DHS Reverses Its Four-Day Pause on ICE Raids at Farms, Hotels and Restaurants

On June 12, 2025, a senior ICE official emailed regional offices instructing them to hold all worksite enforcement investigations and operations involving agriculture, restaurants and hotels. The directive followed a June 11 conversation in which Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Trump that farm and hospitality employers feared raids would disrupt food production and raise prices; Trump then posted publicly that 'changes are coming.' Four days later, on June 16, DHS leadership reversed the guidance in a phone call to ICE staff across 30 field offices. Reuters reported that ICE's internal target of about 3,000 arrests per day remained in place, and that field office leaders had said they could not meet it without operations at the exempted business types.

The episode showed enforcement priorities being set, unset and reset within four days in response to industry pressure and internal arrest quotas rather than through published policy, leaving employers and workers without reliable notice of what the government would do.

Neither the pause nor the reversal was issued as public guidance; both were reported from internal communications described by officials to news organizations.