3 People Die in ICE Custody in April as Conditions Worsen in Immigration Jails

At least seven people have died while incarcerated by ICE since Trump’s term began.

By Mike Ludwig

May 5, 2025

Source: Truthout

Border Wall from the US Side - Nogales, Arizona, USA | Image: School of the Americas Watch via Flickr

The Trump administration has created a human rights crisis with its draconian, made-for-TV campaign of mass deportation. As arrests ramp up across the country, three people died inside immigration jails and detention centers in April alone, bringing the total number of people to die in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since Trump returned to office to at least seven, according to the Detention Watch Network and media reports.

Brayan Garzón-Rayo, a 27-year-old man from Colombia who lived with his family in St. Louis, died on April 8 at the Phelps County Jail in Missouri, where the local sheriff contracts with ICE to incarcerate immigrants. Nhon Nguc Nguyen, 55, from Vietnam, died on April 16 after spending two months in ICE custody. He was being held at the El Paso Processing Center in Texas.

Democrats in Congress are demanding answers following the death of Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old citizen of Haiti, who died on April 25 at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Florida, after several weeks of being shuffled between immigration jails in Louisiana, Florida and Puerto Rico.

Speaking on the House floor Wednesday, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Democrat from Florida and the only Haitian member of Congress, questioned whether ICE provided Blaise with adequate medical care as required by law.

“Marie had been complaining about chest pain for hours,” said Cherfilus-McCormick, who called for a transparent investigation into Blaise’s death. “They gave her some pills and told her to go lie down. Unfortunately, Marie never woke up. Her loved ones deserve answers. They deserve accountability.”

In a statement on Blaise’s death, ICE repeated a boilerplate line claiming that “comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay.” The agency used identical language in news releases about the deaths of Garzón-Rayo and Nguyen.

However, multiple studies by physicians and human rights groups have shown that dozens of people have died preventable deaths in jails and prisons run by ICE and its contractors in the past, and advocates say conditions are rapidly deteriorating as the Trump administration packs facilities as part of his war on immigrants.

“Right now, there are nearly 50,000 people in ICE detention, reaching numbers we’ve only seen in Trump’s first term,” said Carly Pérez Fernández, communications director at Detention Watch Network, in a statement announcing the recent deaths in ICE custody on Wednesday. “Trump’s cruel, multi-layered detention expansion plan is exacerbating the detention system that is proven to be inherently inhumane. No one should suffer in these conditions.”

As existing facilities run out of beds, according to the Associated Press, the Trump administration is scrambling to sign fresh contracts with private prison companies to expand capacity to incarcerate up to 84,000 more people. Reports of inhumane conditions are piling up.

At every turn, advocates and family members are desperately pushing back on the official narrative about conditions inside. As a result, horror stories leak out on a daily basis from the byzantine system of immigration jails and prisons managed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The incarcerated population continues to grow as the Trump administration cancels asylum and humanitarian protections for hundreds of thousands of people and launches aggressive immigration raids, including a six-day sweep in Florida that resulted in more than 1,120 arrests this week.

By the end of March, the number of incarcerated adults had increased by 21 percent to more than 49,000 since mid-December, according to ICE data. As a matter of policy, the Trump administration is ignoring alternatives to incarceration and denying bond to many immigrants as part of a larger plan to deport as many undocumented people as quickly as possible.

Katie Blankenship, managing partner for the human rights group Sanctuary of the South, said “parole is over” for immigration detainees, meaning that ICE is refusing to release people while judges consider their immigration claims.

“Bond eligibility has shrunk based on the Laiken Riley Act,” Blankenship said in an interview, referring to the 2024 law championed by Republicans and signed by President Joe Biden. The law requires DHS to detain undocumented people charged with shoplifting or other offenses ranging from drunk driving to assault, even if the initial arrest occurred years ago and did not result in conviction.

