Republicans in Congress urge Trump to target criminals, not farmworkers, as ICE arrests increase

WASHINGTON – Amid a recent surge in arrests of immigrants allegedly living in the country illegally, some raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have drawn quiet concern from Republicans in Congress who largely back President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation project.

ICE arrested dozens of workers at a meat processing plant in Nebraska on Tuesday, the same day federal agents raided farms and packing facilities across California. A week earlier, the agency arrested 11 workers at a dairy farm in New Mexico.

In interviews at the Capitol last week, several GOP lawmakers told The Spokesman-Review they support the Trump administration’s stated goal of targeting violent criminals but worry that arresting farmworkers could devastate their states’ economies, acknowledging the open secret that U.S. agriculture relies heavily on unauthorized immigrant labor.

“You have to recognize that a huge part of the workforce for the American agricultural industry depends on an illegal source of labor, and that’s just not a tenable, sustainable situation,” said Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican and farmer from central Washington who has led an effort for years to pass an immigration-reform bill for farmworkers.

In a survey by the Labor Department conducted from 2020 to 2022, 42% of workers said they lacked legal authorization to work in the country. Experts say the real number is likely higher, with some immigrant workers not wanting to admit their status to the government.

“That would be very bad for Wisconsin,” Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from America’s Dairyland, said when asked what ICE raids on farms would mean for his state. “I think there are enough criminals that they need to round up.”

Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, said farmers in his state tend to support Trump’s policies but want to see the administration prioritize deporting violent offenders, not the workforce they rely on.

“I think the president, who has a mandate to deport people here illegally, also has a responsibility to continue to bring clarity to how we’re going to prioritize different categories of undocumented persons and their deportation, because we don’t have unlimited resources,” Young said. “That’s why I think we need to establish priorities. Because in the absence of those, it’s hard for somebody like myself to argue that someone here illegally should be here.”

Trump seemed to acknowledge those concerns on Thursday, posting on his Truth Social platform, “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.”

“In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs,” the president wrote. “This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”

The White House didn’t respond directly to questions about the administration’s policy and what those changes would be, referring instead to remarks the president made at a bill-signing ceremony later Thursday. Asked by a Fox News reporter why he had changed his mind on “targeting” farmworkers, Trump replied, “We’re not targeting.”

“Our farmers are being hurt badly by, you know, they have very good workers,” the president said. “They’ve worked for them for 20 years. They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great, and we’re going to have to do something about that. We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”

Trump said those “good workers” could be replaced by “murderers,” repeating his frequent conflation of immigrants living in the country illegally with violent criminals. Research has consistently shown that immigrants, both with and without legal status, commit homicide and other crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.

“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon, I think,” the president said. “We can’t do that to our farmers. And leisure, too, hotels. We’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”

It wasn’t the first time Trump had spoken about immigrant workers in a more conciliatory tone than usual. In an exchange with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a cabinet meeting on April 10, he hinted at a policy change to let unauthorized immigrants leave the United States “if they go out in a nice way,” and return with legal status.

“We’re going to work with them right from the beginning on trying to get them back in legally,” he said. “So a farmer will come in with a letter concerning certain people saying they’re great, they’re working hard. We’re going to slow it down a little bit for them. And then we’re going to ultimately bring them back. They’ll go out, they’re going to come back as legal workers.”

That approach is at odds with administration officials, led by domestic policy chief Stephen Miller and “border tzar” Tom Homan, who have reportedly pushed ICE to accelerate arrests and deportations, tripling the agency’s arrest quota to 3,000 per day at the end of May. That directive appears to have driven a spate of raids targeting industries where immigrants often work.

Trump’s policies have made it harder for ICE to hit that target, because his administration has successfully reduced the number of immigrants crossing the border illegally – a group that has historically represented a large share of deportations – and because his rhetoric and tactics have prompted some Democratic-led jurisdictions to refuse to cooperate with ICE.

Unlike the Obama administration, which deported a record number of immigrants by working with state and local law enforcement to target criminals, Trump has faced greater resistance from so-called “sanctuary” policies like Washington state’s Keep Washington Working Act that limit cooperation with ICE.

Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican, said on Wednesday he spoke with Homan three weeks earlier about the administration’s deportation policy. The congressman said Washington’s sanctuary policy has caused ICE to have “a broader aperture” and arrest immigrants who haven’t committed violent crimes, rather than taking custody of convicted offenders from local jails.

“The administration has made it very clear to me on multiple occasions that their focus is on violent criminal offenders who are here illegally,” Baumgartner said. “And in those states where local officials are working with federal immigration officials, that’s where the focus remains.”

‘Essential workers’ or ‘criminals’?

