President Trump says his administration will take a light touch when it comes to deporting employees of farms, hotels, and other hospitality businesses, even as ICE is falling far short of the White House’s demand for 3,000 deportations a day. Some of the president’s staunchest supporters are concerned that he is now paring down his ambitious deportation agenda. 

Mr. Trump and Republicans are relishing the fight between protesters and law enforcement at Los Angeles. Since the violence started over the weekend, the GOP has been highlighting the anti-ICE protests, the burning cars, and the foreign flags that have popped up in the city. 

Despite Republicans seeing this fight as a winner for them, Mr. Trump is taking a step back to say that he’ll grant some relief to farmers and the hospitality industry. 

“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,” Mr. Trump says in a Truth Social post. “This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”

Speaking to reporters during a press conference at the White House on Thursday, Mr. Trump explained that some farmers have had beloved employees taken away from them in the course of his mass deportation operation. 

He says that rounding up non-citizens who have no criminal records, and have been working on farms or at hotels for decades, should not be high on ICE’s list. 

“Our farmers are being hurt badly by — you know they have very good workers, they’ve worked for them for 20 years, they’re not citizens but they’ve turned out to be great, and we’re gonna have to do something about that. We can’t take farmers and take all their people,” Mr. Trump told reporters. 

“We’re gonna have an order on that pretty soon,” he said. “We can’t do that to our farmers and leisure, too — hotels. We’re gonna have to use a lot of common sense on that.”

Immigration and the deportation effort have become among the most fraught issues of debate among Republican senators as they work to pass Mr. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. On Wednesday, Senator Paul was told he would not be allowed to attend the congressional picnic at the White House on Thursday, just hours after he criticized the $150 billion price tag for immigration enforcement included in that bill. 

Dr. Paul was later re-invited to the picnic by the president. 

Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has been posting on X for the past week, criticizing Dr. Paul and another Kentucky libertarian, Congressman Thomas Massie, for their refusal to vote for the bill in its current form. 

Mr. Miller says Dr. Paul is using his position as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee “to eviscerate the border and deportation provisions of the BBB.” 

“It’s hard to imagine a greater betrayal of the Americans who elected President Trump,” Mr. Miller wrote Wednesday. 

On Thursday, Mr. Miller met with Republican senators at the Capitol, only to find out that Dr. Paul wasn’t the only GOP lawmaker who had problems with the border and deportation money. 

Senator Johnson — another Senate holdout who is concerned about the level of spending in the bill — told reporters after the meeting with Mr. Miller that he and the White House aide got into a heated argument in front of other senators about the $150 billion price tag. After that argument, however, Mr. Johnson conceded that Mr. Miller had convinced him to get on board with that provision.