Inside Trump's Extraordinary Turnaround on Immigration Raids
President Trump's decision to pause most raids targeting farms and hospitality workers took many inside the White House by surprise. It came after intensive lobbying by his agriculture secretary.
Inside the West Wing, top White House officials were caught off guard--and furious at Ms. Rollins. Many of Mr. 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.
But the decision had been made. Later on Thursday, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tatum King, sent an email to regional leaders at the agency informing them of new guidance. Agents were to "hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels."
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.
"It's entirely predictable that Trump would backpedal on enforcement in the sectors he cares about " hospitality, where his own businesses operate, and agriculture, where his voters are over represented," said Wayne Cornelius, a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, who researched immigrant labor.