In March, ICE arrested Alfredo Juarez, a Mexican citizen, while he was driving his partner to work in Sedro-Woolley in Skagit County, Washington. The agency says he had an outstanding deportation order tied to a 2015 arrest following a traffic stop, after which the then 15-year-old Juarez sued the city of Bellingham for racial profiling and eventually settled.

Through his lawyer, Juarez has said he was never informed about the deportation order and had been living openly for years, often making public appearances as an interpreter for the independent farmworkers’ union Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Juarez is in ICE custody at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

Edgar Franks, the union’s political director, said he believes ICE targeted Juarez because he was outspoken about farmworkers’ rights and to send a message to other activists.

“People are now questioning whether it’s worth going to work or not,” he said. “Workers are hesitant to go and look for work because of the escalated presence of ICE and Border Patrol in the community. And if it’s happening with the workers, the employers are definitely going to feel that impact as well.”

Franks said ICE hasn’t conducted large-scale raids in Washington, but families in the community are making plans for who will look after children if their parents are detained.

“You can see it in people’s faces and in their voice, how this moment that we’re living in right now is taking a toll on a lot of workers,” he said. “I think being cruel to immigrants is the intent. It’s not really to keep the country safe. Just like a couple years ago, the immigrants were the saviors of agriculture and the economy, with the ‘essential workers’ title being thrown around, and now it’s, ‘You’re criminals and need to leave.’ ”

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said she met with Juarez’s partner and other farmworkers in Mount Vernon after his arrest.

“The fear on these workers’ faces and the stories they were telling me were heartbreaking,” she said. “They’re just trying to go to work, do their jobs, go home, and they’re worried about sending their kids to school.”

Murray said Juarez’s detention suggests the Trump administration is targeting not dangerous criminals but prominent community members.

“It’s almost like, ‘Let’s go pick up somebody that everybody knows so we can make a big deal about it,’ rather than somebody who – as they told us – had committed violent acts or whatever,” she said. “It’s really frightening.”

Rep. Rick Larsen, a Democrat who represents Skagit County, said farmers in his district are just as concerned as their employees. If there aren’t workers to harvest the area’s raspberries, he said, “They’ll stay on the vine and rot.”

Like their GOP counterparts, Democrats in Congress said they want Trump to stick to his campaign promise of a “worst first” approach to deportation. But in interviews at the Capitol, they expressed doubts that the president is sincere about that plan, suggesting that anti-immigrant ideologues are driving his administration’s policy.

“I’m all for going after violent criminals, holding them accountable and making sure we are deporting them,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat who added that she did just that while serving as her state’s attorney general after she graduated from Gonzaga Law School.

“He’s not doing that,” she said. “He talks a good game. He hasn’t deported all of the violent criminals, and he’s going after these hardworking families who want nothing better than just to have a good life, raise their kids here, pay taxes and be a part of this economy.”

Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said he has met with children whose parents have been deported after working in the fields for decades, “and I’ve yet to meet a farmer who thinks this is a good idea.”

“We’re hearing about a workforce that’s being devastated and people that won’t show up to work,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M. “So then what’s going to happen to the dairies, to the milk? It’s going to go bad. Food costs are going to go even higher. It’s going to be devastating to agriculture in America.”

‘A Nixon-goes-to-China moment on immigration’

Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, is candid about the agriculture industry’s reliance on unauthorized immigrant labor. That’s especially true for dairy and other sectors that need year-round workers, he said, because Congress has never created a visa program to let employers hire foreign workers for more than short-term seasonal jobs.

“We are an industry that has about 90% foreign-born labor, so we’re very, very dependent on immigrant labor to fill the jobs that we have within the dairy industry in Idaho,” he said. “Honestly, all of ag is going to look that same way.”

The reason Americans can’t fill those jobs, Naerebout said, is simple math: There are more jobs than domestic workers to fill them, and most Americans don’t want to do them anyway.

“Unless we want to shrink the U.S. economy, we’re always going to have a dependency on immigrant labor to fill jobs that Americans don’t want to fill,” he said. “Americans have chosen other sectors of the economy to work in that are less labor intensive and possibly pay a little bit better and have shorter hours, especially during harvest.”

Naerebout said there haven’t been ICE raids on Idaho dairy farms, but agriculture is a tight-knit community and many dairymen in the Gem State know the man whose farm was raided in New Mexico.

“So there’s a lot of nervousness in the ag community that if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere,” he said. “It’s creating a tremendous amount of uneasiness.”

The Idaho Dairymen’s Association, along with many other agriculture-industry groups, has gotten behind a bipartisan bill championed by Newhouse and other Northwest Republicans, which twice passed in the House under Democratic control. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act would give unauthorized agricultural workers a path to legal status and overhaul the guest-worker visa program while requiring employers to check their workers’ legal status with the E-Verify program, a step many have ignored in tacit recognition that their workforce wouldn’t pass muster.

