by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Immigrants who work in certain sectors of Virginia’s economy, and their employers, can rest a little easier now.  The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration has ordered immigration agents to cease their sweep operations at agriculture and hospitality industry worksites.

On June 12, a senior ICE official sent an e-mail to ICE regional directors saying, “Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”  The e-mail went on to say that investigations involving “human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling into these industries are OK.” However, it stipulated that agents were not to arrest “noncriminal collaterals,” i.e., undocumented immigrants who were not known to have committed any crime.

This order followed Trump declaring, “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.”  He went on to concede, “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.”

Data on the number of undocumented workers in the Virginia agriculture and hospitality industries are elusive.  The Pew Research Center estimated that there were approximately 275,000 undocumented immigrants living in Virginia in 2022.  That number would be about 3.2 percent of the state’s total population and about 24 percent of its total immigrant population.  Nationally, it is estimated that 16.6 percent of all undocumented immigrants in the work force are in the  agriculture or hospitality sectors (a total about 1.25 million individuals).  Applying that percentage to Virginia would result in protection for about 46,000 undocumented immigrant workers.  Whatever the numbers, the undocumented immigrants working in the restaurants and hotels of Virginia Beach, Northern Virginia, and Richmond; the fields and meat processing plants of the Eastern Shore, the Shenandoah Valley, and Southside, as well as of Smithfield Foods and in other parts of the state, have been granted sanctuary by President Trump.