On Wednesday morning, President Trump took a call from Brooke Rollins, his secretary of agriculture, who relayed a growing sense of alarm from the heartland.
Farmers and agriculture groups, she said, 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, Ms. Rollins said. 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.
She wasn’t the first person to try to get this message through to the president, nor was it the first time she had spoken to him about it. But the president was persuaded.
The next morning, he posted a message on his social media platform, Truth Social, that took an uncharacteristically softer tone toward the very immigrants he has spent much of his political career demonizing. Immigrants in the farming and hospitality industries are “very good, long time workers,” he said. “Changes are coming.”
Some influential Trump donors who learned about the post began reaching out to people in the White House, urging Mr. 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 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.”
It remains to be seen how effective the order will be and whether Mr. Trump will stick with his decision. Raids at other work sites, like the one in Los Angeles’s garment industry that led to mass protests, are still allowed. On Friday, the day after Mr. 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.
This account of Mr. Trump’s retreat is based on interviews with 11 people, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
“President Trump has always stood up for our farmers, who were a major part of his November victory, by working to negotiate fairer trade deals and cut red tape,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “He will continue to strengthen our agricultural industry and boost exports while keeping his promise to enforce our immigration laws and remove the millions of unvetted illegals who flooded into the United States under Joe Biden.”
‘Let’s go after the criminals’
The scope of Mr. Trump’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.
“We all need to focus on convicted criminal aliens,” Representative Tony Gonzalez, Republican of Texas, said on CNN this week. “If we focus there and we’re not going after the milker of cows who’s, you know, in 103-degree weather, going after that guy and we’re going after the convicted criminal, I think we’re on the right path.”
Representative Glenn Thompson, Republican of Pennsylvania and the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said ICE raids at farms were “just wrong.”
“They need to knock it off,” he told reporters this week. “Let’s go after the criminals and give us time to put processes in place so we don’t disrupt the food supply chain.”
During an agriculture committee hearing on Wednesday, he pressed Ms. Rollins about what the administration was doing to ensure ICE raids were not “impacting food security.”
Ms. Rollins said she had spoken about the issue to Mr. Trump both on Tuesday in the Oval Office and on Wednesday morning.
“This president’s commitment to ensuring that all laws are followed remains paramount,” Ms. Rollins said. But she added that Mr. Trump understood “the significant challenges” in finding the necessary farm labor.
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.”
Seth W. Christensen, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department, said Ms. Rollins “fully supports President Trump’s immigration agenda, starting with strong border security and deportations of all illegally present.” He added, “This agenda is essential to fixing a broken farm-labor economy and restoring integrity to the American work force.”
Protecting farmers
Mr. Trump has often made policy exceptions for farmers, a key base of support. In his first term, he provided farmers with billions of dollars in aid amid a trade war with China. He deemed agricultural laborers to be essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic. He even allowed their employers to provide them with letters to show law enforcement so they would not be deported.
In his second term, Mr. Trump has weighed a new round of emergency relief to farmers this year because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.
“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.
Farmers say they routinely resort to hiring workers without work authorization because they cannot find Americans willing to do the physically onerous work. Often, the workers have been paying Social Security taxes and other federal taxes for decades.
Half of the farmworkers interviewed for the National Agricultural Workers Survey, released in 2022 by the Labor Department, had spent 11 to 30 years on farms, and nearly one in five had done so for more than three decades. They were earning an average of $20,000 a year.
On Friday, there were reports that some immigration raids were still happening, according to groups that represent growers and farm workers in California.
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 Mr. 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,” Ms. Romero said.
“Even if ICE and the Border Patrol are not going directly to the field but are driving around agricultural areas,” she said, “that is enough for farm workers out there to be scared and still be detained.”
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.
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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