As current and future deportation protests are seizing national attention, the president suggested that 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 that the administration’s “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 on June 12.
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.
Connor, who spoke with The Epoch Times in May, said there has been a drive for decades to offer some kind of pathway to legal employment for those workers. However, none of those efforts have made it out of Congress.
There was a glimmer of hope for change, Connor said, when Trump said during an April Cabinet meeting that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said there should be a way for “certain people” who are strongly recommended by farmers to “stay in for a while and work with the farmers and then come back and go through a legal process.”
“We have to take care of our farmers,” the president said in April.
Mexican migrant workers harvest organic parsley at Grant Family Farms in Wellington, Colo., on Oct. 11, 2011. John Moore/Getty Images
The fruit and vegetable sectors are particularly reliant on illegal immigrant labor, according to Connor. These are physically difficult jobs with long hours and seasonal demand swings based on which crop is ready.
In 2021, nearly 55 percent of hired crop farmworkers were “not legally authorized to work in the United States,” according to a Department of Agriculture farm labor report most recently updated in January. That percentage has grown from 14 percent in 1991.
If these workers were to quit and leave the country suddenly, America’s farms would be severely shorthanded, Zeke Hernandez, a Max and Bernice Garchik Family presidential associate professor at Pennsylvania University’s Wharton School, told The Epoch Times in May.
“Food producers of all kinds will have to reduce output because they can’t hire enough people,” Hernandez said in an email. “They'll have to operate fewer shifts and produce less in each shift. That will mean shortages of food and thus inflation.”
Strictly speaking, it is illegal for U.S. employers to knowingly hire illegal immigrant workers. However, enforcement of that rule has been uneven for decades, Connor said, and many agricultural employers rely on labor contractors or use paperwork of questionable validity to skirt the law.
The H-2A visa program, which provides seasonal work permits for agricultural workers, is one legal option. But farmers complain that the process is burdensome, costly, and poorly suited to year-round operations like dairy or poultry production, according to Conner. In fiscal year 2023, the State Department received 378,000 H-2A applications and issued 310,000 visas, up from 48,000 in 2005.
For years, the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, which lobbies on behalf of America’s farmer cooperatives, has called for a three-point plan that could address many of the issues contributing to that black market situation.
First, Connor said, there needs to be what he called a “blue card”—referencing the permanent resident “green card” allowing a noncitizen to live and work in the U.S. legally— that will enable farmworkers who have been in the United States for an extended period to expand residency and employment privileges. Second, he called for expanding the H-2A program to allow for full-time work and simplifying the application process. Third, E-Verify—a system that confirms whether new hires are legally authorized to work—should be temporarily suspended until these reforms are made.
While the Republican Party is firmly against illegal immigration, Connor said he believes that change can come under the Trump administration because even staunch opponents of illegal immigration realize the potential economic impact on rural America if many of those farmworkers were to leave.
“President Trump and today’s Republican Party are cognizant of the importance of rural America in their political coalition,” Conner said.
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