Latest news with #Farmers
Malay Mail
11 hours ago
- Business
- Malay Mail
‘Create opportunities for local farmers': Anwar orders govt to stop using imported food at official events
PUTRAJAYA, June 20 — Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim today directed all government departments to cease using imported goods, particularly food, at official events, in a bid to promote local products. Speaking at the Finance Ministry's monthly assembly, Anwar emphasised that using local produce will not only bolster the local economy but will also open wider opportunities for local farmers to market their goods. 'If every government department follows this directive, it will create more opportunities for our farmers to supply local food ingredients,' he said. The Prime Minister cited neighbouring countries as examples, noting their firm commitment to using local food products at all official functions. 'In Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, I've never been served imported food at any government-hosted official event. It's automatic for them to ensure only local food is served,' he remarked. Anwar also criticised the continued preference by some parties for imported food despite the government's clear stance. Calling the practice inconsistent with efforts to empower the local economy, he urged civil servants and officials to be more mindful of the need to support homegrown produce. — Bernama
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Business
- Washington Post
Trump wavers on workplace sweeps, revealing why they don't work
It should have occurred to President Donald Trump that his aggressive sweeps of places where large numbers of undocumented people work were going to be somewhat inconvenient for many employers. But no, that apparently didn't dawn on him until complaints started coming in from the industries most affected. '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 wrote last week on his Truth Social platform.
The Independent
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Trump officials reverse pause on immigration raids targeting farms and hotels
The Trump administration is reportedly reversing a recently formulated plan to refrain from conducting immigration raids against undocumented migrants in the agricultural, hotel, and restaurant industries, just days after adopting the original policy. The Department of Homeland Security announced the return to raids on such workers on a Monday morning call with representatives from 30 Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices, The Washington Post reports. Late last week, the department announced it would be pausing worksite enforcement and investigation operations across the industries in question, after the president admitted his attempts to rapidly deport millions of people were draining workers from those sectors. '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,' the president wrote last week on Truth Social. 'This is not good,' he added. 'We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!' He reinforced the message later that day in remarks to reporters. 'Our farmers are being hurt badly by, you know, they have very good workers, they have worked for them for 20 years,' Trump said during a press conference on Thursday, offering rare praise towards undocumented migrants, a group he frequently demonizes as overwhelmingly dangerous despite data showing the opposite. '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.' The message was at odds with that of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of much of the administration's immigration policy. Miller has argued for the validity of rapidly deporting all undocumented immigrants arguing that opposition from Democrats in places such as Los Angeles to raids targeting those without criminal records was tantamount to trying to overthrow the U.S. government. The split came as the Trump administration ordered hundreds of Marines and thousands of National Guard troops into LA in response to widespread protests against immigration raids there. By Sunday, the brief moment of goodwill seemed to evaporate, and the president was once again calling for mass deportation raids across the country, telling ICE agents in a Truth Social post to 'do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.' 'You don't hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!' the president added, despite having just entertained giving unlawful migrants in rural farming communities a reprieve from deportations earlier that week. Trump administration officials including Miller have been pushing immigration agents to ramp up the pace of deportations, with a goal of 3,000 ICE arrests every day, though the administration has acknowledged it is not yet hitting this target. In the meantime, ICE could reportedly run out of money as soon as next month amid the administration's wide-ranging deportation efforts.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Cotton on Trump ICE pause on select industries: ‘I don't think we should pull back on any kind of enforcement'
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Sunday said he doesn't believe Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should 'pull back on any kind of enforcement' after the Trump administration directed the agency to pause raids against workers in the agriculture, hotel and restaurant industries. Cotton told CBS News's Margaret Brennan on 'Face The Nation' that 'we need to have robust worksite enforcement' after being asked if he agreed with the move given agricultural business in his state. 'I don't think we should pull back on any kind of enforcement at all,' Cotton said. 'I think worksite enforcement in all industries needs to be able to move forward. And I think ICE agents on the front lines need the support of political leadership.' The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed a shift in deportation policies in a statement to NewsNation on Saturday, days after President Trump signaled that 'changes are coming' in a post on Truth Social. '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,' the president wrote on Thursday. 'This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!' he added. DHS officials said they would follow the White House's lead on removals and detainments, according to a report by The New York Times. 'We will follow the president's direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America's streets,' DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump, in reversal, may exempt farms and hotels from immigration raids
