Trump Reiterates His Promise To Protect Farm and Hospitality Workers From 'Pretty Vicious' Deportation

The president is torn between the economic concerns of his supporters and the demands of immigration hardliners.

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 attended the Des Moines rally, brought the issue to his attention. "You were the one that brought this whole situation up," he said to her at the rally. "Brooke Rollins brought it up, and she said, 'So we have a little problem. The farmers are losing a lot of people.'"

Trump has repeatedly promised to execute "the largest deportation program in American history"—a goal that he reiterated in Des Moines. Yet he sounded surprisingly sympathetic toward at least some of the people affected by that crackdown. "These people…work so hard," he said. "They bend over all day. We don't have too many people [who] can do that." He added that "some of the farmers…cry when they see [immigration raids] happen." He alluded to "cases where…people have worked for a farmer on a farm for 14, 15 years" and "then they get thrown out, pretty viciously." His conclusion: "We can't do it. We've got to work with the farmers and people that have hotels and leisure properties."

If the agricultural sector's reliance on undocumented workers somehow was news to Trump even after he served as president for four years, he should have been intimately familiar from his own businesses with the potential impact of immigration enforcement on the hospitality industry. In 2023, the American Immigration Council estimated, U.S. hotels and restaurants employed 1.1 million unauthorized workers, 7.6 percent of the total work force.

Trump did not mention construction. But last September, the National Immigration Forum estimated that undocumented workers accounted for "almost a quarter" of employees in that industry.

It was completely predictable, in other words, that a broad crackdown on unauthorized U.S. residents that included workplace raids would have an outsized impact on several kinds of businesses, generating the complaints to which Trump has intermittently responded. "We're going to have a system of signing them up so they don't have to go," he said during a visit to the "Alligator Alcatraz" immigration detention center in Florida on July 1, referring to undocumented farm workers. "They're not going to have citizenship, but they'll be working. They'll be paying taxes. We need to get our farmers the people they need….Without those people, you're not going to be able to run your farm."

In Des Moines, Trump acknowledged that "serious radical-right people, who I also happen to like a lot," may not be "quite as happy" as the farmers with that solution. "But they'll understand," he suggested. "Won't they? Do you think so?"

Probably not. "If you want to break our coalition, go and push amnesty," warned conservative activist Charlie Kirk, executive director of Turning Point USA. "That right there would be a complete collapse of everything that we have worked for."

Conservative commentator Michael J. Knowles likewise rejected Trump's promises of forbearance and accommodation. "Eleven million to 16 million illegal aliens in this country," he said on his Daily Wire show. "If you want to actually start to rectify that situation, you can't just deport the ones with face tattoos. You do, kind of, have to deport abuela. You do eventually, at least. You can't have just random carve-outs."

Trump is avowedly ambivalent. "I'm on both sides of the thing," he said on Fox News last month. "I'm the strongest immigration guy that there's ever been, but I'm also the strongest farmer guy that there's ever been. And that includes also hotels and, you know, places where people work."

Polling suggests that most Americans share that ambivalence. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early June, 54 percent of respondents opposed "more raids where people in the U.S. illegally may be working," and 65 percent thought "there should be a way for undocumented immigrants to stay in the country legally, if requirements are met." Despite Trump's rhetorical emphasis on deporting criminals, 57 percent of respondents anticipated that his immigration policies would have "no impact" on crime or lead to "more crime." A plurality (46 percent) thought those policies would make the U.S. economy "weaker," while just 34 percent said they would make it "stronger."