Trump Official Suggests Replacing Deported Farm Workers with Medicaid Enrollees
'There's been a lot of noise in the last few days and a lot of questions about where the president stands and his vision for farm labor,' Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters during a press briefing with Republican governors Tuesday.
'Ultimately, the answer on this is automation, also some reform within the current governing structure, and then, also, when you think about there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program, there are plenty of workers in America,' she continued.
First, it touches on an issue that the Trump administration has struggled to reach a consensus on since the president first launched his mass deportation effort in states and cities around the U.S. As I noted in TPM's Morning Memo last week, Trump has been flip-flopping — to a truly cartoonish degree — on the question of whether to upend the agriculture and hospitality industries for the sake of following through on his core campaign promise: to deport people in cruel and attention-grabbing ways. While Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has excitedly sent ICE to terrorize and arrest immigrants in blue states and cities, there's been more hesitation around whether to conduct raids in rural communities, the kind that in many cases produce America's food, and where many residents, including farmers, voted for Trump. There's been similar hesitation around how and whether to target restaurants and hotels, which rely on seasonal workers and, in many cases, have executives that generously support the Republican Party.
In mid June, DHS advised staff to temporarily pause ICE raids at farms, hotels and restaurants. Just days later, DHS officials reversed course on that directive. Last week, Trump grappled with the political realities of deporting farmers' workforce during an interview on Fox News, when he suggested, yet again, that ICE might not target farmers who employ undocumented immigrants as field workers.
'I don't back away,' he said. 'What I do have, I cherish our farmers. And when we go into a farm and we take away people that have been working there for 15 and 20 years, who were good, who possibly came in incorrectly. And what we're going to do is we're going to do something for farmers where we can let the farmer sort of be in charge. The farmer knows he's not going to hire a murderer.'
However, it now appears that at least one Trump administration official — one who is specifically tasked with supporting and regulating America's farmers — is supportive of the raids on farm workers plowing ahead. Rollins has, she professes, found a solution for those in the industry she oversees: Farmers short on field laborers due to mass deportations could replace the work with some sort of amorphous AI. You know, the kind that picks tomatoes. Alternatively, they could nab some of those purported freeloaders (child-free, able bodied adults between the ages of 19 and 64) on Medicaid who will soon have to complete work requirements (at least 80 hours per month of work, volunteering, education, or training) in order to access health care, thanks to Trump's disastrous, Medicaid-slashing megabill.
While the bill's passage may have finally satiated the desires of Republicans who have long pushed to impose work requirements on low-income Americans who receive health coverage through Medicaid, the majority of Medicaid recipients who are not children and who are not disabled already do work, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Congressional Budget Office even released data on the legislation that showed adding work requirements would kick people off Medicaid and decrease federal spending on the social safety net program, but it would not actually increase employment.
That's not how Rollins sees it. Per her, a new crop of Medicaid recipients looking for jobs when work requirements kick in next year (shockingly, after the midterms) can be sent to the fields. Perhaps this is magical thinking on Rollins' part. Perhaps not. We will just have to see.
While there is not yet data on the demographic of voters that will lose their health care coverage due to Medicaid work requirements, we do know a decent amount about whose health care coverage is at risk as part of the general, sweeping cuts Republicans just imposed. Many are, in short, Trump voters. Per NPR:
More than two-thirds of nearly 300 U.S. counties with the biggest growth in Medicaid and CHIP since 2008 backed Trump in the last election, according to a KFF Health News analysis of voting results and enrollment data from Georgetown. Many of these counties are in deep-red states such as Kentucky, Louisiana, and Montana.
Before the megabill passed the Senate, the New York Times did a deep dive on the demographics of constituents who might be most affected by the proposed cuts put forward by House Republicans. While large cuts to Medicaid will likely hit densely populated urban areas represented in Congress by Democrats hardest (based on the percentage of the population enrolled in Medicaid), a good chunk of rural counties where more than 30 percent of the population is covered by Medicaid have Republicans representatives in the House. That data includes and applies specifically to House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) own district. Per the Times:
Of the 10 congressional districts with the highest share of residents enrolled in Medicaid, nine are held by Democratic legislators.
There are also pockets of the country that rely significantly on the program where voters favor Republicans. Of the 218 seats Republicans control in Congress, 26 are in districts where Medicaid covers more than 30 percent of the population, according to a New York Times analysis of federal enrollment data.
We will see if this unhinged solution to the administration's mass-deportation problems is the one that sticks.
Back on good terms with President Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is already acting as a mouthpiece for Trump's agenda, warning that if the world's richest man (and one-time DeSantis ally) Elon Musk decides to support third-party candidates he will end up harming Republicans in the midterms. Musk announced he'd be creating an 'America Party' over the weekend after weeks of teasing it.
'The problem is, when you do another party, especially if you're running on some of the issues that he talks about, you know, that would end up — if he funds Senate candidates and House candidates in competitive races, that would likely end up meaning the Democrats would win all the competitive Senate and House races,' DeSantis said Monday evening.
In comments to reporters during a Cabinet meeting today, Trump threatened another federal power grab on New York City if Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani wins the race. Mamdani is a Democratic socialist who has run on a campaign of affordability. He faces other challengers in November, including current Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent after Trump, in February, made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
'If a communist gets elected to run New York, it can never be the same. But we have tremendous power at the White House to run places where we have to,' Trump told The New York Post Tuesday of Mamdani. 'New York City will run properly. I'm going to bring New York back. I love New York.
'We're going to straighten out New York. It's going to — maybe we're going to have to straighten it out from Washington,' he continued.
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