Exclusive — Brooke Rollins on Immigration Enforcement: Agriculture Needs to Turn Toward Technology, Away from Illegal Migrant Labor

WASHINGTON — U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview that the United States is encouraging farmers to turn to robots, machines, and other technology, and away from illegal alien migrant labor, as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up immigration enforcement activity.

Rollins’ comments came during an exclusive interview with Breitbart News this weekend after a major political conundrum this past week where President Trump had sent out a message telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to focus less on illegal aliens at farms and hotels and more on criminals for now. The change in guidance, which has since been reversed, caused blowback on Rollins with the New York Times printing a piece attacking her this weekend. Rollins, however, told Breitbart News she stands with the president completely and that she agrees with him that all illegal aliens in America must be deported.

“I could not have been hopefully more clear than in my post [on Sunday morning]: The end goal is the same, an American workforce that has arrived in the U.S. 100 percent legally — whether via birth or immigration — with no rewards ever for any who broke our laws in their arrivals,” Rollins told Breitbart News. “So I think that’s been a little bit lost in this. I’d also say that this is not new policy. He’s been saying this exact same thing in continuity here. It’s always been a tiered approach. It’s interesting, on April 10 — which was one of our recent cabinet meetings — he brought this up. I was was not expecting him to. We’d not spoken about it, but he brought it up specifically that we need to really target the bad criminals first and then we move to the next phase. So I think that none of that is new. Then, just for me personally, I’ve been on this team with him for almost 10 years now, and have never wavered in supporting and implementing and executing his agenda. I mean, you and I’ve spent a lot of time together now, you heard it with my America First Policy Institute and America First Works stuff. This is sort of unequivocal for all of us.”

“Correct,” Rollins added when Breitbart News asked if her position and Trump’s position is that every single illegal alien in America even farmworkers must be deported.

Rollins, who has been at Trump’s side since his first term, made it clear in her social media post on X this weekend:

In the broader discussion with Breitbart News on the matter, Rollins agreed that farms and other agriculture companies should be spending time right now to invest in technology like robots and machines that can alleviate any need for migrant laborers — something immigration hardliners have long sought as a way to help boost wages for American workers and legal immigrants who will step in to replace the illegal aliens currently working on farms.

“I think that’s really spot on. I will tell you on a couple of my trips, I visited an innovation lab in North Dakota, went and visited some additional technology up in the panhandle, in Lubbock in Texas, looking at cotton farms,” Rollins said. “There is so much technology just right on the cusp like the AI revolution. There was a drone in North Dakota that I watched fly over a field and basically be able to pinpoint exactly where more water was needed, exactly what needed to be picked, and then told the machines to go do that. We really are at the very beginning of a whole new frontier and era in agriculture. So to your point, yes, and that’s something I think we will be looking into at USDA. How do we help move the industry, first of all, into bigger and better things, more profitability and prosperity? Again, it’s the small and mid-size family farms that have just been going out of business left and right. They just can’t keep up. So how do we support them? Not necessarily Big Ag, but then also how we help move away from this dependence on foreign labor. So those are really the main options. Look at all of them. The president is resolute, obviously, in his promise to the American people to deport all illegal aliens that are here, but also to ensure that our farmers and our communities are able to feed our country. It’s a matter of national security, too. So it’s very nuanced.”

Rollins also pointed to what she said are issues with the H2A visa program, which allows farmers to bring in farmworkers on a seasonal basis. While the H2A visa has no caps in terms of raw numbers of migrants, she said there are other issues with it like wage restrictions and seasonal restrictions and other regulations she said were put in place during the administration of former President Joe Biden that have caused problems for farmers and legal workers alike.

“You really get into the current system under H2A — I’m just going to talk agriculture, I don’t know enough about the hospitality industry, nor should I probably be talking about it — but just on the farming side of this, that H2A and that visa is specific for our ag industry and it is uncapped,” Rollins said. “Now there are all kinds of problems with it, and that’s what we have to fix. Right now, to work through the H2A visas — which a lot of our farmers do — but it’s you have to go through three different agencies. It takes months to do it, and it’s only seasonal. So that means that in like the dairy cattle industry, that needs their cows milked 365 days a year — not six months or three months out of the year — it’s not that helpful for them. So we’ve been working with Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the Secretary of Labor, with Kristi Noem, certainly with the White House, to figure out how we can quickly make those changes to H2A. The other thing I would say that’s really important is under Biden, the average wage increased by I think 30 or 40 percent, which is unsustainable. So, for example, in South Texas under Biden, what you have to pay the H2A visa worker is almost $23, $25, or even $30 an hour. Right across the border in Mexico, it’s $2 or $3 an hour. So you’re obviously never going to be able to solve for that cheap Mexican labor. But there are pieces that under Biden that went up exponentially, that has caused a lot of this to be priced out. Of course, as you know I’ve talked a lot about this, most of our ag industry is living on the margins right now. Anyway, the uncertainty, the cost of inputs, et cetera, et cetera, that this is just one more layer that makes it difficult to answer your question once we can fix that and help. We will have some announcements in the next five to ten days on it that then you’ll begin to see a much more seamless process that hopefully will solve for when a lot of these workers are deported home and they can begin to hire, instead, American workers. I do think technology is going to have a part of this and and I think there are lots of different moving parts, but we’ll solve for it. We’re going to get there.”

