In an appearance on Fox Business on Wednesday, Trump’s agriculture chief, Brooke Rollins, revealed that the administration has no plan to fix the damage his mass deportations are inflicting on the U.S. food supply.
The Trump administration has thus far sent confused signals on how it plans to conduct its promised mass deportations without crippling the economy and food system, which depend in large part on the labor of undocumented workers whose jobs U.S. citizens are not rushing to take. The president recently pledged to let undocumented farmworkers remain in the U.S. if their employers vouch for them.
Anchor David Asman asked Rollins for clarification on whether some undocumented farmworkers will be allowed to stay.
“Ultimately, we have to move toward a 100 percent legal workforce, and that’s what this president stands for, and that’s what we’re doing,” the agriculture secretary replied. “The mass deportations will continue, but the president has been very clear that we have to make sure we’re not compromising our food supply at the same time.”
Providing nothing by way of how the administration will reconcile those two conflicting promises, Rollins’s answer led Asman to press: “It sounds like you don’t yet have a concrete proposal to deal with farmers who rely on undocumented workers, am I right?”
“Well, no. We’re working on it,” Rollins began, before Asman cut back in, saying, “You’re working on it, but that’s not a concrete proposal.”
“Well, no. The president has been very, very clear,” Rollins continued. “We need to make sure that the food supply is safe. [Labor Secretary] Lori Chavez-DeRemer is on it, she’s leading the way. The H-2A [temporary agriculture worker] program has been in place for a long time. The border has to be secure. And there will be no amnesty. Listen, none of this is easy.”
Asman agreed on the latter point, but said it’s unfair “to say there’s a concrete proposal when you’re still working out details to try to deal with the needs of farmers who need a lot of these undocumented workers and at the same time not providing an amnesty.”
The anchor was putting it nicely by saying the administration is “still working out details.” The administration is apparently so bereft of solutions that, a day earlier, Rollins bizarrely suggested that able-bodied Medicaid recipients (a cohort whose size she severely overstated) will replace deported farmworkers, toiling in fields to meet Medicaid work requirements that will be implemented under Trump’s budget.
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