Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins is defending her push to exempt farmers, meatpackers, and restaurant employers from the nation’s immigration laws.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that Rollins persuaded President Donald Trump to protect those groups from his much-stated campaign promise to deport illegal migrants.
Investors then persuaded Trump to lift enforcement on hotels, which are important to the commercial real estate sector. The giveaway came as Trump also touted a migrants-for-minerals swap with China.
Trump’s back-room concessions prompted a roar of online protests among the supporters that he needs for the impending 2026 election.
“They shouldn’t be doing temporary and partial protection from law enforcement,” said Rosemary Jenks, founder of the Immigration Accountability Project. “What the Trump administration did with this order to ICE is essentially giving amnesty to the employers in these industries? Why are some employers above the law but not others?”
“Ignore the noise from the fake news media and the grifters trying to divide us,” Rollins responded via X on Sunday morning:
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.
Her defensive statement did not mention any swap by the agriculture sector, such as promises to invest in more automation for meatpacking factories or more high-tech greenhouses for the farms near cities.
In 2017, meatpacking firms began investing heavily in tech once Trump cut off their foreign labor supply — but they largely stopped deploying the technology when Biden’s border chief restarted the inflow of cheap labor.
Her statement did not mention the reality that the farm sector can legally import an unlimited number of workers via the H-2A visa program for a wide range of farm work, including sorting and transporting food. She also ignored the new wave of clean-tech farming that reduces the use of migrant labor.
Without commitments from employers, the Rollings exemption is a giveaway to the investors who maximize their stock value by using a taxpayer-funded army of hard-working and disposable illegal migrants.
Trump’s deputies should be pressuring industries to modernize with wealth-generating technology and automation instead of burdensome illegal migrants, said Jenks:
They should be telling all of these industries: “You need to start using E-Verify… [so] you’re not bringing on more illegal aliens, and you need to start planning for losing the illegal aliens you already have.”
“As long as illegal labor is cheaper than capital investments in technology, the employers will continue using illegal labor,” Jenks said. “The Trump administration is saying, apparently, that’s just fine.”
Other countries are rushing to equip their nationals with wealth-boosting robot technology.
Vice President JD Vance is prodding investors to focus on automation and productivity. The promise of cheap labor is “a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation,” Vance told an audience of investors in March.
Giving away the exemption is also unnecessary because ICE cannot deport a large share of illegal migrants in those sectors, Jenks told Breitbart News:
It’s just absurd — there is no possible way that a dedicated Trump administration can deport all of the illegal aliens in farms, restaurants, hotels, and meatpacking plants in two years, let alone tomorrow. So employers should be planning for that now. They should be raising their wages [and] trying to recruit Americans and legal workers. The farmers should be using [farm worker] H-2A visas …. we have an unlimited H-2A program, yes, it is absurd.
Trump should he pressuring hotels to modernize, Jenks said, adding:
I worked at chain hotels, two of them, all through high school and all through college. I did full shifts in college … I’ve worked on weekends and sometimes after school. It was a great entry-level job for me to learn responsibility, and learn a work ethic. I couldn’t get a job in a hotel now to save my life because they’re full of both illegal aliens and lower-skilled legal aliens. The idea that they can’t attract legal workers, particularly Americans, to those jobs is outrageous.
Many U.S. hotels are franchise operations. The franchises are usually bought by Indian-origin migrants — or E-2 visa holders — because they can quietly import cheap labor via B-1/B-2 visitor visas. This cuts labor costs and so allows franchise operators and real estate investors to earn higher profits than if the franchise operators were Americans.
The resulting archipelago of cooperating Indian businesses also makes it difficult for young Americans to get a start as business owners in cities and towns across America.
“Any employer who is going to the Trump administration and saying, ‘You can’t enforce the law against us,’ they’re admitting that they knowingly hire illegal aliens,” said Jenks. “They should be at the top of the enforcement priority list.”
The exemption is also a huge threat to Trump’s turnout plan for the 2026 election, she added:
The reactions I’m seeing on Twitter range from sad — ‘This is not what we voted for” — to “I’m never voting for a Republican again.” That’s a huge problem because if Republicans lose the House in 2026 then it’s going to be impeachment again and again and again.
Democrats provided that giveaway to businesses during President Joe Biden’s four years. Top Democrats are still offering that giveaway to Wall Street and migrants in the hope of growing the nation’s population of migrants. “I don’t think the president understands that we have entire sectors of our economy that cannot function without immigrant labor,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told CNN on June 15.
