DHS Immigration Raids Reversal: Arrest Quota and Worksite Raids

On June 12, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security told immigration agents to stop conducting worksite raids at farms, meatpacking plants, restaurants, and hotels. Four days later, DHS reversed itself and told agents to resume. That short-lived pause and its rapid rescission — the DHS immigration raids reversal — exposed the collision between the Trump administration’s deportation targets and the labor needs of the industries most dependent on immigrant workers, and it set off a wave of large worksite operations, court challenges, and economic disruption that continued through the rest of the year.

What the June 12 Pause Told Agents

Senior ICE official Tatum King emailed regional offices on June 12, 2025, instructing them to “hold all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” Investigations tied to human trafficking, money laundering, or drug smuggling could continue, but agents were told to stop arresting “noncriminal collaterals” at those worksites.¹

The directive followed pressure from agricultural and hospitality employers. President Trump acknowledged the concern on June 15, posting on Truth Social that “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. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”²

The Reversal Four Days Later

On June 16, 2025, ICE and Homeland Security Investigations leadership held a morning call with field office chiefs and told them raids at agricultural businesses, hotels, and restaurants must continue, overriding King’s email.²

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said “worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability. These operations target illegal employment networks that undermine American workers, destabilize labor markets and expose critical infrastructure to exploitation.”² She added in a separate statement: “There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts.”³

White House “border czar” Tom Homan told reporters on June 19 that “the message is clear now that we’re going to continue doing worksite enforcement operations, even on farms and hotels, but based on a prioritized basis. Criminals come first.” Asked why the pause had been issued at all, Homan declined to explain.³

The Arrest Quota Driving the Decision

Reporting by Axios and the Wall Street Journal traced the reversal to an internal arrest target. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem pushed ICE to arrest 3,000 people per day, a figure calibrated to reach one million arrests per year.⁴ Field office chiefs told leadership they could not hit that number without raiding the same businesses the June 12 memo had placed off-limits.⁵

Actual arrest numbers fell short. Between January 20 and October 15, 2025, ICE averaged roughly 821 arrests per day, climbing to about 1,100 per day by late 2025. To close the gap, agents were pushed to make “collateral arrests” of people not on target lists and to detain individuals without criminal convictions.⁶

The government publicly denied the quota existed. In a July 30, 2025 letter to the Ninth Circuit in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, counsel wrote that “no such goal has been set as a matter of policy, and no such directive has been issued to or by DHS or ICE.” Months later, in a December 2025 hearing in M-J-M-A v. Wamsley in the District of Oregon, an ICE agent testified that his team had been verbally instructed to make eight immigration arrests per day during a Portland operation.⁴

The Raids That Followed

Worksite operations accelerated within hours of the reversal.

Delta Downs Racetrack, Louisiana

On June 17, 2025, the same day DHS confirmed the reversal publicly, ICE and partner agencies locked down entrances at the Delta Downs Racetrack horse stables in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, and arrested 84 people for administrative immigration violations. Four had prior convictions including aggravated assault, drug trafficking, and sexual battery.⁷ Peter Ecabert, general counsel for the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, called the raid “unacceptable” and said it left racing operations “stranded and without workers.”⁸

Hyundai Battery Plant, Ellabell, Georgia

On September 4, 2025, agents took 475 people into custody at a Hyundai battery production facility in Ellabell, Georgia, despite the underlying search warrant naming only four specific individuals.⁹¹⁰ A leaked internal ICE document later showed that at least one detained worker held a valid B1/B2 visa, had not violated its terms, and was still presented with a voluntary departure form. Immigration attorney Charles Kuck, representing several of the workers, called the detention of valid visa holders “unlawful imprisonment.” On September 7, South Korea and the United States negotiated a deal to transport arrested workers back to South Korea, with roughly 300 deportation flights scheduled within days.¹¹

Court Rulings on Worksite Warrants

The wave of enforcement produced a notable challenge to the warrants ICE has traditionally used to enter businesses. On May 27, 2025, Magistrate Judge Andrew Edison of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas denied ICE’s application for an administrative inspection warrant, known as a “Blackie’s warrant” after a 1981 precedent. In In re Sealed Search Warrant Application (No. 3:25-mc-05067), Edison ruled that because employers face potential criminal penalties for hiring unauthorized workers, the search was “inherently criminal” rather than purely administrative, and ICE must obtain a particularized criminal warrant supported by probable cause under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41.¹²

“People are not documents or safety hazards. If the government wants to search for a person—including an alien—it must get a Rule 41 warrant,” Edison wrote. When the government submitted an identical application to a different judge, the case was reassigned to Edison, who rejected it again on June 9, 2025.¹³

