Two of the Trump administration’s top figures overseeing Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans were furious with a White House official who tried to persuade the president not to target workers in the agriculture and leisure industries.
White House Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—dubbed “ICE Barbie” for her stylized anti-immigration photo ops—were enraged after learning that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had called Trump and suggested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents avoid deporting longtime workers in sectors heavily reliant on migrant labor, Axios reported.
Rollins’ intervention—which one insider described as “minimal”—appeared to sway the president. Last week, Trump floated the idea of carving out exemptions from his mass deportation plans specifically to avoid targeting non-criminal workers on farms and in hotels.
An official policy shift followed soon after. Senior ICE official Tatum King informed regional ICE offices Thursday that “investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meatpacking plants), restaurants, and operating hotels” would be paused.
Miller, the architect of many of Trump’s hardline immigration policies, had been pushing for ICE to detain at least 3,000 migrants a day and was especially opposed to any industry-specific exemptions. Miller, Noem and other hardline anti-immigration officials then sought to change the policy back to where it was before Rollins got in Trump’s ear, reported Axios.
That pressure campaign seemed to work. On Sunday, Trump ramped up his rhetoric and urged ICE officials to “achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in history,” including targeting Democratic-led cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.
By Monday, the Department of Homeland Security reversed course, notifying staff that the previous guidelines were scrapped and that ICE would resume raids on agricultural businesses, hotels, and restaurants, The Washington Post reported.
The White denied the reports of a fued within the White House over the deportation policies.
“The entire Trump Administration is moving in the same direction to fulfill the President’s promises and remove illegal aliens from the United States,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast. “We will continue to prioritize removing the worst of the worst, especially in dangerous, Democrat-run sanctuary cities. But anyone who is in the United States illegally is, and has always been, at risk of deportation.”
In a statement, Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of pro-immigration group America’s Voice, said the flip-flopping underscores that “political blowback is building.”
“Look no further than Trump saying he now wants to reverse course to stop deportation of farmworkers, restaurant and hospitality workers,” Cárdenas said. “Even if Stephen Miller gets his way and the supposed ‘pause’ isn’t real, the initial announcement from the Trump White House is a telling admission about the political and economic blowback of mass deportation.”
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