Semafor: “The Trump administration will civilly and criminally prosecute [some] companies that have employed migrant workers, White House border czar Tom Homan said in an interview with Semafor’s Ben Smith Wednesday, a new dimension of risk for executives. “Worksite enforcement operations are going to massively expand,” he said. “They’re coming here for a better life and a job and I get that… If they can’t get a job, most of them aren’t going to come.” Putting heat on employers that, knowingly or not, depend on undocumented workers would shake huge segments of the US economy and undercut two of Trump’s campaign promises: make housing more affordable and keep food prices down. As we reported Tuesday, almost a quarter of construction workers and as many as half of meatpacking workers lack legal status. Further reading: Stepped-up immigration enforcement is pressuring brands that rely on Latino customers, WSJ reports, as shoppers stay home rather than risk getting caught in a dragnet. Coca-Cola, Colgate and Constellation have all felt the hit. The Trump administration is planning to ramp up civil and criminal prosecutions of companies that employ workers without legal status, White House border czar Tom Homan said in an interview Wednesday. “Worksite enforcement operations are going to massively expand,” Homan said. The White House has faced criticism from Democrats and even its own anti-immigration allies for exaggerating an immigrant crime wave while holding harmless the employers whose decisions shape huge sectors of the American economy. President Donald Trump “won’t prosecute companies for bribery and won’t prosecute companies for hiring illegal immigrants,” Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said on X Tuesday. “This administration just takes care of its donors.” But behind the scenes, American companies are “freaking out” about the possibility of civil and criminal sanctions, or about the operational impact of losing a huge labor force, said Chris Thomas, a partner at Holland & Hart, who represents employers in immigration cases. He said clients have been “calling in a panic — asking if they should be looking for ways to cut out potentially undocumented workers.” (He added that his clients do not know themselves to be employing any.) Employers are “very scared — folks in LA, particularly,” said Bruce Buchanan, a leading immigration lawyer based in Nashville. Trump appeared to respond to those worries on Thursday morning: “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 posted on Truth Social, promising that “changes are coming.”

The contradiction at the heart of the administration’s approach reveals a fundamental tension between populist rhetoric and pro-business reality. While cameras roll for dramatic deportation footage, the industries dependent on illegal migration are maintaining business as usual. This disconnect could ultimately undermine the economic nationalism that propelled the Trump campaign to victory,” Lee Fang wrote on Substack. What has caused this disconnect? For a clue, we should look to high-dollar donations. The Trump Vance Inaugural Committee Inc, in a filing last week, revealed that its biggest single contributor was Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation, a chicken processing company in the United States. The chicken-producing conglomerate gave $5 million to fund the inauguration, far outpacing business donors with much deeper pockets, such as Amazon, Meta, ExxonMobil, and Pfizer.  Pilgrim’s Pride has much to gain from a lax approach. Last year, the company confirmed reports that it used buses to transport Haitian workers to its plant in Russellville, Alabama. It also employs thousands of migrant workers, many of whom are alleged to be without documentation, at its poultry facility in Moorefield, West Virginia. The activity of Pilgrim’s Pride, then, exemplifies the industrial-scale employment of undocumented workers that has become standard in certain sectors of the American economy. In this, the company is representative of an industry that has done more than any other to ruthlessly exploit migration…”