President Donald Trump said an order regarding migrant farm workers is coming “soon” as concerns mount over the effect the deportation of longtime workers could have on U.S. agriculture.

“We’re going to have an order on that pretty soon, I think,” Trump said Thursday at the White House. “We can’t do that to our farmers, and leisure too. Hotels. We’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”

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The Trump administration has pursued an aggressive deportation effort in California and elsewhere, including conducting workplace immigration raids. Reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was conducting raids on farms have spurred anxiety in workers.

However, in a Truth Social post earlier Thursday, Trump conceded that his “very aggressive policy” was taking away longtime workers that farmers and hospitality businesses rely on.

“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,” he said. “We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”

Trump explained his post during remarks at the White House.

“Our farmers are being hurt badly,” Trump said. “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 going to have to do something about that.”

Trump campaigned heavily on an illegal immigration crackdown last year, but promised to first go after migrants who also committed other crimes. However, this appeared to change in recent weeks as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and other officials pushed to triple the number of ICE arrests.

The push was part of the Department of Homeland Security’s overarching goal of deporting at least a million illegal immigrants by the end of Trump’s first year back in office.

However, last weekend, it also helped fuel protests and rioting in Los Angeles, which have dominated this week’s news cycle and have hurt businesses that have used migrant labor for years.

Trump didn’t say exactly what those changes were, but elaborated a bit when asked about the matter later in the White House East Room.

“We can’t take farmers and take all of their people and send them back because they don’t have maybe what they’re supposed to have,” Trump said. ” … They’ve been there 20 or 25 years, and they’ve worked great, and the owner of the farm loves them and everything else. And then you’re supposed to throw them out, and you know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that come in.”

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That’s the argument that many of Trump’s opponents have been making for years.

In January, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) gave a speech predicting that “our vegetables would rot in the ground” if they weren’t picked by illegal immigrants. In 2022, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Florida farmers needed migrants to “pick the crops.”