Who is Agriculture Secretary Nominee Brooke Rollins?

Donald Trump has nominated America First Policy Institute (AFPI) founder and former Trump administration official Brooke Rollins as his pick to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees our nation’s food and farm supply, nutritional programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and houses the U.S. Forest Service. But like other Trump nominees across other top federal agencies, Rollins has been nominated to oversee a vast department despite no applicable experience. Instead, her appointment seems largely driven as a loyalty reward for Rollins’ effort in creating policy and personnel for the incoming administration – a rival to Heritage’s Project 2025 only in style, not substance.

Rollins “appears to have no agricultural policy track record to comment on,” said the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Rollins' AFPI, described as the second Trump administration in waiting, has so little interest in farm policy that there are no agriculture experts listed on its website.”

Founded by Rollins following Trump’s defeat to President Joe Biden in 2020, AFPI has recruited both former and current Trump picks, like former unlawfully-appointed acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, and has reportedly readied hundreds of executive orders for a potential second Trump term. AFPI has also partnered with anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), with Wolf attending FAIR events that have in the past attracted white nationalists. Trump’s allies have also set their sights on eliminating categorical SNAP eligibility, which will harm the U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents. While her confirmation by the U.S. Senate appearing all but assured, Rollins should be challenged on the impacts of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, including “bloody” mass deportations, on agriculture and the resulting increased food prices that working families will face should his plan succeed.

ROLLINS’ TENURE AT THE CONSERVATIVE TPPF

Rollins served as policy director for then Texas Gov. Rick Perry until leaving to head the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) from 2003 through 2018. The Texas Observer last year described the organization as “part of of the State Policy Network (SPN), a national network of hard-right influence peddlers working on both the state and national level to advance extreme right-wing agenda items like defunding public education, gutting environmental regulation, and slashing taxes for the nation’s wealthiest people.” More recently, TPPF has joined in on the right’s despicable attacks on transgender Americans, including hosting an event this past year where Gov. Greg Abbott promoted gross misconceptions about the lifesaving, gender-affirming health care of vulnerable trans children. The Texas Tribune reported that a senior fellow for TPPF was also set to be among attendees at a Christian nationalist event until reporting upended the gathering.

“Billed as the 15th anniversary celebration for True Texas Project, the conference agenda claims that there is a ‘war on white America,’” The Texas Tribune reported in June, “and urges attendees to embrace once-fringe ideologies such as Christian nationalism or the Great Replacement Theory, which claims that there is an intentional, often Jewish-driven, effort to destroy white people through immigration, interracial marriage or the LGBTQ+ community.” Following the report, TPPF was among attendees to pull out of the event. TPPF also touted its participation in the creation of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the radical agenda targeting immigrants and anyone who looks like one, including by undoing long-standing policy and making schools, hospitals, and houses of worship vulnerable to mass deportation raids.

It’s worth noting some of Rollins’ past comments on immigration in the context of mass deportation and extremist affiliations. In 2013, Rollins gave remarks that appear to run counter to the nativist agenda of the administration she’s seeking to join, including stating the need to “have a very serious discussion on a normalization process” for long-settled immigrants. “I believe that recognizing the people that are here, and putting them into a system in which they are paying taxes and learning English will ultimately be a benefit for our society as a whole,” she told Texas Monthly. “Recognizing their contribution is important.” But just over a decade later, her work has involved helping craft potential presidential orders to “narrow legal ways to migrate,” as The Wall Street Journal reports.

ROLLINS JOINS FIRST TRUMP ADMIN, SUBSEQUENT EXTREME TIES

In 2018, Rollins was initially recruited from TPPF by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to join Trump’s Office of American Innovation with a mission “to apply ideas from corporate America to solve the nation’s problems.” Now defunct, the office was criticized for a lack of transparency, a lack of accomplishments, and called by lawmakers a potential "vehicle for cronyism and waste." In the end, Kushner did well – for himself. Rollins then served as acting director of the United States Domestic Policy Council until Trump’s loss, when she founded AFPI, which the New York Times has described as even more influential than the Heritage Foundation’s agenda. “Like Project 2025, the institute developed a plan for staffing and setting the policy agenda for every federal agency, one that prioritizes loyalty to Mr. Trump and aggressive flexing of executive power from Day 1.”

