The president acknowledges the need to accommodate farmers, hoteliers, and leisure business operators who have illegal immigrant employees.
President Donald Trump says he’ll issue an order to address illegal farm and hotel workers as protests against immigration enforcement efforts spread nationwide.
As current and future deportation protests are seizing national attention, the president suggested there will be an order “pretty soon” tackling the issue of illegal immigrants who work in agriculture, hospitality, and other industries.
On June 12, Trump said on his Truth Social account that farmers, hoteliers, and leisure business operators are telling him “our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, longtime workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
“Changes are coming!” the president said early Thursday.
Later at a press event, he followed up with additional commentary suggesting that there needs to be a different policy for illegal immigrant workers who have proven their ability and loyalty to their employers.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon,” Trump said. “I think we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure and hotels.”
The comments came shortly after the president authorized the deployment of Marines and National Guardsmen to quell riots in Los Angeles that originally began in response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in California. The unrest has inspired similar, smaller protests in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Washington, New York, Atlanta, and Chicago. More than 100 protests are expected to take place across the country on June 14.
In a June 12 CNBC interview, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said the president’s options are limited. Most of what needs to happen depends on Congress, she said.
“The president understands that we can’t feed our nation or the world without that labor force, and he’s listening to the farmers on that,” Rollins said.
In an earlier interview with The Epoch Times, Chuck Conner, a former secretary of agriculture, said it’s reasonable to estimate that at least 1 million illegal immigrants are employed in America’s agriculture industry. Connor, now the CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, said that figure accounts for at least 50 percent, if not 60 percent, of the farming and ranching workforce.
