Why CA farmers who backed Trump are 'reckoning with an uncomfortable contradiction'

Once a red state, California has been heavily Democratic since the 1990s. Vice President Kamala Harris narrowly lost the 2024 election to President-elect Donald Trump, but she carried California by 20 percent (according to the Associated Press).

Yet some Californians in the agricultural industry backed Trump because of his promise to lift water restrictions.

In an article published the day after Christmas, Politico's Camille von Kaenel reports that California farmers "could soon enjoy bumper crops" but are "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."

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Chris Reardon, vice president of policy advocacy for the California Farm Bureau Federation, told Politico, "To say it would have an impact on California would be an understatement. We just don't know yet."

Von Kaenel notes that Trump's incoming second administration is "likely to undo a Biden-era rule that increased labor protections for temporary farmworkers under the H2-A visa."

Antonio De Loera, communications director for the United Farm Workers, told Politico, "Anything that happens needs to first do right by the workforce that is here, the current workforce that has been feeding us for decades."

De Loera continued, "We will not allow that workforce to be discarded and replaced by expansion of an exploitative gap worker program…. The main thing we're doing across the organization is trying to just reassure workers and empower workers, so that they're not scared by this rhetoric into accepting working conditions that are dangerous."

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Read the full Politico article at this link.