Noem Settles It: Trump Admin Will Sacrifice Agriculture at Altar of Mass Deportations

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Jul 16, 2025

*JUNE 24: U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)*

As we’ve discussed, the Trump administration has been flip-flopping for months on the matter of whether the Department of Homeland Security will target farm laborers, as well as workers in the hotel and restaurant industries, with ICE raids.

Obviously, there are political reasons not to do it. Rural parts of America, where farms are, tend to skew Republican and President Trump has always counted farmers as among his top supporters. The same goes for the hotel and restaurant industries. As the Trump administration mulls whether to terrorize seasonal workers in those fields, he has seemed wary of the political consequences that might come with depriving those industries of a reliable source of labor. Many hotel and restaurant executives are Republican donors.

But there’s also the fact that none of this is about actually arresting and deporting alleged criminals. As the administration has demonstrated the last few months, Trump’s mass deportation agenda is less about deportation and more about 1) making a big show of arresting and detaining a bunch of people, regardless of whether they’re undocumented or have legal status and 2) using immigration enforcement as a cudgel against blue cities and states. Those objectives, I imagine, make the raids on industries that rely on immigrant and migrant labor enticing.

Trump has said a few bizarre things on this front over the last several weeks, at one point suggesting that he is against too many agricultural raids and would let farmers “sort of be in charge” of vetting and hiring workers that they need to produce a harvest.

“The farmer knows he’s not going to hire a murderer,” he said back in June.

But his Department of Homeland Security secretary didn’t get that memo. In fact, DHS’s directives to staff on farm raids have been at odds with Trump’s public remarks for at least a month now. During a discussion with a reporter at The Hill’s Nation Summit this morning, Secretary Kristi Noem was asked whether it was “the position of the Trump administration that every single one of the 320,000 undocumented immigrants working on farms should be deported?”

“The president has been very clear from the beginning that we are going to uphold the law and follow the law,” she said. “There aren’t going to be any safe places where we’ll tell criminals, ‘you can go here and be completely safe.’ We’re going to make sure we’re going after those who perpetuate violence, and trafficking and drug trafficking. And go get them and remove them from this country.”

That is, of course, exactly what Trump has not “been very clear from the beginning” about.

Another Weird Noem Thing

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent letters to DOJ and DHS this week asking for more information on why the Trump administration is collecting DNA from immigrants, including children, Wired reports. To be clear, this is something that has been going on for years that the Trump administration has continued and expanded. DHS has reportedly collected DNA samples from 133,000 migrant kids and teens. An excerpt from Wired, which was first to report on the practice in May:

Wyden confronted the agencies with demands this week to explain the scope, legality, and oversight of the government’s DNA collection. In letters to DOJ and DHS, the Oregon Democrat also criticized what he described as a “chilling expansion” of a sprawling and opaque system, accusing Trump administration officials of withholding even basic facts about its operation.
“When Congress authorized the laws surrounding DNA collection by the federal government over two decades ago, lawmakers sought to address violent crime,” Wyden says. “It was not intended as a means for the federal government to collect and permanently retain the DNA of all noncitizens.”

Thune Suggests Conference Hold Nose and Swallow

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), who is pushing his conference to pass President Donald Trump’s $9 billion rescissions request, said his colleagues who have been frustrated with the Office of Management and Budget’s resistance to provide more clarity on the cuts in the package are making “a fair point.”

“I don’t disagree. I think that more specificity would be a good thing, and certainly more detail in terms of what exactly it is that they intend to cut as a result of all this,” Thune told reporters on Wednesday. “But I think for the most part, most of our members believe there was enough detail here to make a good decision about whether or not we want to move forward on the package.”

Thune’s statement comes as three of the GOP holdouts — Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) — refused to join their colleagues Tuesday night and opposed two procedural votes, citing concerns about the bill and a lack of clarity from the White House on where exactly the cuts will come from.

“The rescissions package has a big problem — nobody really knows what program reductions are in it,” Collins said in a Tuesday statement following her “no” vote on the first procedural vote. “That isn’t because we haven’t had time to review the bill. Instead, the problem is that OMB has never provided the details that would normally be part of this process.”

Despite the resistance, Senate Republican leadership managed to get through the procedural vote with the help of Vice President JD Vance last night and began the vote-a-rama on the rescissions package Wednesday afternoon.

— Emine Yücel