President Trump vowed Monday to focus his immigration crackdown on so-called “crime ridden inner cities” like New York after he ordered an end to controversial workplace raids on farms, restaurants and hotels amid complaints from big businesses.
As immigration protests roil the nation, Trump said on his social media site that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “must expand efforts to detain and deport illegal aliens in America’s largest cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.”
“I want them to focus on the cities. I look at New York, I look at Chicago, the city’s been overrun by criminals,” Trump said at the G-7 summit in Alberta, Canada.
“Most of those [undocumented immigrants] are in the cities, all blue cities,” he added, flanked by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. “They think they’re going to use them to vote,” he said, citing no evidence to back his claims. It’s not going to happen.”
Trump claimed the shift is needed because New York and other big cities are the “core of the Democrat power center.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if Trump’s announcement might lead to more immigration enforcement on the streets of New York and other big cities, which can be difficult and dangerous to successfully execute.
Trump’s tough talk reflects increasing divisions within his base of support over the mass deportation push, which threatens to inflict significant damage on the U.S. economy, especially industries that rely on undocumented immigrants for a big share of their low-wage labor.
Even as Trump’s projects a hard-line stance, the White House last week directed immigration officers to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels after Trump expressed alarm about the impact aggressive enforcement is having on those industries.
Trump conceded Thursday that he heard from hotel, agriculture and leisure industries that his “very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, longtime workers away from them” and promised that unspecified “big changes” would be made.
That same day Tatum King, an official with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, wrote to regional leaders telling them to halt investigations of the agriculture industry, including meatpackers, as well as of restaurants and hotels, all of which employ millions of undocumented immigrants.
The apparent backtracking from the aggressive mass deportation push has sparked divisions within Trump’s MAGA movement, with some far right-wing figures urging him not to back down.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a key hard-liner and the main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said ICE officers would seek to make at least 3,000 arrests a day. That would amount to a massive increase from the average of 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term, a number that is similar to the pace of arrests during former President Joe Biden’s rule.
But powerful Republican-aligned business groups, along with moderate and farm-state GOP lawmakers, are urging Trump to ease the crackdown to avoid further damaging the fragile U.S. economy, which is already facing uncertainty stemming from his still-expanding trade war.
Originally Published: June 16, 2025 at 11:50 AM EDT
