The Department of Homeland Security decided that farmworkers and service workers are no longer off-limits for Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, reversing guidance that was less than a week old, according to The Washington Post.
Officials with ICE and DHS announced the change on a Monday call with some 30 field offices, the outlet reported, citing two unnamed sources.
President Donald Trump had declared “changes are coming” to his administration’s immigration policy after apparently hearing negative feedback from the owners of agricultural businesses, hotels and restaurants — many of which rely on immigrant workers to operate.
“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 Thursday on Truth Social.
He claimed without evidence that “criminals” who were “allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy” were then applying for the posts vacated by the longtime workers.
“This is not good,” Trump wrote.
But the pause, confirmed by a DHS official over the weekend, made it more difficult for immigration authorities to meet White House aide Stephen Miller’s push for 3,000 arrests per day. The brief order also had applied to meatpacking plants.
Miller has reportedly been urging ICE officers to juice their deportation numbers by simply showing up to Home Depot locations to look for immigrant day laborers to arrest instead of going through the typical process of researching and making lists of people suspected of being in the country without permission.
The Washington Post reported that Miller, the force behind much of Trump’s brutal immigration policy, privately opposed Trump’s move to shield farm and service workers from ICE.
The scale and indiscriminate nature of ICE’s raids have sparked protests in Los Angeles that spread to other cities around the country with significant immigrant populations. When a small portion of the Los Angeles demonstrations turned violent, Trump seized the opportunity to make a political statement by ordering the National Guard and Marine Corps into the city for the next several weeks, even though they currently offer limited utility and come with a hefty price tag.