Deportation Nation: Trump’s ICE Dragnet Policies Are Failing— And Congressional Republicans Know It
- Howie Klein
- Jun 16
- 6 min read
Sowing Chaos, Reaping Rage: How Trump’s Crackdown Has Turned Against The GOP

Maybe that sour puss that Trump was displaying at his failed military parade/birthday bash was not because of the low turnout, but because he was thinking about being forced into changing his deportation plans. Over the weekend, the New York Times and other news outlets reported that Trump had overruled Stephen Miller it is “abruptly” shifting the focus of the mass deportations away from essential workers who ICE has been rounding up. The regime told ICE officials “to largely pause raids and arrests in the agricultural industry, hotels and restaurants… The decision suggested that the scale of 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.”
ICE agents were told by e-mail 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 undocumented but who are not known to have committed any crime.” The day before, Señor TACO had acknowledged that the crackdown might be alienating industries 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.’”
The next day, The Times reported in greater detail about Trump’s motivations for the switcheroo. It started with complaints from agribusiness. His Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told him that farmers and agriculture groups “were increasingly uneasy about his immigration crackdown. Federal agents had begun to aggressively target work sites in recent weeks, with the goal of sharply bolstering the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants. Farmers rely on immigrants to work long hours… She told the president that farm groups had been warning her that their employees would stop showing up to work out of fear, potentially crippling the agricultural industry.”
Some influential Trump donors who learned about the post began reaching out to people in the White House, urging Trump to include the restaurant sector in any directive to spare undocumented workers from enforcement.
Inside the West Wing, top White House officials were caught off guard— and furious at Rollins. Many of Trump’s top aides, particularly Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, have urged a hard-line approach, targeting all immigrants without legal status to fulfill the president’s promise of the biggest deportation campaign in American history.
This has long been the key Republican immigration dilemma: the ugly, virulent racism and xenophobia of the typical MAGAt vs the greed and selfishness of the GOP donor class, eager to exploit cheap (dependable) labor from other countries. The Times: “It remains to be seen how effective the order will be and whether Trump will stick with his decision. Raids at other work sites, like the one in Los Angeles’ garment industry that led to mass protests, are still allowed. On Friday, the day after Trump issued the new guidance, farm workers were being rounded up in the fields of Oxnard, 50 miles north of Los Angeles, according to advocates. But the president’s decision to shield farmers and the hospitality industry— a business he knows well from his years as an owner of luxury hotels— reveals the tension between his deportation efforts and concerns about maintaining crucial support in his political coalition.”
Trump and his henchmen had been warned about the ramifications of his deportation policies for years but, apparently, no one’s taking the warnings seriously. The Times reported that the scope of Señor Trumpanzyy’s “immigration crackdown has unsettled some Republicans as the raids on farms began disrupting operations. More than 40 percent of the nation’s crop workers have no legal immigration status, the Agriculture Department has estimated. On Tuesday, federal agents started fanning out across California’s vast agricultural area, from along the coast to the Central Valley. The raids spread chaos in Oxnard, which grows much of the nation’s strawberries, as well as in Kern and Tulare Counties, where vegetables, grapes and delicate fruit, like peaches, are starting to be harvested. Growers reported that 30 to 60 percent of workers stopped reporting to the fields in the days after the raids. Agricultural associations in California, Idaho and elsewhere, whose members are typically Republicans, have been bombarding their Senate and congressional offices to voice concerns.”
The Times expanded: “Immigrant advocates received a rash of calls from children trying to locate their parents who were being transported to detention facilities in Oxnard. Agents had been in the area much of the week, arresting workers in packing houses and in the fields, according to the Ventura County Farm Bureau. Many farms remained closed because of the presence of roving federal agents, particularly Border Patrol. ‘Agents were driving by, they would see workers and they would go into the fields to detain them,’ said Teresa Romero, the president of the United Farmworkers Union, which represents 10,000 field workers in California, Oregon, Washington and New York and presses for their interests nationwide. (In most states, farm workers have no legal right to unionize.) She said that Trump’s guidance did not go far enough to protect vulnerable, essential workers because it allowed enforcement to continue in rural towns. ‘If Trump is serious about protecting farm workers then the raids in the streets in agricultural areas have to stop right now,’ Romero said.”

Among the most vulnerable GOP incumbents during the midterm cycle are Members who represent agricultural interests, like David Valadao and Kevin Kiley in California; Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn in Iowa; Derrick Van Orden and Bryan Steil in Wisconsin; Juan Ciscomani in Arizona; Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry and Rob Bresnahan in Pennsylvania; Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler in New York; and Ryan Zinke in Montana. All of these members have aligned themselves so closely with Trump’s immigration agenda that they’re now lashed to the mast of a wildly unpopular and economically destructive policy. By backing Trump’s calls for mass deportations— often with public statements and hardline votes— they’ve made themselves complicit in a crackdown that’s enraged growers and ranchers, disrupted supply chains, and stoked chaos in the very industries their districts depend on. The recent backlash from agricultural groups and small business owners— not to mention traumatized families and human rights advocates— is a political time bomb as well as an election year policy headache. These Republicans can’t easily distance themselves now, even as the fallout intensifies. And since Señor TACO has already appeared to change course again to placate his base voters, they’ll look not just cruel but weak and hypocritical— a potentially lethal combination in districts where an increasing number of voters are already uneasy about extremism, instability and the real-world costs of MAGA governance.

This morning, Josh Wingrove reported that Señor TACO’s “move to ramp up federal immigration enforcement in large Democratically-controlled cities comes a week after the president acknowledged the impact his deportation agenda has had in rural communities hit hard by the loss of agricultural workers. The president said he would craft policy changes to cover farm and hotel industry workers, recognizing concerns from business leaders over the impact his crackdown on migration is having on some critical sectors of the country’s labor force.”
Still, some of the president’s most fervent supporters say they are unhappy with the change.
Jack Posobiec, a right-wing activist, said Saturday that Ms. Rollins was under pressure from outside groups, including Big Ag and wealthy donors, to scale back the president’s deportation plan.
“Why not focus on all illegals?” he said. “Sure, you know criminals go first. The violent illegals go first. But the policy should focus on all illegals.”
Mike Howell, the head of the Oversight Project, a conservative group, pointed to the news as proof that a mass deportation campaign was not happening in the way some expected.
“I think it would be to everyone’s benefit if we could end the shared fiction that mass deportations are happening,” he said on social media. “Elements of both the right and left know it to be false but pretend it is true, for different reasons.”

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