Farmers have begun raising concerns about the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s mass deportations on their operations, but the president’s nominee for agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, said any issues stemming from a lost labor force are “hypothetical.”
If farms are affected by mass deportations, she and other administration officials would “hopefully solve some of these problems,” Rollins said during her nomination hearing in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Thursday. When a senator remarked he hoped the issues caused by mass deportations were hypothetical, Rollins said, “I do, too.”
These comments stand in contrast with those of other Trump policy officials regarding mass deportations. In an interview with The New York Times in 2023, Stephen Miller, now a deputy chief of staff in the White House, said the deportations would have a major impact: “Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers.”
Before Trump was elected, experts and farmworker rights advocates said mass deportations could lead to the agriculture industry’s collapse. Nationwide, an estimated 42% of farm workers were undocumented in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.
Given how long farms have relied on undocumented labor, no other workforce currently exists that could replace unauthorized workers.
Rollins said Trump would not forget about farmers’ needs when implementing his deportation plans. While she agreed with the policies, she said she would listen to farmers and act accordingly, likely by augmenting the H-2A program, which brings foreign workers into the U.S. temporarily to pick crops. The program is run by the U.S. Department of Labor.
“The president’s vision of a secure border and mass deportation at a scale that matters is something I support,” Rollins said during Thursday’s hearing. “You may argue that is in conflict” with my duties to support agriculture, she added, but, “having both of those as key priorities, my job is to work with the secretary of labor on the H-2A program.”
The H-2A program is rife with well-documented abuse and wage theft. There have already been warnings that increased use of the program could overwhelm the government and negatively impact workers’ rights.
Rollins was also asked if she thought deporting farmworkers could increase food prices, as Trump campaigned on the high cost of groceries. She again said that was a hypothetical issue.
While food prices have outstripped the rate of inflation in recent years, one reason food has remained relatively affordable in the U.S. is because farm labor can be cheap. In the Times interview, Miller said Americans would replace the deported workers and “be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.”
Rollins and Republican senators on the Senate’s agriculture committee emphasized her rural roots and her time in 4H, but Rollins does not have extensive experience in the agriculture industry. Multiple times, she told senators that she looked forward to learning more about an issue they asked about, including the increase in bird flu among poultry and livestock.