“The politics around immigration has been really tough, especially since President Trump’s first campaign, which brought a new skepticism about even legal immigration,” said Julia Gelatt, an immigration expert at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “But the Farm Workforce Modernization Act has seemed for many years like one of the best chances for a smaller piece of immigration reform.”

That bill died in the Senate amid behind-the-scenes squabbles over several provisions, but a few GOP lawmakers said they see an opportunity for Trump to break the impasse and do something no American president has done since Ronald Reagan in 1986, the last time Congress made major updates to U.S. immigration law.

“I do believe that if anybody could have a Nixon-goes-to-China moment on immigration, it would be President Trump,” Baumgartner said, comparing Trump’s leverage to the 1972 trip in which then-President Richard Nixon used his reputation as a staunch anti-communist as political cover to repair relations with Beijing and help wind down the Cold War.

“Look, if you’re in the country illegally, you’re in the country illegally, but the focus needs to be on violent illegal immigrants,” Baumgartner said. “And then once we can restore security to our borders, we can have comprehensive immigration reform, because we do need to expand agricultural worker permits and guest worker permits.”

Sen. Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican who served as his party’s lead negotiator when Newhouse’s bill got to the Senate in 2022, said he hopes the legislation can advance later this year.

“The bottom line is I think that what we need to do is to develop a guest worker bill that will help to provide a pathway for a solution to that issue,” he said. “That’s what I think we ought to do.”

While the bill has had wide Democratic support in the Senate, it never came to the floor in the upper chamber, suggesting that it lacked the necessary Republican support to reach the 60-vote threshold required by the Senate filibuster rule or that it was blocked by GOP leaders.

A spokeswoman for Crapo’s fellow Idaho senator, Jim Risch, said the Republican “fully supports President Trump’s efforts to secure our southern border while also recognizing the issues facing the agricultural labor supply.”

“We need an immigration system that’s uncompromising on illegal entry, fully enforces the rule of law, and provides a lawful workforce for agriculture,” spokeswoman Janessa Tolman said in a statement. “Ensuring both sides are in place is essential – each one is needed to put America first.”

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act faces opposition from some industry groups and workers, and the complex geography of American agriculture means some states – and the senators who represent them – would see uneven benefits. Franks said his union opposes the bipartisan bill because it would give too much power to employers and force workers to wait too long for legal status.

“I think Congress should really follow Ronald Reagan’s example and issue amnesty for all immigrants right now,” Franks said. “The details can be negotiated and whatnot, but I think workers right now deserve amnesty after all they’ve been put through.”

Congress has repeatedly tried and failed to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws since Reagan signed the 1986 law, partly because lawmakers have wanted to solve the legislative puzzle in a single bill. But Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, said that in the current political environment, “There may be a willingness to take more of a piecemeal approach to some of these reforms.”

“There has long been insistence on both sides of the aisle that immigration reform be comprehensive and include every aspect of it,” she said. “But this administration may put pressure to do otherwise.”

Sen. John Hickenlooper, a Colorado Democrat, said he doesn’t share that optimism because the immigration issue “has been such a political tool” for Trump.

Rep. Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican who leads the hardline House Freedom Caucus, said it’s time to for Congress to act.

“I don’t know how aggressive they are at having ICE raids on farms,” Harris said. “I think what we have to do, though, is we have to discuss whether or not we have to allow more legal temporary foreign ag workers into the country, and I think that discussion is one that I think is going to be had.”

Newhouse said more momentum is needed to achieve immigration reform.

“We’ve got a tremendous number of people here that shouldn’t be, but we also have to look at those that are contributing and those that have been here for a long time,” Newhouse said. “We’re starting to see people not wanting to show up at work, in farms, even in Washington, because of the risk that poses. So I think there needs to be a smart balance here.”

Despite Trump’s promise that “changes are coming,” the Washington Post reported on Friday, citing anonymous sources, that no policy changes are underway to protect farmworkers from deportation. ICE did not respond to questions from The Spokesman-Review about the agency’s policy toward unauthorized immigrant farmworkers.

Naerebout said those changes are badly needed, because ICE ramping up enforcement in his state before Congress overhauls U.S. immigration policy “would be devastating to Idaho’s economy.”

Rep. Mike Simpson, a Republican from Idaho Falls who has repeatedly sponsored the Farm Workforce Modernization Act along with Newhouse, said that until Congress and the president fix the problem, immigration authorities should be “more selective” about who they target.

“The real question,” Simpson said, “is how much do you want to pay for a bottle of milk?”