Trump pulls back from immigration enforcement in agricultural sector

This quote is from the New York Times story quoting "an email by a senior ICE official, Tatum King, to regional leaders of the ICE department that generally carries out criminal investigations, including work site operations, known as Homeland Security Investigations."  

Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.  

The story continues:  

The email explained that investigations involving “human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling into these industries are OK.” But it said — crucially — that agents were not to make arrests of “noncriminal collaterals,” a reference to people who are undocumented but who are not known to have committed any crime.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the guidance.

I wrote yesterday about recent immigration raids in the agriculture sector.  

Postscript:  Here is fuller analysis from the New York Times on June 14 of Trump's about face on raids in the agricultural sector.   The story's lede follows: 

On Wednesday morning [June 11], President Trump took a call from Brooke Rollins, his secretary of agriculture, who relayed a growing sense of alarm from the heartland.

Farmers and agriculture groups, she said, were increasingly uneasy about his immigration crackdown.

* * *

Farmers rely on immigrants to work long hours, Ms. Rollins said. She told the president that farm groups had been warning her that their employees would stop showing up to work out of fear, potentially crippling the agricultural industry.

She wasn’t the first person to try to get this message through to the president, nor was it the first time she had spoken to him about it. But the president was persuaded.

This has me thinking how interesting it would be to know which big corporate players in the agricultural sector have Rollins' ear; whose calls does she take?  Several of the stories I read about the immigration raids on agricultural interests mention the Farm Bureau as opposing the raids and raising alarms over their consequences for producers.    

Also from the NYT story is this interesting tidbit: 

Inside the West Wing, top White House officials were caught off guard — and furious at Ms. Rollins. Many of Mr. Trump’s top aides, particularly Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, have urged a hard-line approach, targeting all immigrants without legal status to fulfill the president’s promise of the biggest deportation campaign in American history.