After Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Tuesday that immigrant farmworkers could be replaced with automation and “able-bodied” U.S. citizens “on Medicaid,” groups representing farmers and workers in California said that’s not realistic.
“There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way,” Rollins said. “And we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation, which, again, with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”
Rollins spoke during a news conference outside the USDA headquarters in Washington, D.C., alongside Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi. The Trump administration officials announced a plan to protect national security by banning “Chinese nationals and other foreign adversaries” from purchasing farmland in the U.S.
Helen McGrath, whose family farms citrus and avocados in Ventura County, said Rollins’ comments were insulting.
“I can confidently say that most farmers in the country either laughed out loud or were just deflated by those comments,” she said. “It just shows how uninformed and out of touch some of these officials are with what food production looks like in this country.”
According to 2022 figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 42% of crop farmworkers had no work authorization, with California having the highest share of unauthorized workers.
Immigration raids at farms, ranches and dairies have recently targeted operations in Ventura County, as well as those in other states, such as Nebraska. Many farmers reported their workers had stayed home for days after such enforcement actions out of fear of arrest.
Last month, President Trump acknowledged concerns among agriculture industry leaders that recent immigration enforcement was taking away critical workers. That led to a pause of worksite raids in the agriculture, hotel and restaurant sectors.
Days later, though, his administration reversed course.
Rollins acknowledged “there’s been a lot of noise in the last few days and a lot of questions about where the president stands in his vision for farm labor.”
She said that when she and Trump have spoken about mass deportations, he has agreed that they must be carried out strategically “so as to not compromise our food supply.”
Juan Proaño, chief executive of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a national civil rights organization, dismissed the agricultural secretary’s message, saying the Trump administration has flip-flopped so much that her words shouldn’t be taken at face value.
“I wouldn’t put too much credence on this,” Proaño said. “The president understands he’s getting significant pressure from the agriculture industry. These workers really are irreplaceable in our food distribution system.”
Proaño said the idea that “backbreaking work in some of the worst conditions” could be replaced by automation or by people receiving Medicaid is simply not a realistic plan.
“These are large conglomerates worth millions and millions of dollars,” Proaño said. “If they could have automated picking strawberries and oranges, they would have already.”
Automation is not just around the corner, said Mark Bolda, a farm advisor specializing in berry agriculture on the Central Coast of California. Machines have a particularly hard time with strawberries because the soft fruit tends to be hidden under leaves.
“I think the secretary is being overly ambitious,” he said.
A transition to automation would require an expensive and unfeasible overhaul of the way strawberries are grown, Bolda said. It would require, for example, replacing sprawling strawberry fields with tabletop beds in controlled greenhouses with flat floors conducive to wheeled machines.
For now, the work of picking strawberries relies on humans.
“Growers are very vigorously testing machines, but nothing’s worked,” he said.
In 2023, nearly two-thirds of adults ages 19 to 64 who were covered by Medicaid were working, and more than a quarter were not working because of caregiving responsibilities, illness or disability, or because they were in school. That’s according to the health policy organization KFF.
Manuel Cunha, head of the Nisei Farmer’s League, was skeptical of the idea that Medicaid recipients seeking employment would be a good fit for farm labor.
In the 1990s, he was part of an effort that included several California agricultural counties and state workforce leaders to make farm labor jobs available for people required to seek employment under the “Welfare to Work” program. He said farmers at the time were desperate for workers because many longtime farmworkers had recently become lawful permanent residents under President Reagan’s amnesty program and sought jobs in different sectors.
But he said the effort was a disaster.
After diligent outreach, only three people showed up to work, he said. One was late. A second person showed up and worked for part of the day before sustaining an injury and returning to the employment office to say he had gotten hurt on the job.
“We lost crops,” Cunha recalled. “Fruit literally rotted on the ground.”
During the news conference Tuesday, Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, mentioned her past as a farmer and rancher in South Dakota.
“I recognize that food policy is national security policy,” she said. “A country who cannot feed itself, cannot take care of itself, and cannot provide for itself is not secure.”
Critics called her comments ironic, saying the Trump administration is taking farmworkers for granted and leaving the country vulnerable to food insecurity.
“These deportations and this cruelty, it is affecting workers and their families and their community, but it’s going to get to the point that we’re all going to feel the pain,” said United Farm Workers President Theresa Romero. “We’re not going to find what we want and what we need, and whatever we find is going to be a lot more expensive.”
The Trump Organization has filed to bring in at least 1,880 foreign workers under temporary visa programs since 2008 to staff Mar-a-Lago, four of its golf clubs and its Virginia winery, Forbes reported.
In an interview with Fox News last month, Trump said his administration is working to develop a “temporary pass” for immigrants who work in agriculture.
“We’re going to do something for farmers, where we can let the farmer sort of be in charge,” Trump said. “The farmer knows. He’s not going to hire a murderer. When you go into a farm and he’s had somebody working with him for nine years doing this kind of work — which is hard work to do, and a lot of people aren’t going to do it — and you end up destroying a farmer because you took all the people away, it’s a problem.”
Asked about Rollins’ comments later Tuesday, Trump reiterated that “there’s no amnesty.”
“What we’re doing is we’re getting rid of criminals, but we are doing a work program,” he said.
Rollins pointed to the H2A visa program and other seasonal worker programs, saying the conversations around temporary farm labor continue.
LULAC, the civil rights group, launched a petition on Friday urging the Trump administration to legalize essential workers, including those in the agricultural and service industries. The petition collected 100,000 signatures in the first 24 hours after it went live, according to the organization.
Proaño said he plans to visit Washington in the coming days to have “some open dialogue” with the administration. He said the president himself has voiced support for a legal pathway the petition calls for.
“We are taking essentially the president’s own words and his call to action and showing that there are a lot of people that support it,” he said. “We hope he will find the wherewithal to do something about it.”
Industry groups, including those advocating on behalf of agricultural businesses, have been lobbying Trump for a reprieve.
Ryan Jacobsen, chief executive of the Fresno County Farm Bureau and a farmer of almonds and grapes, said he was caught off guard by Rollins’ comments, saying they struck a different tone than Trump’s previous remarks.
Jacobsen said that farmers in the Central Valley have, as the secretary suggested, embraced automation, but also know its limits.
“A fresh peach still requires a pair of hands to cut that off of a tree,” he said. “Table grapes still require the sensitive hands of an employee removing it from the vine.”
