Trump's abrupt policy switch on immigration benefits top donors

During the 2024 campaign, President Trump excoriated all "illegals," calling them "animals" and claiming they were "poisoning the blood of our country." Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, Trump said his goal was to deport every undocumented immigrant in the country. "I think you have to do it," Trump said. "They came in illegally."

In late May, top Trump aide Stephen Miller directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to increase arrests to 3,000 per day — roughly triple the agency's previous high-water mark. The directive prompted ICE to begin targeting workplaces in industries known to employ a large number of undocumented workers, including agriculture, construction, hospitality, and textiles.

Then, Trump abruptly changed his policy. In a Truth Social post last week, Trump said his "very aggressive policy on immigration" was taking "very good, long time workers" away from the agricultural and hospitality industries. These workers, Trump said, are "almost impossible to replace." Therefore, "Changes are coming!"

Two days later, on June 12, a senior ICE official, Tatum King, sent a message to ICE staff formalizing the new policy: "Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels." There is an exception for investigations involving "human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling into these industries." But even in those cases "noncriminal collaterals" — any undocumented workers who are not implicated in a crime — are to be left alone.

The remarkable reversal directly benefits some of the largest donors to Trump's political operation.

Pilgrim's Pride, the second-largest poultry processor in the U.S., was the single largest donor to Trump's inaugural committee. It is the U.S. subsidiary of Brazilian agricultural giant JBS. The company's $5 million donation was more than "the contributions from Apple’s CEO plus Amazon, Meta, and Google combined."

Pilgrim's Pride, which processes one out of every six chickens in the United States, has a record of employing undocumented immigrants to keep its vast operations humming. According to a June 2024 investigation by Mountain State Spotlight, the company's chicken processing plant in Moorefield, West Virginia employed undocumented immigrants for decades. Mountain State Spotlight found that the immigrant workforce was exposed to extraordinarily dangerous conditions at the plant, and serious injuries were commonplace. But "some managers have leveraged… employees’ immigration status to keep them working."

In December 2007, ICE arrested "25 people involved in a scheme to secure jobs for illegal immigrants at Pilgrim's Pride plants in East Texas," including "human resources employees at the company." That was followed by April 2008 ICE raids "of Pilgrim's Pride plants in Texas, Florida, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Tennessee," which identified 338 undocumented workers. To settle the matter, Pilgrim's Pride paid $4.5 million to a federal law enforcement fund. (The company did not admit to any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.)

Ronald Cameron, the owner and chairman of Mountaire, the fourth-largest poultry producer in the United States, donated $3 million to pro-Trump super PACs during the 2024 election cycle: $2 million to Preserve America PAC in October 2024 and $1 million to Make America Great Again Inc. in July 2024. Cameron also donated $2 million to pro-Trump super PACs in 2016 and $1.3 million in 2020.

Mountaire also has a history of using undocumented workers to power its operations. A 2021 investigation by Scalawag Magazine found that Mountaire relied on third-party staffing agencies that "actively recruit undocumented immigrants." The arrangement allowed Mountaire "to outsource the liability of hiring undocumented workers directly."

These investigations just scratched the surface of the reliance of the meatpacking industry on unauthorized workers. Overall, according to an expert at the American Immigration Council, about "23 percent of workers in the meatpacking industry are undocumented."

Hospitality for the undocumented

Trump has spent most of his career in the hospitality industry, operating numerous hotels, resorts, and golf courses under his brand. Not coincidentally, many of Trump's largest donors are his colleagues in the industry.

Miriam Adelson, the owner of the Las Vegas Sands corporation, which operates hotels and casinos, spent $136 million to elect Trump during the 2024 election. Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites of America, donated over $14 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., and an additional $1 million to cover Trump's legal bills. Bigelow had a two-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-lago in 2024.

There is no direct evidence that either Las Vegas Sands or Budget Suites of America employs undocumented workers. But undocumented immigrants make up about 8% of employees in the leisure and hospitality industry. (Undocumented immigrants are employed less frequently by casinos than regular hotels, since the industry is highly regulated.)

Moreover, many of Trump's properties have a long history of employing workers without legal authorization to work in the U.S.

In December 2018, two housekeepers who had worked for Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey golf resort came forward to say that they had been working for years for the Trump organization with phony papers. They told reporters that their supervisors had known about their immigration status and that they were far from the only undocumented workers employed at the Bedminster club. Over the next year, dozens of undocumented workers were fired from multiple Trump properties. But not before more reports emerged uncovering the extent of the reliance of Trump’s resorts on underpaid undocumented immigrants.

In February 2019, the Washington Post reported that since the Bedminster golf resort was opened in 2002, it had knowingly employed several undocumented workers to do construction, groundskeeping, and housekeeping. While the Trump family denied knowing about the legal status of some Bedminster employees, the Post found that supervisors were aware that their employees were providing them fake work-authorization documents and social security numbers.

When asked by reporters at the time whether he knew about the undocumented workers on his properties, Trump said, “Well, that I don’t know. Because I don’t run it… But I would say this: Probably every club in the United States has that, because it seems to me, from what I understand, a way that people did business.”

Trump says immigration enforcement will target political opponents

First, Trump carved out exceptions to his immigration policies that benefit his political benefactors. Then, on Sunday evening, Trump posted on Truth Social that, moving forward, immigration raids will focus on areas populated by his political opponents:

[W]e must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center… These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities.

Trump falsely claimed that Democrats "use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State." This is a version of the racist "great replacement" conspiracy theory, which posits that immigration is part of a plot by Democrats to marginalize and "replace" white Republicans.

Late Monday, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had reversed course again and would resume workplace raids in the agricultural and hospitality industry. The back and forth represents a power struggle between well-connected corporate interests and immigration hawks at the White House.