President Donald Trump floated a form of semi-amnesty for illegal hotel, restaurant, and farm workers during a victory speech in Iowa late Thursday — but he also said a bitterly divided Congress would have to write the legislation.
“We’re working on legislation right now,” he told the friendly crowd as he bobbed and weaved between business supporters and pro-deportation voters, between migrants’ impact on jobs and crimes, and between current poll ratings and future turnout in the 2026 election.
But Trump’s pro-deportation supporters instantly shot down his trial balloon.
“What the hell is the point of throwing a quadrillion dollars at ICE if we only go after those [with] criminal records,” responded conservative Daniel Horowitz. “If you listen carefully, this [pitch] is not just farms, but many industries and will essentially just make this [deportation campaign] about those with criminal records.”
“Americans did not vote for amnesty. We voted for mass deportations. Amnesty is NEVER the answer,” said a tweet from the Immigration Accountability Project.”
Trump’s statement came the day after ALIPAC, a grass-roots, anti-amnesty group that helped kill several prior amnesty campaigns since 2004, announced that a member survey showed both overwhelming support for Trump and roughly 90 percent opposition a Trump’s giveaway. Founder William Gheen reported:
If Trump keeps promoting this plan to change or skirt existing immigrartion laws, or attempts to give a pass-Amnesty to illegals and their employers via the required new legislation … his approval ratings among his base will collapse, and he will dismay, anger, and lose many Americans who supported him for his numerous promises to enforce our existing immigration laws without Amnesty.
ALIPAC’s survey was prompted by Trump’s July 29 comments on Fox, where he said, “I’m on both sides of the thing.” He added:
We’re going to work it so that, some kind of a temporary pass, where [migrant] people pay taxes, where the farmer can have a little control as opposed to you walk in and take everybody away.
But President Joe Biden’s mass migration was “a sin we can never forget,” Trump added.
Whenever “they start talking about giving legal status or any type of selective amnesty … we all got to throw fits,” Gheen told Breitbart News. “It’s going to be one of those things that could blow the engine on the Trump administration.”
The “throw fits” strategy has proved spectacularly successful: Trump was elected in November because of public opposition to Biden’s migration, and the pro-business GOP in Washington has agreed to spend roughly $170 billion over four years to curb illegal migration amid fierce establishment opposition.
Trump’s “We’re Going to Put You in Charge” Speech
Throughout his Iowa speech, Trump zig-zagged between the pain and pleasure points in his two-legged coalition of voters and employers.
Americans are getting more jobs and higher wages as companies react to the exit of migrants, he said to applause.
Yet he also suggested that only criminal migrants are being deported: “We want all the criminals out. Everybody agrees that we’re finding the murderers, the drug dealers. We’re getting them the hell out of here.”
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A migration giveaway to employers is unpopular among his supporters, he admitted. “I got myself into a little trouble because I said I don’t want to take people away from the farmers,” he said, before reminding his audience that he needs their votes in 2026.
But employers want to keep their illegal workers, he said. “Farmers, look, they know better. They work with them for years. … for 14, 15 years, and they get thrown out pretty viciously, and we can’t do it,” he pleaded to the silent crowd. “We’ve got to work with the farmers and people that have hotels and leisure properties, too.”
Trump’s “hotels and leisure properties, too” comment echoes the lobbying pressure he is feeling from his friends in the real-estate business. Those property owners are losing value from his migration curbs because rising wages limit commercial renters’ ability to pay high rents.
“We’re going to put you in charge,” he told the employers. “We’re going to make you responsible [for the migrants]. And I think that that’s going to make a lot of people happy.”
He also warned the employers, saying, “The farmers will be responsible, and then if the farmers don’t do a good job, we’ll throw them the hell out of the country.”
But he also asked his Iowa voters if the plan was acceptable, saying, “Now, serious radical right people, who I also happen to like a lot, they may not be quite as happy, but they’ll understand, won’t they? Do you think so?”
In his speech, he repeatedly mentioned his business-friendly chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, but not his pro-American migration czar, Stephen Miller.
But Trump also suggested that he would keep his distance from the issue by passing the buck to Congress’s legislators and Brooke Rollins, his pro-migration Secretary of Agriculture:
Madam Secretary [Rollins], look at you with the white hat on. Do you think they’ll understand that you’re the one that brought this whole situation up … Rollins brought it up, and she said, “So we have a little problem. The farmers are losing a lot of people, and we figured it out.” And we have some great stuff being written.
Prior reports said Rollings is working on regulations to reduce lawsuit risks for farmers who tap into the unlimited H-2A program for farm workers. But getting any legislation through Congress would be a very difficult battle — and Trump did not suggest he would join the fight.
Democrats will block it unless the legislation allows the migrants to get citizenship and vote in federal elections.
Also, some GOP legislators will block the legislation unless it allows businesses to import so many additional migrants that Trump’s voters lose wages.
Also, many top leaders in the GOP are moving the party to a populist, pro-employee stance.
Trump just waved away the political difficulties during his long victory speech: “We’re going to do something — I think that’s going to be good.”
Trump did not address the public’s rising concern about the growing exclusion of American college grads from careers caused by the high inflow of legalized white-collar migrants into the U.S. economy via the H-1B and other visa programs.
Meanwhile, Democrats are fighting to prevent the deportation of the nation’s huge population of illegal migrants.
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