Trump's immigration enforcement spreads to rural America, the agricultural sector

It was inevitable, I suppose, that Trump's immigration enforcement would ultimately turn to rural America and the farm sector, and that matter is getting a lot more coverage this week.  The New York Times began covering the situation in upstate New York last week, and this week the enforcement spread to California in earnest (see coverage here).  

Here's a quote from the Los Angeles Times coverage of recent raids in central California, which provides perspective:

Until this week, California’s agricultural sector had largely escaped the large-scale raids that the Department of Homeland Security has deployed in urban areas, most recently in Los Angeles and Orange counties. California farmers — many of them ardent supporters of Donald Trump — have seemed remarkably calm as the president vowed mass deportations of undocumented workers.

Many expected that Trump would find ways to protect their workforce, noting that without sufficient workers, food would rot in the fields, sending grocery prices skyrocketing.

But this week brought a different message. Asked about enforcement actions in food production regions, Tom Homan, Trump’s chief adviser on border policy, said growers should hire a legal workforce.

“There are programs — you can get people to come in and do that job,” he said. “So work with ICE, work with [U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services], and hire a legal workforce. It’s illegal to knowingly hire an illegal alien.”

The Los Angeles Times also reported on raids earlier in the week.  That story says that half of California's 256,000  farmworkers are undocumented, according to a report from UC Merced.  

Meanwhile, this afternoon, Trump seemed to recognize the damage that the raids and detentions are doing  to farmers and to suggest he would back off immigration enforcement in that sector.  Here's the lede and some key quotes from Trump: 

President Trump acknowledged on Thursday that his immigration policies are hurting the farming and hotel industries, making a rare concession that his crackdown is having ripple effects on the American work force.

Mr. Trump, who has made mass deportation a centerpiece of his presidency, said on social media that “changes are coming.” And while there was no sign of any significant modification to his policies, Mr. Trump’s statements suggested the scale of his crackdown may be alienating industries he wants to keep in his corner.

Here is a further quote from Trump:

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.

* * *

Our farmers are being hurt badly by, you know, they have very good workers, they have worked for them for 20 years. They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be, you know, 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, maybe not.

* * *

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.

Read more about Trump's relationship with farmers, including during his first term, here and here.  This story is about a recent raid on a meatpacking plant in Omaha, Nebraska.  Here is an April NYT story about detention of a mother and her children from a dairy farm in upstate New York.   

In addition to these reports from the coasts, the New York Times has covered the story of a Hong Kong national who has lived and worked in rural Missouri for decades, here and here, with a focus on how the boot-heel community rallied around the mother of three who worked as a server at a local diner.  She was recently released; it is unclear if her community's efforts to gain her release influenced the outcome of the matter.  

Postscript:  One June 13, NPR spoke to the president of the United Farm Workers, Teresa Romero, about these issues.