The Trump administration has abruptly shifted the focus of its mass deportation campaign, telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to largely pause raids and arrests in the agricultural industry, hotels and restaurants, according to an internal email and three U.S. officials with knowledge of the guidance.
The decision suggested that the scale of President 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 Mr. Trump made a rare concession this week that his crackdown was hurting American farmers and hospitality businesses.
The guidance was sent on Thursday in an email by a senior ICE official, Tatum King, to regional leaders of the ICE department that generally carries out criminal investigations, including work site operations, known as Homeland Security Investigations.
“Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels,” he wrote in the message.
The email explained 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 “non-criminal collaterals,” a reference to people who are undocumented but who are not known to have committed any other crime.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the guidance.
“We will follow the president’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” Tricia McLaughlin, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement.
For months, Mr. Trump and his aides have said they would target all immigrants without legal status in the United States to make good on his campaign promise for mass deportations. While the administration came into office saying it would initially target undocumented immigrants with criminal records, it has in recent weeks expanded to raiding work sites and sweeping up other undocumented immigrants broadly.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump 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,” he said on social media.
Mr. Trump posted after Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, informed him of farmers who were concerned about the ICE enforcement affecting their businesses, according to a White House official and a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump has for decades owned luxury hotels, an industry with a strong immigrant labor force.
A former Trump administration official added that throughout his first term, Mr. Trump often heard concerns from some Republicans from rural states about how the immigration crackdown would hurt the agricultural industry.
The decision to scale back operations at work sites comes at a crucial time, and the implications of the guidance are still to be determined on the ground.
In recent weeks, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has publicly pushed for a “minimum” of 3,000 arrests per day.
Following Mr. Miller’s comments, arrests shot up to over 2,000 a day last week, and in recent days and weeks, ICE officials have conducted operations at restaurants, factories and business across the country.
One Department of Homeland Security official with knowledge of the email said that agents had felt the pressure for more arrests and that the guidance took them by surprise. Agents were still digesting the long-term implications without a direct signal from the White House about how to carry out the new guidance, the official said.
Mr. King seemed to acknowledge that the new guidance would hurt the quest for higher numbers of arrests.
“We acknowledge that by taking this off the table, that we are eliminating a significant # of potential targets,” he wrote.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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