Timeline:
June 16: Leadership at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reversed the June 12 directive to not conduct arrests and raids at farms, hotels, and restaurants, via a phone call to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staff at 30 field offices across the country.
June 12: Trump posted on social media that “changes are coming” in terms of immigration enforcement in the agricultural and hospitality industries. That evening, a senior ICE official sent an email directive to regional ICE offices instructing them to “hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations” in agriculture, restaurants, and hotels. (The email has not been made public.)
June 11, 2025: Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins reportedly told President Trump that farmers and agricultural groups were concerned about arrests and worksite raids targeting their employees, and the negative impact that this type of immigration enforcement would have on food production and prices.
Impact: It remains unclear what impact, if any, the June 12 directive to ICE may have had on actual ICE actions in agriculture and hospitality. Reuters reported that ICE’s daily quota to make 3,000 arrests per would remain in effect, in part because “ICE field office heads had raised concerns they could not meet the quota without raids at the businesses that had been exempted.”
Industries like agriculture, hospitality, construction, meat processing, and restaurants employ significant shares of foreign-born workers, including unauthorized immigrant workers. Any significant enforcement in those industries will leave employers without workers, make it more difficult for U.S. residents to access goods and services, raise prices, and generally shrink the economy and lead to job loss. Trump’s temporary pause on immigration enforcement in certain industries was a likely acknowledgement of that—after intense lobbying by employer groups, a key constituency for Trump and the Republican party, who have made the case to others in the Trump administration that their businesses will be harmed. But the Trump administration’s desire to prioritize deporting as many people as possible, despite the costs and negative impacts, appears to have outweighed the concerns of industry representatives, at least temporarily. As EPI and others have documented extensively, aggressive crackdowns on undocumented workers put them and those working alongside them at further risk of suffering economic harms or workplace exploitation, even if they are not detained or deported.