When Breitbart News spoke to Rollins on Sunday afternoon, the administration had not yet reversed the guidance to ICE and Homeland Security enforcement officials regarding laying off enforcement at farms. As of Monday evening, DHS officials made clear that the temporary guidance had been lifted and immigration enforcement agents were again on their way to farms to deport illegal alien migrant workers. Rollins had said to Breitbart News on Sunday that the timeframe for this now-lifted temporary reprieve was going to be extremely short — and that’s exactly what happened.

“First on the timing, the President again remains very focused — and I think that the White House has announced an extremely aggressive goal — but keeping in mind that the agriculture sector is only about 1 percent of that,” Rollins said. “So, while the President has asked us to do this in a cadence that doesn’t compromise putting America First and putting our farmers first. that’s what I know my colleague Kristi Noem is doing over at ICE, over at DHS, with Tom Homan, Lori Chavez-DeRemer on the Labor side. We’ve actually been talking all weekend on how to move this out quickly, to allow more H2A visas and to allow an expansion of the workforce.”

She said to very soon expect “to see a full transition over to a fully legal workforce, whether that is some combination of technology, some combination of American workers obviously that can move into some of those jobs, and then also an expansion of H2A so that for those who are coming here legally to work we can actually make it easier, the process better, more quick, and less expensive for our American farmers.”

As for H2A reforms, and whether those changes can come from the administration or need congressional action, Rollins said it would be “likely a combination.” She noted she is in “constant conversations” with both Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as well as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

“But obviously we’ve been waiting on Congress for years now to fix it,” Rollins said. “So this President, as we know, has been very bullish and if something’s got to be fixed, he’s going to do everything he can to fix it within the confines of the law. So I think in the next few days, the next few weeks, you’ll see a slate of fixes that will come out from the Department of Labor. As I mentioned, I’m working hand in glove with Lori Chavez-DeRemer and also in constant conversations with Secretary Noem and then the White House. There’s an incredible group of people there, led by Stephen Miller, who have such an extraordinary vision for this and how to effectuate it. I talked to Steven a couple different times over the last few days about the importance of fixing the H2A visa and that really is a solution. We don’t really need an executive order. We don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of time. We know what needs to be fixed. So first, as I mentioned, the average daily wage, we’ve got to figure out a way to make it cheaper for our farmers. Some in Georgia I talked to said it cost them up to $39 or $40 an hour. As I mentioned, my citrus farmers in Texas were talking about it being $23 to $25 an hour to pay this migrant workforce because of the rules put in place by the Biden administration requiring you pay for housing, for food, for driving. I mean, this is better than that. The second is the seasonal part. A big part of our ag community doesn’t work via seasons. Obviously, our row croppers do, our citrus farmers and others do, but a big part don’t — and so they can’t even use the H2A visa as it’s currently written, specific to our dairy industry. But there are others too, so that also has to change. Then third, just the complexity, it really inures to the benefit the current system of Big Agriculture. They have the armies of lawyers, the armies of people to fill out the paperwork, the armies of people to ensure that the three different agencies they have to go through, which is State, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Labor, and then within that, the CBP that you again, without an army of paper pushers H2A is very difficult in real practice. So how do we streamline that? How do we make it much quicker? How do we put touchbacks in place? There are all of these things that Labor is really working on right now, that Ag is helping with, and I think once we begin moving those out hopefully as soon as the next few weeks you’ll begin to see a transition away from the current reliance — as the President has noted — on the illegal workforce.”

Rollins also noted that Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill, which is currently working its way through the U.S. Senate after passing the House before Memorial Day, would have major benefits for farmers and on immigration enforcement.

“The first thing on the Big, Beautiful Bill is that it is a really big win, if it stays intact, for our farmers,” Rollins said. “We are cutting about $290 billion out of SNAP over 10 years — the food stamp program at USDA — shifting about $57 billion of that over to the agriculture industry tax cuts, protecting the about 2 million small family farmers from the death tax, and then the reference prices which allows us to for the first time since 2015 hopefully be able to pay and have a foundation of reference prices that is not 10 years old. So those are all really important pieces of that. As far as the border security side, that’s probably the most important part of this bill from the President’s priority list and I think it will go a long way to ensuring that we don’t end up in this place again in five or 10 years with 10, 15, or 20 million — no one really knows how many illegals have crossed the border just in the last four years. Now, I think everyone would agree that the speed at which the border became secure was stunning in the best way. The fact that it happened so fast is just so impressive. But now we move to the next phase, which is how we deport, again, in cadence — and then we will get to a fully legalized — 100 percent — American, legalized workforce.”