaurant, GOP members of Congress raised concerns to Trump.
Rep. David Valadao, who represents California’s Central Valley, an agricultural powerhouse that produces 25% of the nation’s crops and is known for its almonds, peaches, olive oil, and grapes, said on X the administration should “prioritize the removal of known criminals over the hardworking people who have lived peacefully in the Valley for years.”
“They need to knock it off,” House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson, of Pennsylvania, told reporters of the administration’s targeting of the food sector. “Let’s go after the criminals and give us time to put processes in place so we don’t disrupt the food supply chain.”
Andy Harris, the Maryland Republican who chairs the highly influential conservative House Freedom Caucus, told reporters Tuesday he supported expanding legal visas for immigrant workers, including possibly creating a new category.
“With an unemployment rate of 4% you’re not going to find American workers for a lot of these tasks. You haven’t found them even when the unemployment rate was higher,” Harris said.
Harris was speaking at a press conference held by the American Business Immigration Coalition, which is pushing Congress to create a new type of long-term work visa for immigrants.
That desire runs counter to the policies of Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown, who has been widely described as an ideological purist. According to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Examiner, an impatient Miller urged top ICE officials to “do more” and, rather than targeting criminals, show up at Home Depot and 7-Eleven and round up people waiting for work. Miller later nearly doubled the administration’s arrest target to 3,000 arrests a day.
The labor is the point
For a sizable contingent of Trump’s base, getting rid foreign labor is precisely the point. “Our position is there should be no carveouts for anyone,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for restricting immigration. For FAIR, there is a simple solution to industries who say they can’t attract domestic workers: Raise pay.
“You can turn any job in this country into a job an American won’t do simply by degrading wages and working conditions. We shouldn’t do that,” Mehlman told Fortune. “Even in lower-skilled jobs, there are a lot of people looking for work at wages that can support their families. We should hold the employer accountable.”
Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, also came out against the carve-out, posting a poll on X indicating a majority of respondents disagreeing with the brief enforcement pause and retweeting a farm touting its citizens-only hiring policy. And rightwing commentator Matt Walsh posted, “Employers who knowingly rely on illegal immigrant labor should be in prison. Instead we’re going to back off of immigration enforcement for their sake? Hell no. We can’t tolerate this.”
Asked for clarification on the administration’s enforcement policy, Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to Fortune: “The President has been incredibly clear. There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts.”
“Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability. These operations target illegal employment networks that undermine American workers, destabilize labor markets and expose critical infrastructure to exploitation,” she said.
What will employers do?
What most observers agree on is this: Achieving the stated goal of 3,000 immigration arrests per day is near-impossible without sweeping up people whose only crime consists of unlawfully entering the U.S.
The full impact of these sweeps, however, remains to be seen. A Nebraska meatpacking plant that lost 76 employees to the state’s largest workplace raid to date has since been inundated with applications for the newly opened positions, NBC reported. And the optics of using a heavy militarized force to arrest low-level workers are turning off a large portion of Americans, according to Pappageorge. “When you bring the Marines in to arrest dishwashers and cooks and farmworkers it’s going to create a backlash—–not just in the industry but among citizens,” he said.
Employers bear a large part of the responsibility for the “broken immigration system,” he added. “The employers need to come to the table with the labor movement and the Democrats and Republicans that represent these massive industries,” he said.
It’s uncertain that will happen—at least not in the way MAGA envisions. The last time MAGA clashed with Trump’s business supporters it was over H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled immigrants to be hired in the U.S.—at the cost, according to critics, of undermining Americans’ wages. Trump, after having decried H-1B visas during the campaign, sided with business in that fight.
