Trump struggles to press deportations without damaging the economy

Chief Executive Gary Rohwer can’t see a future that doesn’t include immigrant workers. “Without them, there wouldn’t be an industry," he said.

President Trump’s aggressive deportation push has slammed into an economic reality: Key industries in the U.S. rely heavily on workers living in the U.S. illegally, many of them for decades. That presents a major challenge for the administration unfolding in real time, with business leaders urging a softer approach while anti-immigration hard-liners demand more deportations.

The conflict could be difficult to untangle—and public signs are emerging of a clash within the administration. The Department of Homeland Security late last week directed immigration officers to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels, stressing that sweeps should focus on people in the U.S. illegally who have criminal backgrounds.

“Severe disruptions to our food supply would harm Americans," wrote Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on X Sunday. “It took us decades to get into this mess and we are prioritizing deportations in a way that will get us out."

At the same time, DHS appeared to walk back its own directive from last week.

Demonstrators march through downtown Los Angeles on the fifth day of protests against ICE agents in the city.

In a letter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement leadership over the weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem doubled down on the administration’s efforts to deport millions of people living in the country illegally. “[W]e must dramatically intensify arrest and removal operations nationwide," she wrote in the letter, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “This is a nonnegotiable national priority."

ICE agents will be judged “every day by how many arrests you, your teammates and your office are able to effectuate," she wrote, adding, “Failure is not an option."

She also said worksite enforcement—the types of raids that had been exempted for some industries in guidance issued days earlier—remained “a cornerstone" of the president’s deportation plan: “There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts."

A Homeland Security spokeswoman said on Monday that ICE isn’t ruling out worksite enforcement at farms, restaurants, and hotels, and will give priority to places that are thought to be employing people with criminal records. A White House official said the administration is expanding deportation efforts in major cities, but added that “anyone present in the United States illegally is at risk of deportation."

The Trump administration and other conservatives argue that illegal immigration has robbed American workers of jobs, depressed wages and strained public resources. Administration officials believe that once those living in the U.S. illegally are evicted, the economy will improve for American workers.

“We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities," Trump wrote in a Sunday Truth Social post, specifically calling out cities led by Democrats, such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Undocumented workers, he continued, are “robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens."

The recent fluctuations in the Trump administration’s stance followed weeks of pressure from industry groups that predated the latest raids. Farm and meatpacking representatives argued that labor shortfalls loomed if current policy continued, and that the result could be higher food prices, according to trade groups and company lobbyists.

The hospitality industry told administration officials that it faced acute workforce shortages and lobbied for more temporary visas for hotel workers, said Rosanna Maietta, chief executive of the American Hotel & Lodging Association.

Immigrants living in the U.S. illegally account for about 4.4% of the U.S. workforce, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis of 2023 census data. But their share of the workforce in some industries is much higher, the analysis found: 19% in landscaping services, 17% in crop production, 16% in animal slaughtering and processing and 13% in construction.

Roughly 12 million people immigrated to the U.S. from 2021 to 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office, many of them either illegally or through an emergency process set up by the Biden administration. Many now have some kind of temporary permission to stay in the country and work, though they could ultimately face removal. Others sneaked into the country or overstayed visas.

The newcomers provided the economy with an infusion of working-age people eager for jobs. Immigration boosted economic growth in recent years and helped cool a job market that was in danger of overheating by “rebalancing the tightest parts of the labor market, where wage and price pressures were most extreme," Goldman Sachs economists wrote in a note last year.

A migrant worker on a farm in Homestead, Fla., in April.

Industries that rely on migrant labor have been adding jobs at a slower rate than other private-sector employers since last summer, when the number of people entering the U.S. began to fall, according to an analysis by economist Jed Kolko. The number of foreign-born people either working or looking for work fell by about one million from March to May. While economists caution that data may not be reliable, some say the trend suggests that many living here illegally have dropped out of the labor force.

How much of that is because of raids is unclear. But employers across the country said that the enforcement actions disrupted businesses. ICE agents arrested 16 workers at a warehouse in North Bergen, N.J., in February. Last month, agents arrested 53 workers at a hotel construction site in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

In late May, immigration agents raided a popular San Diego restaurant, claiming that 19 employees had used false immigration documents to get hired. Officers inside detained a few workers, then exited through the back entrance to avoid a crowd of protesters that had formed outside the restaurant, according to Anaclaudia Uribe, a hostess who was arriving to work at the time. The restaurant shut down all seven of its locations for two days.

