Every Republican is an immigration hawk until the help stops showing up for work.
Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV) wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement to change its enforcement tactics in rural America. The West Virginia Republican declared that this is “a very difficult balancing act from the standpoint of our ranchers” because enforcement had left some employers understaffed. “Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years, and I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff,” Justice told Politico.
Several agricultural organizations have begun to push back against immigration enforcement policies since ICE changed tactics and began expanding its operations into rural areas. Keep in mind these are basic policies that millions of voters have supported for decades, policies that Washington has repeatedly ignored. In Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, the cattle industry has begun criticizing ICE raids, as have some local Republicans. “These ICE operations are having a massive chilling effect on the legal, documented, skilled workers that put beef on the table and keep the cattle supply chain moving,” the Kansas Livestock Association, Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association and Texas Cattle Feeders Association said in a joint statement. Dairy industry representatives in Idaho have also voiced their concerns over losing cheap labor, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
This handwringing from agricultural lobbyists and vulnerable politicians reveals a deeper truth about Justice and his peers. Jim Justice’s support for basic immigration restriction measures is at its core majoring in the minors, or at least, supporting the most anodyne of reforms. It’s a way to score political points against Democrats, who also support the mass migration agenda albeit in a more accelerated form. But when it comes to supporting hard measures that actually roll back migration—ending chain migration, implementing E-Verify, establishing an immigration moratorium—Justice is nowhere to be found.
Before his recent statements about going soft on illegal aliens in rural areas, Justice maintained the standard Republican posture of supporting border security. On September 20, 2021, Justice was one of 26 Republican governors, led by Arizona’s Doug Ducey and Texas’s Greg Abbott, who signed a letter asking President Joe Biden for a meeting on “the national security crisis created by eight months of unenforced borders.” In 2023, he joined 24 other Republican governors in a letter telling Biden “the crisis at the southern border extends to every state,” calling the situation a “travesty” and saying “we’ve got to do something about this.”
He also noted that 54 volunteer West Virginia National Guard members had returned from a 30-day deployment to Texas’s Operation Lone Star, where they encountered 10,178 migrants trying to enter illegally. In January 2025, during his first weeks as a senator, he voted for the Laken Riley Act, posting that he was proud to cast his vote.
Yet, when push comes to shove, the immigration hawk rhetoric evaporates against the hard reality of balance sheets and cheap labor demands. This contradiction is entirely normal among the Republican political class, who talk about restricting immigration while their private business practices do the opposite. Donald Trump himself has a long history of utilizing immigrant labor while posturing as a hardliner.
In January 1980, Trump needed the Bonwit Teller building demolished fast so Trump Tower could rise, hiring a contractor whose crew of roughly 200 Polish laborers had no legal status. They worked 12 to 16 hour shifts without safety gear on an asbestos-filled site, earning as little as $4 an hour—less than half the union wage—and sometimes nothing at all when the contractor stopped paying. “We worked in horrid, terrible conditions,” one of them, Wojciech Kozak, told Newsweek. “We were frightened illegal immigrants and did not know enough about our rights.” Trump spent 15 years denying he knew, then paid $1.375 million in 1998 to settle the case before Judge Loretta Preska unsealed the terms in 2017.
The pattern repeated across Trump’s business empire. In August 2019, the Washington Post revealed that Mobile Payroll Construction LLC, a Trump-owned company, had spent nearly 2 decades moving a roving crew of Latin American laborers who built features at his winery and golf courses across his properties. Labor Department data reviewed by Forbes shows the Trump Organization has sought 2,033 foreign workers through H-2A and H-2B programs since 2008. Trump’s own businesses depended on this labor, and his rhetoric eventually caught up to that fact. On June 12, 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social that farmers and hotel operators say enforcement is taking “very good, long time workers” away, adding that “we must protect our farmers.”
Jim Justice is no different from Trump with respect to legal immigration. The Greenbrier Hotel Corporation has posted seasonal job orders on the Department of Labor’s SeasonalJobs.dol.gov portal, carrying H-2B temporary labor certification job orders for hospitality positions, including a seasonal host position at $11.22 an hour seeking 12 workers, and a seasonal server position at $16.54 an hour for the 2026 season. Licensed H-2B recruitment agencies such as JTP Agency list high-end resort and private club positions consistent with The Greenbrier’s ongoing seasonal hiring needs.
Justice’s approach to labor costs mirrors his approach to debts, which is to minimize them or dodge them entirely. A ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight review published September 24, 2020, found hundreds of lawsuits going back more than 30 years—many from workers, vendors, and government agencies alleging non-payment—with the total in judgments and settlements exceeding $140 million. In early 2024, Carter Bank and Trust moved to collect roughly $300 million, leading the Justices to sue and call the bank “beyond belief terrible.”
Later in 2024, a $142 million JPMorgan loan on The Greenbrier was sold to Beltway Capital, which declared default and scheduled auctions before the debt was paid off. In March 2026, White Sulphur Springs Holdings bought Carter Bank’s Greenbrier debt and sued seeking a receiver, alleging the Justices diverted profits and let maintenance lapse, with claimed debt above $387 million. In August 2026, the family closed a joint venture with Kennedy Lewis Investment Management providing up to $500 million in financing, dismissing both lawsuits.
Judge Jim Justice by his payroll rather than his press releases, and the verdict is clear. He will deliver what Big Capital wants, mass migration and lax corporate rules, never the immigration restrictionist agenda populist voters nationwide demand.
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