Trump’s town hall with Univision was a train wreck, so expect most of our corporate media to just ignore it. Here’s one of the questions he was asked by a Latino farmer, Jorge Velásquez, who had concerns about Trump’s plans for mass deportations.
VELASQUEZ: For many years, I have worked with these hands, hunched over, picking strawberries and cutting broccoli. This tough job is mainly done by undocumented people. If you deport to these people, who would do that job and what price would we pay for food?
Trump’s response. To lie once again about immigrants supposedly coming from countries that were “emptying out” jails and “mental institutions”.
Here’s his meandering response where he never actually addresses the farmer’s concerns:
TRUMP: So, the problem we have is, we had people coming in under my administration, and they were coming in legally, they were coming in through a system that we had, which was great. Because I’m the best thing that ever happened to farmers.
You know that. I was great. You know, farmers are doing very badly right now, very, very badly under this administration. Under my administration, farmers did very well. We have to have a lot of people come into our country.
We just want them to come in legally through a system because they’ve released hundreds of thousands of people that are murderers, drug dealers, terrorists, they’re coming in totally. Nobody knows who they are, where they come from.
And the people that are most against it are the Hispanic people. They are totally against it, what’s happened. The other thing I can say is that a lot of the jobs that you have and that other people have are being taken by these people that are coming in.
And the African American population and the Hispanic population in particular are losing jobs now because millions of people are coming in. So they’re coming in, but they’re also coming in largely and tremendous numbers coming in out of mental institutions.
They’re emptying out mental institutions. They’re emptying out insane asylums. That’s a step above a mental institution. Worse, bigger, bigger problems, bigger problem people. They’re emptying out jails.
Their jails are being led into our country from Venezuela, but not just South America. From all over the world, they’re being led in. From jails, from nobody’s ever seen anything like it. The jail population throughout the world has come way down, and it’s all coming into the United States of America.
So we want workers, and we want them to come in, but they have to come in legally. They have to love our country. They have to love you, love our people. The problem with this administration is they’ve totally lost control.
As Raw Story noted:
A June report from The Guardian revealed that farmers have turned away from Trump in recent years because he cost them so much in profits as Foreign Policy reported. He then tried to buy farmers with direct payments, but as economists explained to Politico, it wasn’t sustainable.
Trump claims that farmers have done horribly under the Biden administration. As the USDA charted, farmers reached “record highs in 2022,” and while “farm sector income is forecast to fall in 2024,” the report said it would be “at a slower rate than it fell in 2023.”
Meanwhile, the massive agricultural company John Deere debunked his claim this week that his threat of tariffs in his first administration had supposedly saved workers.