AFPI has also sought to make itself a player in the nativist movement, including partnering with designated hate group FAIR and other anti-immigrant organizations to argue for ending long-standing protections that humanely limit how long migrant families can be detained, for halting use of the CBP One app (which, while flawed, has played a role in lowering irregular migration), and to support the “Stop the Invasion Act,” a GOP bill advancing the white nationalist great replacement conspiracy theory that is directly tied to multiple domestic terrorist attacks. “When migrants are described as invaders, that leads to violence,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “Because how else does one stop an invasion?”

Chad Wolf, AFPI’s executive director and the unlawfully-appointed and former acting Department of Homeland Security under the first Trump administration, has directly associated with Tanton network hate group FAIR, attending its “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” (HTFTTF) event two years in a row, in 2021 and 2022. The event has a history of attracting white nationalists, Southern Poverty Law Center said in 2017. “In 2011, Roan Garcia-Quintana, a board member of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) was photographed at HTFTTF with nativist former Rep. Tom Tancredo.” Former GOP Congressman Steve King, who finally began to get pushback from his Republican colleagues after openly wondering what was so bad about the term “white nationalist,” has also been a guest.

AGRICULTURE AND WORKING FAMILIES WILL BE HIT HARD BY MASS DEPORTATIONS

Mass deportation was Trump’s signature policy of his 2024 presidential campaign and the consequences of violently separating American families and forcibly removing millions of essential workers will be devastating to agriculture in particular, as acknowledged by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, one of the longest-serving officials in that role. “If, in fact, there were mass deportations, there is no industry, in my view, that would be more significantly impacted than agriculture,” he said this month. Farm groups have also expressed worry about Trump’s plans. "’We need the certainty, reliability and affordability of a workforce program and programs that are going to allow us to continue to deliver food from the farm to the table,’ said John Hollay, director of government relations at the International Fresh Produce Association, which represents produce farmers,” Reuters reported.

Why this urgent pushback? Because many, if not most, of the skilled farmworkers who feed us and sustain our nation’s food supply year round lack legal immigration status. The Department of Agriculture itself has estimated that half of all farmworkers, a number totaling more than one million laborers, are undocumented. “Growers and labor contractors estimate that the share is closer to 75 percent,” the New York Times reported in 2020. In California, a top producer of the nation’s vegetables, nuts, and fruits, three-quarters of farmworkers are undocumented. In Florida, one of the top producers of all oranges and number one in the U.S. in the value of production of bell peppers, sugarcane, tomatoes, and watermelons, nearly half of skilled farmworkers are undocumented.

Dairy states like California, Idaho, Utah, Vermont and Wisconsin – largely responsible for producing the fresh milk, delicious cheeses, and other dairy products that are enjoyed by Americans – will also be hit hard. “Talk to workers in Wisconsin, and they express little doubt immigrants account for a larger portion of the dairy industry workforce today,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in 2019. In fact, “some farmers say they haven’t encountered a U.S.-born applicant in years.” When asked about the impact of deportations on the dairy industry, Pete Wiersma, the president of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, responded that he didn’t think there would be any milk. “I just don’t think we could get it done.”

While immigration policy does not typically fall under the purview of the Department of Agriculture, the impacts of mass deportation on the industry and the potential blowback from raised food prices heaped on working families and fiscal losses to farmers make the issue one that Rollins must face. While AFPI’s anti-immigrant animus has been clear throughout its partnerships, Rollins, if confirmed, will be faced with dueling pressures from mass deportation architects Stephen Miller and Tom Homan on one side, and a decimated agricultural industry and working families angry over broken promises to lower grocery costs on the other.