Homeland Security Confirms ICE Operations at Farms and Hotels After Reports of Pause

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that it will continue to carry out immigration enforcement operations at farms, hotels, and agricultural businesses to target criminals.

A DHS official responded on June 17 to a question from The Epoch Times about whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would resume the operations in light of recent articles suggesting otherwise.

“The President has been incredibly clear. There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability,” she said, adding that the “operations target illegal employment networks that undermine American workers, destabilize labor markets and expose critical infrastructure to exploitation.”

Reuters, the Washington Post, and other news outlets this past week cited anonymous U.S. officials saying that the Trump administration had directed immigration officials to largely pause raids on farms, hotels, restaurants, and meatpacking plants.

Those outlets also reported that DHS and ICE officials told leaders in a call on Monday that ICE agents must continue conducting workforce site immigration raids on agricultural businesses, hotels, and restaurants. The Epoch Times could not immediately verify those reports’ claims.

President Donald Trump also referred to his immigration enforcement policies in a June 12 Truth Social post.

“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 said. “We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”

In another Truth Social post on Sunday evening, Trump signaled that he would ramp up immigration enforcement operations. He directed ICE officials to expand their efforts in Democratic-run cities, following protests and riots in Los Angeles in recent days that prompted him to send in the National Guard and a battalion of Marines.

Trump wrote that ICE must use “their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History” and that they “must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”

As he took office in January, Trump pledged to remove violent illegal immigrants with criminal records as well as illegal immigrants who pose a national security threat.

Federal agencies have been under more pressure in recent weeks to deport more illegal immigrants. White House adviser Stephen Miller said the administration is looking to significantly increase the number of daily arrests and deportations.

“We are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day, and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day so we can get all of the Biden [administration] illegals that were flooded into our country for four years out of our country,” Miller told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on May 28.

During the first 100 days of the Trump administration, ICE arrested more than 66,000 illegal immigrants, or about 650 arrests per day, according to an April 29 DHS update.

Reuters contributed to this report.