Many business owners have battled severe uncertainty amid the whiplashing changes in President Donald Trump’s import tariff plans, creating significant hesitancy in managing their expansion plans and even daily operations. The same concern and confusion also plagues companies struggling to deal with workplace raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as it carries out Trump’s goal of mass deportations of undocumented people in the country. Business owners working in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, hotels, restaurants, and services like landscaping and dry cleaning expected they would be in for turbulent times since Trump’s election in November. One of his main campaign pledges was to undertake the biggest ever deportation of undocumented immigrants. Companies in these sectors traditionally employ significant numbers of unauthorized workers to do often hard, uncomfortable, and low-paying jobs that many Americans don’t want. But despite Trump’s anti-immigration vow, many business owners were not prepared for the shock of armed ICE units raiding their workplaces and taking undocumented staff away. The number of sweeps has grown as the White House has kicked its expulsion policy into higher gear, creating enormous disruption and even fear in targeted companies—and others fearing they could be next. Now, executives of businesses employing undocumented workers are also having to grapple with new uncertainties about how to respond to those sweeps, after Trump pivoted on deportations as he has with tariffs. “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,” Trump said in a June 12 post on his Truth Social platform, promising “changes are coming” in response to those businesses’ concerns. Later that same day, he expanded on the post by saying he’d order ICE to stop targeting sectors that employ large portions of “very good workers” who happen to be undocumented. That shift drew applause from Republican legislators representing areas with large numbers of businesses destabilized by the sweeps. Company owners also praised Trump’s change of heart. “These raids disrupt our food supply and contribute to higher food prices,” said Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association. “In addition to the workers who have been detained, they also instill fear in these communities, even for legal workers. We’re encouraged by the President’s recognition of the need for a balanced approach to this issue.” But even as affected business owners began bringing back undocumented staff who’d been ordered to stay away from work as the threat of ICE raids spiked, Trump turned heel again. Feeling pressure from MAGA supporters wanting him to take the hardest line possible on illegal immigration, Trump on Monday commanded ICE units “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” And so, as has been the case with tariffs, business owners now don’t know what to expect, or how to effectively respond to Trump’s repeated r eversals on his deportation strategies. “One minute you have a message saying they won’t go after agriculture , the next something else,” Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the central California growers’ association, Nisei Farmers League, told The New York Times . “First thing this morning, I got calls from my growers asking, ‘Does this mean they are going to come after the workers in the fields?’” Owners and managers of such companies are understandably stressed by the renewed uncertainty in what’s already a tense, high-stakes situation. Not only are they concerned about the human toll of their undocumented employees being arrested and expelled, they’re also facing potentially big blows to their businesses. According to a 2022 Pew Center estimate, there are thought to be 11 million undocumente d migrants in the U.S., about 8.3 million of whom are working—often in sectors that also frequently employ legal immigrants. Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition, said in a statement that in the U.S. today, “22 percent of restaurant staff, 51 percent of dairy and cattle workers, and 72 percent of horse racing are foreign born workers,” often undocumented. Though unauthorized immigrants make up only an estimated 5 percent of the U.S. labor market, their disappearance from sectors that rely on them is likely to produce billions to businesses in lost productivity and missed opportunities. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, deportation of 1.3 million migrants would cut economic growth by 1.3 percent over the next three years. Trump has vowed to oust all 11 million undocumented people. Figures that Time magazine received this month from the Department of Homeland Security claim 207,000 expulsions have been made so far this year, with White House officials calling for 3,000 more every day. That compares with the total 271,484 undocumented people that the U.S. expelled during the entire 2024 fiscal year. Given both the financial and business threats that continued deportations pose for the most implicated companies, it’s understandable many owners who voted for Trump are now expressing unhappiness about his immigration policy—and his changing intensity of its application. They aren’t alone. According to a new Pew Center poll, 47 percent of respondents disapprove of Trump’s deportation actions, while 42 percent approve. Meanwhile, with ICE workplace raids ramping up again, 54 percent of participants condemned those sweeps of businesses searching for undocumented people, versus 43 percent who had no problem with it. “(T)hese evaluations—and views of specific policies—largely split along partisan lines, with Republicans broadly supportive and Democrats opposed,” the Pew survey noted. The early-rate deadline for the 2025 Inc. Power Partner Awards is Friday, June 27, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now .