Trump shifts deportation focus, pausing raids on farms, hotels and eateries

Hamed Aleaziz And Zolan Kanno-Youngs / The New York Times

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration has abruptly shifted the focus of its mass deportation campaign, telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to largely pause raids and arrests in the agricultural industry, hotels and restaurants, according to an internal email and three U.S. officials with knowledge of the guidance.

The decision suggested that the scale of President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign — an issue that is at the heart of his presidency — is hurting industries and constituencies that he does not want to lose.

The new guidance comes after protests in Los Angeles against the Trump administration's immigration raids, including at farms and businesses. It also came as Trump made a rare concession this week that his crackdown was hurting American farmers and hospitality businesses.

The guidance was sent Thursday in an email by a senior ICE official, Tatum King, to regional leaders of the ICE department that generally carries out criminal investigations, including worksite operations, known as Homeland Security Investigations.

"Effective today, please hold on all worksite enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels," he wrote in the message.

The email explained that investigations involving “human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling into these industries are OK.” But it said — crucially — that agents were not to make arrests of “noncriminal collaterals,” a reference to people who are living in the country illegally but who are not known to have committed any crime.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the guidance.

“We will follow the president's direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America's streets,” Tricia McLaughlin, a department spokesperson, said in a statement.

For months, Trump and his aides have said they would target all immigrants without legal status in the United States to make good on his campaign promise for mass deportations. Although the administration came into office saying it would initially target immigrants living in the country illegally and who had criminal records, it has in recent weeks expanded to raiding worksites and sweeping up other unauthorized immigrants broadly.

On Thursday, Trump acknowledged that the crackdown might be alienating industries that he wanted to keep on his side.

“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 said on social media.

Trump posted after Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, informed him of farmers who were concerned about the ICE enforcement affecting their businesses, according to a White House official and a person familiar with the matter. Trump has for decades owned luxury hotels, an industry with a strong immigrant labor force.

A former Trump administration official added that throughout his first term, Trump often heard concerns from some Republicans from rural states about how the immigration crackdown would hurt the agricultural industry.

The decision to scale back operations at worksites comes at a crucial time, and the implications of the guidance are still to be determined on the ground. The guidance did not appear to rule out raids at worksites in other industries, like the one at a garment factory in Los Angeles that sparked the protests.

In recent weeks, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has publicly pushed for a “minimum” of 3,000 arrests per day.

After Miller's comments, arrests shot up to over 2,000 a day last week, and in recent days and weeks, ICE officials have conducted operations at restaurants, factories and other businesses across the country.

A Department of Homeland Security official with knowledge of the email said that agents had felt the pressure for more arrests and that the guidance took them by surprise. Agents were still digesting the long-term implications without a direct signal from the White House about how to carry out the new guidance, the official said.

King seemed to acknowledge that the new guidance would hurt the quest for higher numbers of arrests.

“We acknowledge that by taking this off the table, that we are eliminating a significant # of potential targets,” he wrote.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.