A farmer who voted for President-elect Donald Trump is warning him not to go too far with his pledge to carry out the largest deportation in American history.
In an interview with Bloomberg, tomato grower Tony DiMare said that it would be a major mistake for Trump to institute the kind of crackdown on undocumented farm labor that has been enacted in Florida, where he says he's having trouble finding enough people to pick crops.
"A lot of people left Florida for Georgia, north, scared,” DiMare told Bloomberg. “Farmers had to let their crops rot.”
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37-year-old immigrant farmworker Rene Trujillo similarly said that he's had trouble getting work ever since the Florida crackdown went into effect.
“Ever since they made that law, almost no one will hire you without papers,” he said.
Idaho-based farmer Shay Myers, meanwhile, tells Bloomberg that it is simply not realistic given current conditions to hire only American citizens or even only documented immigrants who come into the country on H-2A guest worker visas.
Myers says that he lost an entire asparagus crop recently when guest workers he'd hired were delayed at the southern border.
He also bluntly tells Bloomberg that if he "had to replace every falsely documented worker with an H-2A worker, it wouldn’t happen."
Trump's threats to conduct mass deportations, combined with his long-threatened tariffs and the continued spread of bird flu, could put upward pressure on food prices despite the fact that Trump pledged during the 2024 campaign to reduce the price of groceries.
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