The sudden and complete reversal highlights a fundamental schism within the party of Trump: Wealthy hotel, hospitality, and agriculture executives and business owners have complained to Trump about losing a reliable workforce. But the MAGA base and immigration hardliners see the most stringent immigration enforcement policies as a core promise of the Trump campaign. The conflict between the two factions is playing out in real time as workers fear for their jobs and relatives while business leaders—many of whom believed that promised ICE raids would focus on criminals and gang members rather than law-abiding workers—watch their revenue streams go up in smoke.
“Fear is really the common thread,” said Emily Knight, president and CEO of the Texas Restaurant Association, a trade group that advocates for the restaurant industry in Texas, which employs 1.4 million workers. “The fear is not only the workforce not coming but customers staying home, and what that economic reality is.”
Foot traffic to restaurants has been dropping since Trump’s inauguration, with a particularly steep drop in heavily Mexican areas, according to data the TRA shared with Fortune.
“It’s a ridiculous fantasy that somehow you can deport the immigrants that are doing the work of this country and not blow up this economy,” said Ted Pappageorge, head of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents 60,000 hotel and hospitality workers in Las Vegas at hotels, restaurants and casinos.
The group represents a vastly diverse membership with immigrants from some 170 countries. Pappageorge noted that recent rapid-fire policy changes, such as revoking Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, quickly turned “legal” workers into “illegal ones.”
The change affected “thousands of workers in the state of Nevada, hundreds on the [Las Vegas] Strip,” he said. “They had permission; were law-abiding, going to work every day and powering this economy—they had their status revoked.”
It was a videotaped ICE raid on a New Mexico dairy that reportedly changed the president’s mind.
A routine check on June 3 escalated, and half the farmer’s workforce was arrested and ICE enforcers “even came into milking parlors with guns out pointed at cows,” Beverly Idsinga, executive director of Dairy Producers of New Mexico, told reporters this week. The dairy owner went from 50 employees to 24 employees overnight, she said. “He’s getting high school students on break; he’s stopping his farming operations,” Idsinga said.
Andy Harris, the Maryland Republican who chairs the highly influential conservative House Freedom Caucus, told reporters Tuesday he supported expanding legal visas for immigrant workers, including possibly creating a new category.
“With an unemployment rate of 4% you’re not going to find American workers for a lot of these tasks. You haven’t found them even when the unemployment rate was higher,” Harris said.
Harris was speaking at a press conference held by the American Business Immigration Coalition, which is pushing Congress to create a new type of long-term work visa for immigrants.
For a sizable contingent of Trump’s base, getting rid foreign labor is precisely the point. “Our position is there should be no carveouts for anyone,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for restricting immigration. For FAIR, there is a simple solution to industries who say they can’t attract domestic workers: Raise pay.
“You can turn any job in this country into a job an American won’t do simply by degrading wages and working conditions. We shouldn’t do that,” Mehlman told Fortune. “Even in lower-skilled jobs, there are a lot of people looking for work at wages that can support their families. We should hold the employer accountable.”
Asked for clarification on the administration’s enforcement policy, Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to Fortune: “The President has been incredibly clear. There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts.”
“Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability. These operations target illegal employment networks that undermine American workers, destabilize labor markets and expose critical infrastructure to exploitation,” she said.
What most observers agree on is this: Achieving the stated goal of 3,000 immigration arrests per day is near-impossible without sweeping up people whose only crime consists of unlawfully entering the U.S.
Employers bear a large part of the responsibility for the “broken immigration system,” he added. “The employers need to come to the table with the labor movement and the Democrats and Republicans that represent these massive industries,” he said.
