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Let It Burn!
These MAGA farmers could be ruined if Trump follows through with mass deportations
California’s farm owners bet on President-elect Donald Trump and won. His campaign promise of mass deportations could ruin them.SACRAMENTO, California — California farmers could soon enjoy bumper crops thanks to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to lift water restrictions. But who will pick them if he follows through on his deportation threats?
The country’s largest agricultural constituency backed Trump in November, bucking California’s deep-blue electorate over his campaign promises to “open the faucet” and deliver more water to the state’s parched, conservative-leaning Central Valley. But now it’s reckoning with an uncomfortable contradiction: Trump also campaigned on mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, who make up at least half of the state’s agricultural workforce.
That’s left California’s agricultural barons, who employ the most farm workers of any state in the nation and grow half the produce consumed in the United States, nervously parsing Trump’s rhetoric.
“To say it would have an impact on California would be an understatement,” said Chris Reardon, vice president of policy advocacy at the industry group California Farm Bureau Federation. Reardon, who declined to say who he voted for, has been fielding calls from members asking him what exactly will happen to workers.
“We just don’t know yet,” he’s told them.
Highlights from Trump's freewheeling Mar-a-Lago presser
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Trump has appointed anti-immigration hawks to top positions, like Thomas Homan as border czar, and pledged to begin deportations on “Day One” of his administration, through executive orders crafted to evade legal challenges and by undoing Biden-era restrictions on deportations. Dave Puglia, the president and CEO of the Western Growers Association, called the prospect of sweeps on farms “very troubling.”