Industry and Congressional Reaction

The whiplash between pause and reversal drew criticism from Republican agriculture leaders. Rep. G.T. Thompson of Pennsylvania, chair of the House Agriculture Committee, called raids on agricultural producers “just wrong” and urged the administration to “go after the criminals and give us time to put processes in place so we don’t disrupt the food supply chain.” Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said the “mixed signals” from the administration “breeds uncertainty” for farmers trying to plan operations.⁸

Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition, said the pause had brought “a sense of calm” and the reversal meant “there’s fear and worry once more. That’s not a way to run business when your employees are at this level of stress and trauma.”¹⁴ United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero said farmworkers were “terrified” and that “these are not criminals. These are people responsible for putting food on our table.”⁸ Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association, said “the people pushing for these raids that target farms and feed yards and dairies have no idea how farms operate.” Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum noted that ICE had detained people who were in the country lawfully, and said “the immigration policy and the economic policy are not lining up at all.”

Economic and Workforce Fallout

A June 2026 Brookings Institution study found that ICE made approximately 380,000 total arrests between the January 2025 inauguration and February 2026. In 86 cities that saw a sharp enforcement surge in the first half of 2025, each arrest above the 2024 baseline was associated with the loss of 13 jobs, a ratio that climbed to 30 jobs lost per excess arrest in cities tracked for at least six months. Brookings estimated a total loss of 668,000 jobs across those cities, with between 51,000 and 297,000 of those jobs held by American-born workers.¹⁵

Fear generated by raids also spread past those who were undocumented. Agricultural economists said that after ICE raids on a nearby farm, even workers with legal status would stay away for days. Immigrants make up roughly two-thirds of the nation’s crop farmworkers, and about 40 percent of those workers lack legal authorization. In the dairy industry, immigrants account for 51 percent of the workforce, supporting farms that produce nearly 80 percent of the U.S. milk supply. Dairy and poultry operations are particularly exposed because their year-round labor needs disqualify them from the seasonal H-2A visa program.¹⁶

Where Things Stand Now

By the fall of 2025, the administration appeared to pull back from large-scale agricultural raids without formally announcing a policy change. ICE had raided a New Mexico dairy farm and a Nebraska meatpacking plant in June, but later activity in the sector was infrequent: a September raid on a Wisconsin dairy farm and an October raid on a Northern California onion farm tied to visa fraud charges.¹⁷

Julia Gelatt of the Migration Policy Institute called it a “quiet de-emphasis,” a common approach for administrations trying to protect the food supply while pursuing broader deportation goals. At the same time, DHS moved to streamline the H-2A visa process, projecting an additional 119,000 visas, while lowering hourly wage guidelines and allowing employers to charge for previously free housing. The North Carolina H-2A wage rate dropped from $16.16 to $11.09 per hour, and California’s from $19.97 to $13.45. The United Farm Workers described the combination of raids and wage cuts as a “one-two punch.”¹⁷

Because the de-emphasis is unwritten, industry and farmworker advocates note that it could shift again at any time, leaving the same uncertainty that defined the June reversal in place for employers and workers alike.¹⁷

1
Immigration Policy Tracking. Reported: ICE Has Resumed Worksite Raids
2
CNN. Homeland Security Immigration Raids Resume
3
NBC News. Trump’s Border Czar: Worksite Immigration Raids Continue
4
Immigration Policy Tracking. Report: ICE Directed to Increase Arrests to Meet Daily Quotas
5
Economic Policy Institute. Trump Decides to Pause ICE Raids in Agriculture, Meatpacking, and Hospitality, Then Quickly Reverses Course
6
Axios. Trump ICE Immigration Arrests Deportations
7
ICE. ICE, Law Enforcement Partners Arrest More Than 80 During Worksite Operation
8
ABIC. Know This Now – June 20, 2025
9
CNN. Georgia Hyundai Plant Raid Timeline
10
American Immigration Council. Understanding ICE Worksite Raids
11
The Guardian. Hyundai Factory ICE Raid – Legal Visa
12
Justia. USA v. Sealed Search Warrant
13
Steptoe. Judge Holds That ICE Workplace Warrants Must Comply With the Fourth Amendment
14
ABC7NY. ICE Raids Uncertainty Scare Off Workers, Baffle Businesses
15
Brookings Institution. ICE Enforcement Employment Effects in U.S. Cities
16
Arkansas Advocate. Trump Migrant Deportations Could Threaten State’s Agricultural Economies
17
Connecticut Mirror. Trump Allows More Foreign Ag Workers, Eases Off ICE Raids on Farms