Just days after announcing a pause in immigration operations targeting undocumented workers in farms, hotels, and restaurants, the Trump administration has reversed its decision.
According to information published by The Washington Post and relayed by The Independent, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) instructed immigration agents to resume raids in these sectors during a Monday morning call with about thirty regional ICE offices.
The previous week, the DHS had briefly suspended operations, admitting that intensified deportation efforts were depriving certain sectors of essential labor. This acknowledgment came directly from President Donald Trump, who wrote on his Truth Social platform:
“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.”
He then added: “This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
These unusually conciliatory remarks hinted at a possible shift in the White House’s immigration policy. During a press conference the same day, the president even acknowledged the key role played by undocumented immigrants in agriculture:
“Our farmers are being hurt badly because they have very good workers who have worked for them for 20 years. They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be, you know… great,” Donald Trump said, before adding:
“We can’t just 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.”
Under normal circumstances, this statement would reflect a significant shift in immigration policy under any other American administration.
But this moment of presidential clarity quickly clashed with the hardline stance of Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House and chief architect of the administration’s immigration policies. Miller, a staunch supporter of mass deportation strategies, reportedly called Democratic leaders’ resistance to ICE raids—particularly in Los Angeles—an attempt to “overthrow the U.S. government,” according to The Independent.
As the White House exhibited these internal tensions, hundreds of Marines and thousands of National Guard members were deployed to Los Angeles, where large-scale protests denounced ICE operations in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods.
By the following Sunday, any sense of de-escalation had vanished. In a new message posted on Truth Social, Trump urged federal agents to resume large-scale operations:
“Do all in your power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” declared the leader of the far-right MAGA movement.
“You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!” he added.
A paradoxical statement, considering his willingness just days earlier to temporarily spare agricultural areas.
According to The Independent, influential administration officials, including Miller, continue to push for an accelerated pace of arrests, with a target of 3,000 ICE apprehensions per day.
However, the White House acknowledges that this threshold has not yet been met. Even worse, resources allocated to these massive operations may soon run out: the agency could run out of funding as early as next month due to the scale of ongoing deportations, as reported by Reuters, The Independent, and The New York Times, among others.
Source: The Independent
