Trump may shield undocumented farm workers from deportation

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he may create a carveout to his mass deportation efforts for hospitality and farm workers.

After facing criticism over immigration raids that picked up people who have lived in the U.S. for years, Trump said the White House is looking at executive action that would exempt employees of some farmers and hotels from the administration’s sweeping immigration enforcement push.

“You go into a farm and you look at people — they’ve been there for 20, 25, years, and they’ve worked great, and the owner of the farm loves them, and everything else and then you’re supposed to throw them out,” Trump said at the White House.

“We’re going to have an order on that pretty soon, I think,” he added. “We can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels.”

The gross value of Santa Clara County’s agricultural production for 2023 was more than $371 million an increase of 3.5% from 2022 which was nearly $359 million, according to the 2023 Santa Clara County Crop Report. A report in 2021 stated there are about 8,000 agricultural workers in the county.

The majority of farm workers are foreign born, and the majority of foreign-born farm workers are unauthorized, according to the USDA. More often than not, they are paid less.

In a post to Truth Social earlier Friday, the president acknowledged that the administration’s immigration policies were taking a toll on farmers and the hospitality industry.

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote.

In recent weeks, the administration has committed to ramping up removal efforts, setting a target of 3,000 removals per day. The effort is underway nationwide, including in California farmlands, where immigration agents conducted raids earlier this week.

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Violet Jira is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and San José Spotlight.