Will Trump Sell Out ‘America First’ to Gain Cheap Labor for Sweatshop Hotels and Farms?

No politician is perfect, and no president can deliver on absolutely all of his promises, especially in the face of a comatose Congress, insurrectionist judges, and a Deep State honeycombed with traitors. We get that.

When you go to an Italian restaurant, you don’t necessarily expect the filets to rival those at a steakhouse. But you do expect Nino’s Trattoria not to serve you the penne half-raw, with sauce from Ragu, on a dirty plate.

Earlier this week, it seemed that was what  President Donald Trump’s team was doing to his supporters: punting on the one issue that overwhelmingly delivered him the election: immigration. MSN reports:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has directed immigration officials to largely pause raids on farms, hotels, restaurants and meatpacking plants, according to an internal email reviewed by Reuters, a senior Trump official, and a person familiar with the matter. 

The order to scale back U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids came from Trump himself, the person familiar with the matter said, and appears to rein in a late-May demand by top White House aide Stephen Miller for more aggressive sweeps.

Trump was not aware of the extent of the enforcement push and “once it hit him, he pulled it back,” the person said.

Why Reward the Rioters and Sweatshop Owners?

If true, that would be like President Abraham Lincoln carving out exceptions in the Emancipation Proclamation to protect the cotton industry. Americans voted in an electoral landslide for the U.S. government to enforce its duly enacted, just, bipartisan immigration laws — period.

Not to help scofflaw agribusinesses, massive hotel chains, fast food conglomerates, and slaughterhouses keep profiting by illegally hiring aliens — who, by the way, don’t enjoy the wage and safety protections or get the health insurance that American workers would.

If an illegal alien slices off his thumb at one of those meatpacking plants, guess where he goes to get it reattached? To the local emergency room, where the costs of his treatment don’t hit his employer, but all the other patients. That’s why emergency ward visits by U.S. citizens with health insurance often cost over $10,000 — which, given the deductibles most of us are stuck with thanks to Obamacare, usually comes out of pocket. That’s why we go to local, for-profit “urgent care” centers instead.

And those illegal workers’ anchor babies qualify for Medicaid. They attend your local public school, driving up costs and encouraging bilingual and multicultural policies, often rendering the school almost useless for U.S. students whose parents can’t afford Christian or other private schools. So guess what Americans do? They have fewer children. Which gives ammunition to open borders advocates who claim we need more immigrants to prop up the economy. Rinse and repeat.

Did You Vote for National Surrender?

Is that what you voted for? Let’s go back to MSN to see what some on Trump’s team apparently think we voted for:

The new directive, issued on Thursday, still allows for investigations into serious crimes such as human trafficking. The New York Times first reported the guidance.

Trump took office in January pledging to deport millions of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. While Trump framed the effort around removing serious criminals, thousands of suspected immigration offenders with no criminal records have been swept up in recent months.

ICE’s more aggressive tactics – including raids in Los Angeles – have sparked protests and pushback from Democrats. Some Republican lawmakers have called on the administration to focus on criminal offenders.

Have you got that? The federal government would only try to deport a few thousand serious, hard-core violent criminals. (You might have thought that was already Job #1 for agencies such as the FBI.)

It wouldn’t trouble the 10 million-plus lawbreakers the Secret Committee Formerly Known As Joe Biden allowed into the country and sent to swing states. That coup d’etat by the Left would go unreversed and unpunished, and would be allowed to exert its inexorable effect: shifting America permanently to the Left, making elections unwinnable for pro-lifers and conservatives once the political tornado that is Donald Trump blows out of D.C. in 2028. 

Trump is a gift from God, an authentic political genius some might say is on the order of Bill Clinton — except that Trump is a basically decent man and an American patriot. We don’t have a bench full of Trumps in waiting who can reach across class and ethnic boundaries, winning blue-collar votes from traditionally Democratic constituencies.

Trump dodged multiple bullets and fought off hate-driven lawfare to triumph in the last election. Some of his supporters were persecuted by prosecutors, frivolously imprisoned, or sued into bankruptcy. (Christian hero Mike Lindell just lost a punitive lawsuit filed from a far-left former Dominion official who resented Lindell for exposing his political bias. Lindell will have to pay $2.3 million in damages for telling the truth.) Thousands of peaceful January 6 protestors have seen their homes raided by FBI SWAT teams, their lives upended, their families destroyed.

Did we all go through all of that to see Trump cave in to the demands of the violent, foreign flag-waving mobs in Los Angeles and Seattle? Do we just grin and bear Biden’s mass colonization of our country?

Our National Last Chance

This is our one shot to undo the grave damage done to our country by the radical policies of the Obama team, who kept on wielding power via the Deep State during Trump’s first term in office and then ruled the U.S. as tyrants while Biden took long, soothing naps. Now they rule via judges who carve out big chunks of presidential authority one lawless order at a time.

If the mass invasion of impoverished, poorly educated natural Democrat voters who came in under Biden isn’t reversed, if they’re put on a track to amnesty for the sake of enriching a few agribusinesses and can raise their families on U.S. government programs at the expense of blue-collar citizens, then the game is over. Not because we were beaten, but because our captain forfeited.

Surprise Ending: Trump Is Listening to Us

Except that isn’t happening. No sooner had I finished writing this column over here in the U.K. on my way home from vacation than I read the latest news. Trump is actually listening to his voters rather than the rioters:

NEW: ICE to reverse order exempting farms, hotels, and restaurants from immigration raids after learning that the White House didn’t support it.

So much for Trump doing amnesty! pic.twitter.com/SxFSld2j2H

— Patrick Casey (@restoreorderusa) June 17, 2025

Let’s offer prayers of thanks, but keep our powder dry.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.