President Donald Trump’s deputies have reversed the short-lived ICE exemption policy for hotel, farm, and restaurant companies, according to the Washington Post.
The newspaper reported the ICE reversal late on Monday:
Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including its Homeland Security Investigations division, told agency leaders in a call Monday that agents must continue conducting immigration raids at agricultural businesses, hotels and restaurants, according to two people familiar with the call. The new instructions were shared in an 11 a.m. call to representatives from 30 field offices across the country.
On Monday, Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLoughlin told Fox: “We continue to enforce the law … there is no safe harbor.”
The restoration of Trump’s original policy is good news for ordinary Americans, millions of whom have been pushed aside by employers’ preference for the desperate migrants who are willing to accept lower wages or salaries in exchange for living in the United States.
Wealthy donors, investors, and lobbyists lost the round, the Post noted:
business and industry groups have been heavily lobbying the White House, as well as Senate and congressional offices, pleading for an end to the [enforcement] crackdown. Rebecca Shi, chief executive of the American Business Immigration Coalition, said the pause officials put in place last week had signaled to many employers that the president was “open to a solution.”
The American Business Immigration Coalition is entwined with FWD.us, the lobbying group for West Coast investors who directed and profited from President Joe Biden’s disastrous open-borders policy.
Trump’s low-immigration policy is shocking to many business owners who have become dependent on the government-extracted flood of migrants since 1990.
But CEOs are discovering that millions of sidelined or underpaid Americans are willing to take open jobs when ICE deports illegal workers. For example, NBC reported on June 15:
Every seat in the waiting area of Glenn Valley Foods was occupied with people filling out job applications early Thursday afternoon, two days after the meatpacking plant became the center of the largest worksite immigration raid in the state of Nebraska so far this year. Dozens of prospective employees, many of them Spanish speakers, had been coming in and out of the plant all day. Some were hoping to land a new job; others were coming in for training. [Emphasis added.]
Trump’s popular policy is also improving the economy by pushing many companies to invest in high-tech productivity tools that allow higher profits for investors, plus higher wages for Americans.
On June 6, for example, knlvradio.com reported the huge JBS meatpacking firm had signed a deal that gives pay raises, paid sick leave, and a pension plan to 26,000 meatpacking workers. The article was headlined “Groundbreaking Union Contract Brings Major Gains for JBS Workers Across the U.S.”
“I’ve been working at JBS for 10 years, and when I got the news about the pension, I was excited,” said Thelma Cruz, who works at the JBS Pork plant in Marshalltown, Iowa. “My husband also works here, and when we retire, we will both get pension checks every month.”
Before Trump’s election, JBS was able to reject the employees’ demand for higher pay because Biden’s deputies provided it with fresh batches of healthy workers via a variety of quasi-legal and illegal migration paths. For example, Biden’s deputies smuggled Haitian migrants to the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, prompting a Wall Street Journal headline: “Meatpacking giant JBS found workers, while new employees found grim living conditions; ‘worse than being in jail.'” The article said:
A JBS human-resources supervisor arranged for some of the [Haitian] workers to stay at the Rainbow Motel, a mile down the road from the plant, where they lived for weeks. They slept on the floor, as many as eight to a room, and cooked meals on hot plates on the carpet. JBS footed the bill.
The supervisor, himself an immigrant from the African nation of Benin, set up others to stay in a five-bedroom, two-bathroom unit he had leased in a house in town. There, too, they slept on floors. At one point, 30 or more people were living there, workers said. When the power went out in the winter, they cooked in their coats. They were charged $60 a week in rent.
The Democrats’ extraction of human resources from Haiti was blocked when the public elected Trump in November.
Some farms complained about the ICE exemption, saying it provided a government advantage for farms that break the nation’s laws.
Just wanted to reiterate—we only hire US citizens on our farm and in our meat packing plant.
— Meriwether Farms (@MeriwetherFarms) June 15, 2025
All of our full-time employees have health care. We can do this by being vertically integrated and diversified.
Most small operations like ours rely on family members, hire locals or,…
Similarly, a growing number of farmers are buying labor-saving robot milkers for the arduous and endless task of milking cows:
