Trump official suggests Medicaid recipients, automation can replace immigrant workers. California farmers disagree [View all]

Source: Los Angeles Times

Trump official suggests Medicaid recipients, automation can replace immigrant workers. California farmers disagree

Andrea Castillo, Suhauna Hussain, Jessica Garrison
Wed, July 9, 2025 at 6:00 AM EDT
7 min read

A top Trump administration official's claim that Medicaid recipients could replace farmworkers has met with pushback from California's agriculture industry, which faces the loss of its workforce amid the federal immigration crackdown.

"There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way," said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins at a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. "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."

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."

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Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/california-farmers-medicaid-recipients-automation-100000063.html