Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says she's aligned with the administration's policy of deporting all illegal immigrants even as President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has pulled back on immigration enforcement at agricultural operations.
The New York Times reported Saturday that Trump's turnaround on deportations for farmworkers came after Rollins raised concerns with the president about the impact of enforcement actions.
“Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels,” according to an email sent Thursday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Tatum King to regional ICE offices, according to the Times.
The email went on to say that investigations involving “human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling into these industries are OK.” It added, however, that arrests were not to be made of “noncriminal collaterals,” a reference, the Times said, “to people who are undocumented but who are not known to have committed any crime.”
On Sunday, USDA spokesperson Seth Christensen said Rollins “fully supports President Trump’s immigration agenda, starting with strong border security and deportations of all illegally present. This agenda is essential to fixing a broken farm-labor economy and restoring integrity to the American workforce.
Continued Christensen: “The president and the secretary have consistently advanced a ‘Farmers First’ approach, recognizing that American households depend upon a stable and legal agricultural workforce. The foreign-born within that workforce must have entered our country legally — not through amnesty or backdoor legalization.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, Secretary Rollins is committed to building a system that puts America First, upholds the rule of law, and delivers lasting reform through improvements to the H-2A program in coordination with Labor and Homeland Security.”
The phone call with Trump was simply meant to ensure she was on the same page with him on deportations and immigration enforcement, while ensuring “the continuity of America’s critical agricultural sector,” said a source with knowledge of the call.
Rollins herself took to X in an attempt to quell any criticism that she and Trump were somehow not in agreement on the administration’s direction.
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“Ignore the noise from the fake news media and the grifters trying to divide us,” she said, appearing to refer to a New York Times piece Saturday that said top White House officials had been caught "off guard" by the policy switch and were "furious at Ms. Rollins."
“I fully support President Trump’s America First immigration agenda as stated in his campaign, starting with strong border security and deportations of EVERY illegal alien. This agenda is essential to fixing a broken farm-labor economy and restoring integrity to the American workforce.”
“The President and I have consistently advanced a ‘Farmers First’ approach, recognizing that American households depend upon a stable and LEGAL agricultural workforce. Severe disruptions to our food supply would harm Americans. It took us decades to get into this mess and we are prioritizing deportations in a way that will get us out. This administration is undeniably focused on the America First agenda and my work at the Department of Agriculture is no different.”
In the Oval Office Thursday, Trump said, without elaborating fully, that farmers and the hospitality industry shouldn’t lose workers who had been working on a long-term basis without incident. The comments followed a social media post from the president on the issue and a series of attempts by ICE to arrest laborers at farms in Ventura County, California, and at milk and meat processing facilities.
In Ventura County last week, ICE agents were turned away at several farms because they did not possess warrants, but nearly three dozen were detained, NBC4 Los Angeles reported. At a meatpacking plant in Omaha, dozens were detained and six people are scheduled for deportation, according to the Nebraska Examiner.
Trump’s announcement of a pullback on his much-vaunted deportation operation appears to resolve, if temporarily, a disagreement within his administration of just how far to go in targeting undocumented workers. As late as Friday, border czar Tom Homan was quoted in The Washington Post as saying he hadn’t spoken with Trump about any exceptions for certain types of workers.
“I have not seen any instruction, anything that changes in the near future,” Homan tolod the newspaper.
And on Friday, DHS responded to detailed questions from Agri-Pulse about whether ICE had changed its policies with a brief quote from Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: "We will follow the President's direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America's streets."
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins spoke with Trump Wednesday morning about the ag industry’s concerns, before she appeared at a House Agriculture Committee hearing where the subject of ag labor came up.
In that hearing, she said Trump had himself acknowledged the issue at an April 10 cabinet meeting where he said farmers should get some type of dispensation on deportations. But he was not specific
“The president himself, in a cabinet meeting, discussed this,” Rollins told Rep. Andrea Salinas, D-Ore. “I talked to him about it this morning. There is a recognition that there has to be a balance. He remains committed to ensuring that no laws are broken, but while realizing that [with] our agriculture community, specifically our dairy farmers, a lot of our row croppers, our specialty crops, there is a massive labor issue that we have to work to solve in partnership with Congress.”
Before official news of the pullback broke, a high-ranking executive with the National Milk Producers Federation told Agri-Pulse that “most farmers, if not all farmers, have no problem with officers of the law … looking for one specific individual because of … a criminal record. I don't know if any farmer that would not act appropriately to help officers of the law to arrest whoever they're looking for. The problem is when … they do go looking for one individual and they end up arresting 11, or arresting anybody. That's certainly very, very concerning.”
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