While the Trump administration promotes the impact of its economic policies on “[n]ative-born American workers” and ICE raids restaurants, meatpackers and construction sites around the country, President Trump’s own businesses are again seeking to hire foreign workers at his luxury properties. 

Within days of Trump signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which pumped Trump’s immigration crackdown with $75 billion in funding for ICE—a total that surpasses the military budgets of every country on Earth except for the US and China, Trump’s Department of Labor posted a “Job Order” from his West Palm Beach golf club to hire six seasonal foreign workers to work in the kitchen at the club’s restaurant starting in the fall. Several weeks later, the Labor Department posted an order for 12 more foreign seasonal workers to work as servers at the same club.

This isn’t the first time Trump’s businesses have sought to hire foreign seasonal workers, or even the first time since Trump returned to office. Back in April, CREW reported that after lobbyists who represent companies that use foreign seasonal labor held an event at Mar-a-Lago, the Trump administration released a batch of H-2B visas that the industry had been clamoring for. 

These visas allow foreign workers to do seasonal work in the United States, and Trump’s businesses have benefited from them for years. Despite his longtime rhetoric about bringing jobs back to America—which is, after all, the stated aim behind the tariffs that have roiled the global economy—his businesses have long faced accusations of passing over US citizens for foreign workers. The H-2B program requires companies that hire foreign workers to prove that they can’t find Americans to do the job, but in interviews, local recruiters and prospective employees have been skeptical of the Trump Organization’s claim that it can’t find local talent for the positions it’s filling with foreign workers. “We have plenty of people to fill those jobs,” one local recruiter told the Washington Post in 2017, “They just choose to work with the H-2B program.” 

Days after the new visas were posted in March, Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., country club took advantage of the Trump administration’s decision, filing requests with the Department of Labor’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification seeking foreign workers to fill open positions for cooks, a bartender and, days later, servers. 

In yet another sign that he’s looking out for his businesses, Trump has repeatedly signalled recently that the growing immigration crackdown should include carveouts for the hospitality industry—essentially protecting his companies’ abilities to keep hiring foreign, and sometimes undocumented, workers without fear of raids. Just three days before signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, during a visit to the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention camp in Florida, Trump voiced concern for the impact deportations would have on the farming and hotel industries, saying that his administration was working on exemptions that would protect those workers.

Meanwhile, ICE is now the nation’s highest-funded federal law enforcement agency—with outlays that overshadow the combined budgets of the FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service and Bureau of Prisons, according to one analysis. The funds are expected to supercharge the administration’s mass-deportation dragnet that has continued to round up and detain immigrants, both legal and undocumented, as well as U.S. citizens. 

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