Blankenship advocates for people incarcerated at the Krome North Service Processing Center in Florida, one of the nation’s oldest and most notorious immigration jails. In early April, Americans for Immigrant Justice submitted testimonies to the United Nations Human Rights Council from detainees who said they were forced to sleep on the floor in crowded rooms, and while shackled on a bus in a parking lot, while incarcerated at Krome.

Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Florida) said she saw a “tent city” outside of the Krome North Service Processing Center during a recent visit. Wilson had requested a tour of the facility after a viral video confirmed reports of dangerous overcrowding and the suspicious deaths of two detainees sparked protests.

Earlier this week, ICE confirmed the construction of a massive tent structure outside the facility to hold additional detainees in response to overcrowding. ICE told local media that the tent would have air conditioning and meet federal standards for housing people.

Blankenship said public protests and complaints from Democrats in Congress have put pressure on ICE to decrease the population at Krome in recent weeks, but she expects overcrowding to continue to be a problem as Trump’s crackdown continues.

“They are putting lipstick on a pig to get the press off their back and the [members of Congress] off their back,” Blankenship said. “We are coming into the summer months … you know, Krome is in the Everglades, and it’s not like they are giving them the highest-quality stuff.”

ICE did not respond to requests for comment about the reported deaths in its custody and conditions within Krome and other immigration jails.

Blankenship said immigrants and their advocates have lodged hundreds of complaints about a lack of water and food, unsanitary conditions, and medical neglect at Krome. Facing an outpouring of complaints, the Trump administration shut down three civil rights and oversight offices at the DHS that are charged with investigating such claims.

“Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

On April 24, human rights groups filed a lawsuit challenging the closure of the oversight offices, which were created by Congress after past scandals over civil liberties violations.

The danger extends far beyond Florida. A review of the state’s six federal immigration prisons released by investigators at the California Department of Justice this week found that basic mental health and suicide prevention services continue to fall short even as the population has nearly doubled since 2021.

“California’s facility reviews remain especially critical in light of efforts by the Trump Administration to both eliminate oversight of conditions at immigration detention facilities and increase its inhumane campaign of mass immigration enforcement, potentially exacerbating critical issues already present in these facilities by packing them with more people,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement this week.

At the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, which is run by the private prison company GEO Group, immigration detainees have launched six hunger strikes in protest of their confinement in dismal conditions over the past four months, according to Rufina Reyes, an organizer with La Resistencia, a local immigrant rights group.

Activists believe there are currently about 1,500 people being held at the immigration jail, Reyes said. While the exact number is not publicly known, reports suggest the current population is likely the highest it’s been since 2020.

“We also know there are more people being deported each week and more people arriving each week,” Reyes said in an interview.

The Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington has produced a number of reports on alleged abuses at the Northwest Detention Center, including overuse of solitary confinement, the denial of access to medical care, poor hygiene and sanitation, frequent uses of physical force and chemical gases and a lack of adequate responses to reported sexual abuse.

Earlier this week, the researchers released new data showing that Tacoma police routinely ignore crimes reported by people detained at the facility. Over the past 10 years, only 2 out of 157 reports of abuse or assault at Northwest Detention Facility were prosecuted — and in both cases the victims were jail staff, not incarcerated immigrants.

With Northwest Detention Center looming in the background, Reyes said Trump’s immigration crackdown has struck immigrant communities with terror.

“One of the impacts is that, because a lot of people are scared, they have stopped working,” Reyes said. “We know about one family that has been impacted in particular that is from one of the smaller cities, and they haven’t left their house because they have a lot of fear.”

Asked how policy makers should respond, Reyes said politicians should see the reality of immigration detention under Trump for themselves.

“More than anything, we ask politicians to visit the detention centers and also to call for the detention centers to be shut down,” Reyes said.

WAIT, WHAT?!

On “National Security” Grounds: Most (But Not All) VA Workers Lose Union Bargaining Rights?

By Steve Early, Suzanne Gordon 

May 6, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Image by Tony Webster, Creative Commons 2.0



When President Trump’s cabinet picks trooped up to Capitol Hill earlier this year for Senate confirmation hearings, hardly any boasted about their past union connections. But Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins did.

