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Ag Sec Brooke Rollins: Legitimize the Illegals Working Big Ag Farms

President Donald Trump has stirred a hornet’s nest of outrage among his most loyal supporters. By calling for sweeping exemptions of his mass deportation operations for the illegal aliens working for America’s large-scale farms, he has his MAGA devotees in an uproar. But now they’re pointing the finger at Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, blaming her for the stunning pivot. A look at her background reveals the reasons for their suspicion.

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Rollins’ political roots are planted deep in the soil of George W. Bush’s and former Texas governor Rick Perry’s Republican Party. Rollins served in multiple capacities for Perry during the early 2000s, with duties ranging from deputy general counsel to ethics advisor until finally being promoted to policy director for his administration.

From 2003 to 2018, she was president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a Koch Brothers-funded think tank ostensibly dedicated to “free market” economic principles. During her time as head of TPPF, the organization stridently advocated for immigration reform legislation granting amnesty for an estimated 11 million illegal aliens.

2013 Rollins: ‘They Are Not Going Back to Mexico’

Perhaps sensing a coming shift in the political winds, TPPF was especially active during the last big, pre-Trump 2016 push to get a bill through Congress and onto then-President Barack Obama’s desk. For Rollins and the organization she led, one key aspect of the immigration reform agenda was essential: a colossal expansion of a guest worker program for foreigners.

Rollins candidly acknowledged her support for amnesty and for importing a greater number of foreign laborers into the US in a revealing 2013 interview with Texas Monthly magazine. “Brooke Rollins: Time for Conservatives to Do the Right Thing,” the headline read.

“We do need to discuss what to do with the people that are here. They are not going back to Mexico,” Rollins declared. “It is our responsibility, as conservatives and the defenders of the great American dream, to fix this problem…. And again, we can’t fix this problem with heated rhetoric and ugly words and the idea that we are going to move 11 million people across the border. It just isn’t realistic. There is a positive solution. We just all have to work toward it.”

This is Donald Trump’s current Department of Agriculture chief. A woman who wanted to legalize 11 million illegal aliens a dozen years ago with the stroke of an Obama pen is now in charge of an agency that oversees a corporate Big Ag construct that employs untold millions of illegals today.

She wants more than that. Rollins told the Texas Monthly:

“But I do think that there are specific things that Texas can do. Immigration is a federal question. Can Texas pass its own guest worker program? Utah did it, and now they’re at crosshairs with the feds on how to run it and what to do. But just think about the possibility that Utah and Texas and Arkansas and Louisiana and a lot of states in the country decide to pass their own guest worker program and then work with Washington on how to implement it. I think there’s a very constructive conversation.”

The interview was so astonishing to the magazine that it saw fit to publish a lengthy side article explaining it to readers. It served as a primer on the history of guest worker pushes in the US over the past 80+ years.

“America’s largest experiment with guest workers began in 1942, when the [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt administration, as a response to labor shortages during World War II, negotiated an agreement with Mexico that arranged temporary visas for farm workers known as braceros,” the publication noted. Business groups loved the arrangement for obvious reasons, with opposition coming mostly from the political left, which felt the foreigners were being underpaid and exploited.

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“In a 1964 television address, for example, Henry B. Gonzalez, the longtime [Democratic] US Representative from San Antonio (and the first Mexican-American to serve in Congress) explained that it was a ‘bad program,’ pursued at the behest of ‘powerful, vested monied interests’: ‘those who profit by cheap labor, those who profit by the displacing of American labor, those who profit by trading the misery of one nation on the misery of another nation,’” the article continued.

Yes, Democrats once spoke this way.

Low Wages Mean Cheap Goods

The Texas Tribune in February 2013 wrote that Josh Trevino, then the vice president of communications at TPPF, considered “the underlying issue” at the heart of immigration reform to be “how to facilitate the movement of labor across borders.”

“For the past half century there hasn’t been a way to do that. That is the original policy flaw that has created the problem,” Trevino told the news site. “That’s what conservatives ought to discuss. The unskilled labor guest-worker program is very, very tiny. And it doesn’t meet market demands.”

For Rollins and TPPF, this was the pressing point: how to get more cheap, unskilled foreign labor into America. In its own published reports, TPPF cited the low wages paid to these masses of alien workers as a positive feature of any grand scheme, not a problem needing redress.



In a March 2016 report, the foundation first observed that more and more Americans were dropping out of the workforce.

“Since the Great Recession in 2007, labor force participation rates among Americans have been plummeting sharply, with the current level at the lowest it has been in 40 years,” the document stated.

Only three paragraphs later, TPPF extolled the benefits of cheap foreign laborers for American shoppers. “As immigrants typically command lower wages than natives, their presence in the workforce results in lower prices that benefit consumers,” the report proclaims. “It is difficult to measure these gains with precision, but it has been estimated that the cost savings to consumers resulting from immigrant labor is somewhere between $38 billion and $75 billion nationwide.”

It appears obvious that this is the Koch economic vision Brooke Rollins seeks to implant inside the America First Trump White House.

“We will have a 100 percent legal workforce [on America’s farms] very, very soon,” Rollins told reporters on July 4 while standing alongside Trump. “The President and I have consistently advanced a ‘Farmers First’ approach, recognizing that American households depend upon a stable and LEGAL agricultural workforce,” she wrote in a June 15 X post.

Note the word in all-caps. It’s like that for a reason.

A massively expanded guest worker program that grants blanket legal status to millions of foreign farm workers is certainly one way to claim you have eradicated the illegal alien problem in the fields. It’s hardly an honest approach and will surely be regarded as transparently condescending by Trump’s loyal grassroots base, but the press statements will be factually correct.

It’s no surprise that Rick Perry’s former policy director and Charles Koch’s ex-think-tank chief would be eager to make it happen. But MAGA stalwarts must be wondering why Trump would ever get on board with such a thinly disguised ruse.

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