Ron Robbins, who runs a family farm in Sackets Harbor, N.Y., has been short-handed since March, when he says around 45 immigration agents showed up.

ICE agents searched the 8,000-acre operation that milks 1,500 cows and grows corn, soybeans and some produce, then arrested eight people they said were in the country illegally. One of the detainees was a Guatemalan man who worked as the top assistant to the farm’s tourist business, Robbins said.

Since the raid on his property, Robbins, a 4th-generation farmer, said family members are working 18-hour days to keep the operation going, except for the strawberry patch. “We don’t have enough people to do this work," he said. “It’s a no-win situation."

At a construction site in Tallahassee, Fla., workers were pouring the concrete foundation for a 220-unit student housing development the morning of May 29 when federal authorities swarmed the 5-acre site, according to project supervisor Joe Caliendo, who saw the chaos unfolding from an elevated deck. Federal agents climbed over fences and ordered everyone to form two lines: U.S. citizens and noncitizens.

Those who could prove their citizenship or legal status were released. Noncitizens who didn’t have their paperwork with them—or said they had it in their cars across the street—were loaded onto buses and driven away. The agents from ICE, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies arrested more than 100 of the 175 workers on the site.

The raid interrupted the work, and soon the concrete in the unfinished foundation was at risk of hardening. Caliendo called his subcontractors in a panic to find replacement staff to complete the job. It would have cost millions of dollars to redo the process.

The next day, about 20 employees showed up to work, several of whom had been detained and then released the day before. A few dozen more came back over the next week. Many were scared to return.

By now, Hedrick Brothers Construction, the company leading the project, has worked with its subcontractors to restaff the project to near full capacity. But rehiring has been an uphill battle.

The U.S. construction sector is facing a major labor shortage, with a need for about 500,000 more workers, by some estimates. That gaping shortage is part of why undocumented workers have become a vital part of getting construction done.

“I don’t want anybody to think that people are hiring undocumented people to save money," said Caliendo, who added that the workers hired by his subcontractors get paid between $20 and $50 per hour on average. “They hire them because nobody else will do the work they do or work as hard as they do."

Caliendo figures the raid set back the project by about three weeks. The student housing development, located off the Florida State University campus, has a hard deadline: late August, when students start moving in. If Hedrick Brothers misses it, the company will be charged tens of thousands of dollars for each late day.

The enforcement operation at Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha was equally disruptive. When federal agents stormed in and started rounding up workers, some fled to the roof or hid behind pallets in a freezer, Rohwer said. Of the company’s 150 employees who directly handled meat—nearly all of whom were Hispanic immigrants—about 75 were arrested and loaded onto buses. Two-thirds of the remaining ones didn’t show up to work the next day.

As of Monday morning, Glenn Valley Foods was working at about 20% of capacity.

Rohwer said other meat processing companies in Omaha told him that word of the raid spread so quickly that many workers at those facilities, fearful of additional enforcement actions, walked off their jobs shortly after.

Workers on the production line at Glenn Valley Foods earn $18 to $19 an hour, Rohwer said. It is tough work—marinating, pressing and slicing meat in a room chilled to 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

“They are hardworking, show up on time, don’t complain," Rohwer said. “If you take the Hispanics out of this country, it’s going to be terrible."

Many of the arrested workers had been with the company for 10 years or more and were like family, Rohwer said. Company administrators cook Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for production workers.

Rohwer said that since starting the company 18 years ago, he has used the E-Verify system, a government program meant to weed out fake documents by comparing information from a worker’s I-9 employment eligibility verification form to records available to federal agencies. He thought that once they were cleared by the program, he could assume they were legitimate.

Rohwer is now trying to get operations back to normal and bring on new workers. He said he received more than 100 applications in the aftermath of the raid, and had begun hiring some. All but about five of the new applicants are immigrants.

Write to Arian Campo-Flores at arian.campo-flores@wsj.com, Rebecca Picciotto at Rebecca.Picciotto@wsj.com, Patrick Thomas at patrick.thomas@wsj.com and Tarini Parti at tarini.parti@wsj.com