President Donald Trump said on social media Thursday that he is willing to exempt the agriculture and hotel industries from his nationwide immigration crackdown. The surprise move came after executives in both industries complained to Trump about losing reliable, longtime immigrant workers in immigration raids and struggling to replace them. '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,' Trump wrote. 'In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs," he added. "This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!' The New York Times reported the next day that a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official had ordered a pause in immigration raids at agricultural businesses, meat packing plants, restaurants and hotels. The senior ICE official also advised agents to stop arresting undocumented people who are not known to have committed crimes. Agents were told to continue to investigate and detain undocumented people with criminal backgrounds, according to the Times. In response to a question from NBC News about Trump's pause, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin did not dispute it. 'We will follow the president's direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America's streets," she said in a statement. Trump faces a political crossroads. Immigration raids in Los Angeles sparked days of violent protests there and helped fuel sweeping anti-Trump protests nationwide Saturday. At the same time, Trump repeatedly promised his supporters during the 2024 campaign that he would deport a million people a year, the largest mass deportations in U.S. history. To meet that goal, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller demanded last month that ICE arrest at least 3,000 undocumented people a day. Three former DHS officials told NBC News that ICE officials will have to significantly increase raids of large workplaces nationwide to meet those goals. The sites include farms, meatpacking plants, hotels and restaurants — the industries Trump appears to have exempted. A former ICE official said that only raids on 'construction, dairy [and] meat processing facilities, carpet mills' would result in the large number of detentions Miller has demanded. 'It's these low-wage jobs, that is where you get the numbers,' the former official said. During the 2024 campaign and since he returned to office, Trump has dismissed warnings from experts that such large-scale deportations would lead to worker shortages in the industries he is apparently exempting now. But groups that support his crackdown expect him to keep his promise. 'They should be going after them,' said Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that supports a crackdown on undocumented workers. 'I don't think there is going to be a huge swath of the country that will be upset if they bust these companies, if they are employing illegal immigrants and passing on the cost to everyone else.' For years, slaughterhouses have been one of the industries best known for relying on newly arrived immigrant labor, in part because of the difficult and dangerous nature of the work. And many slaughterhouses are in red states scattered throughout the Midwest and the Southeast. Texas alone has almost 500 meat and food processing plants, according to Agriculture Department data. ICE agents last week raided a locally owned slaughterhouse in Omaha, Nebraska, and arrested at least 80 undocumented workers, according to local officials. Chad Hartmann, a spokesperson for Glenn Valley Foods, said in a statement that federal agents searched the company's facility 'for persons believed to be using fraudulent documents to gain employment.' He said that the company strives to operate within the law, that it is cooperating with agents and that it 'is not being charged with any crime.' But so far ICE has not consistently targeted large slaughterhouses around the country. Since Trump took office in January, ICE's workplace enforcement raids appear to have largely targeted smaller businesses, such as a roofer in Bellingham, Washington; a Mexican restaurant in Harlingen, Texas; and a small equipment manufacturer in South Dakota. One of the largest workplace raids to date — which yielded more than 100 arrests — was at a construction site in Tallahassee overseen by a privately owned Florida-based construction company. Larry Stine, an employment attorney who represents some of the largest meatpacking plants in the Southeast, says his clients are 'terrified' of a possible raid and have been actively auditing their employees' paperwork. Trump did not mention an exemption for the construction industry, which also employs large numbers of immigrant workers. So far, though, the construction industry has experienced relatively few ICE raids, industry officials said. Brian Turmail, vice president of public affairs for the Associated General Contractors of America, said that to date, he is aware of only sporadic reports of construction site raids, such as one in Tallahassee on May 29 when more than 100 allegedly undocumented people were detained. The contractors' association continues to prepare members for how to respond if the pace of enforcement actions increases. 'We've been reposting compliance information now that it's a bit more real,' Turmail said. Turmail said he remains confident that Trump is sensitive to the needs of the construction industry, whose decadeslong workforce shortage has only grown more acute in recent years. It's one reason construction costs have been surging, he said, which, in turn, has resulted in construction spending's declining year on year for the first time since 2019. 'Between higher labor and higher material costs, it's putting developers on the sidelines because projects don't pencil out anymore,' Turmail said. Members of the contractors' association remain hopeful that the administration's promises to reorient more of the workforce toward vocational skills will turn into federal spending to do so. Turmail predicted that worker shortages will persist and most likely worsen if the immigration crackdown continues. One way the administration could help address them, he said, would be to create ways for construction workers to enter the country legally. 'Even if we got all the funding we wanted, we'd still need to also find some temporary lawful pathways for people to come in and work in construction,' he said. Democrats say Trump's campaign promises of millions of mass deportations are hitting economic realities. John Sandweg, who was ICE director during the Obama administration, said that to maintain its 3,000 arrests per day quota, the Trump administration would have to raid factories owned by large corporations. 'No doubt some Fortune 500 will get hit,' he said. This article was originally published on