He helped win broad bipartisan approval for his nomination from a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee (SVAC) that includes Bernie Sanders (I-VT) by mentioning that he belonged to the United Food and Commercial workers, while working for five years at a Georgia grocery store chain. Said Collins: “I believe that the employees of the VA, whether they’re union or not, are very valuable and I respect that… I get the issue.”

At another point in the hearing, he pledged to “be the biggest cheerleader for every VA employee out there who is getting up every morning, doing it right [and] making sure we are taking care of our veterans.” And during questioning about President Trump’s intention to end remote work arrangements at the agency, Collins acknowledged that “a large portion of the VA workforce is unionized and they’re in contracts” so “we’re going to have to work together to get people back to work.”

Four months later, there’s little evidence of Collins and VA unions working together on anything. Instead, Collins has been an eager implementer of Trump’s attempted cancellation of collective bargaining rights for most VA union members—on the grounds that they’re engaged in “national security work.”

A Broader Exclusion

Trump issued an executive order based on this far-fetched claim in late March. It invoked a provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA), which has long allowed the federal government to exclude intelligence agency and some federal law enforcement personnel from union representation. Under Trump’s sweeping new interpretation of CSRA, two-thirds of the federal workforce, in 18 different agencies, would be ineligible for contract coverage because of national security considerations.

According to recent guidance provided by Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, this clears the way for Trump cabinet members to fire large numbers of employees, as part of their upcoming reduction in force plans, without regard for existing collective bargaining agreements.

The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents other federal workers, secured a preliminary injunction on April 25 against Trump’s executive order, as it applied to its own members in other agencies. Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). hailed that result as a helpful precedent for “restoring collective bargaining rights that federal employees are guaranteed by law.”

To further weaken labor organizations, federal agencies also ended payroll deduction of union dues in April. VA unions affected by this change include AFGE, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), National Nurses United (NNU), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its affiliate, the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE).

On behalf of 400,000 of the VA’s 482,000 workers, all five unions have recently sued the Trump Administration over multiple issues, including its mass firing of probationary workers throughout the federal government and attempted dismantling of entire agencies. (This pushback was, of course, perceived to be a “declaration of war on President Trump’s agenda,” as a White House “fact sheet” helpfully explained.)

A Waiver for Some VA Unions?

As more than 120 members of Congress (including Senators who voted to confirm Collins) argued in an April 8 letter to the VA Secretary, Trump’s directive is, thus, “primarily retaliatory in nature”—payback for “unions that have stepped up to defend employees’ rights in the face of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) attacks.”

The letter signers urged Collins “to act quickly and decisively to defend the VA workforce from this Executive Order by requesting a waiver for all Department Employees,” because the EO “cloaks itself in the false cover of ‘national security” and is in “likely violation of the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute (FSLMRS). Under that law, to be exempt from collective bargaining, an agency must demonstrate that its “primary function” involves intelligence, counter-intelligence, investigative, or national security work.

Collins responded with an April 17 notice-posting in the Federal Register, in which he “specifically concurs with the President’s determinations” about who is and is not doing “national security work.” In a move that won’t help the administration’s legal defense of its VA de-unionization effort, Collins signaled that his HR department would continue to deal with local unions affiliated with the Laborers, Machinists, Teamsters, Electrical Workers, Firefighters, American Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees.

None of these labor organizations ever had the “national consultation rights” of the larger AFL-CIO affiliates targeted by Trump because their bargaining units within the VA are small and miscellaneous. But, as Everett Kelley points out, many of their members do the same jobs as AFGE-represented “cemetery workers, house-keepers, cooks, mechanics, nurses, and other health care employees.”

So how, Kelley asks, could some “patriotic public servants” be allowed to keep their contract protections, while others performing equivalent duties—and posing no greater “threat to national security”—were stripped of theirs?

Adapting to New Conditions

While that question gets litigated by AFGE and other VA unions, they must still adapt to workplace conditions even worse than those created by Robert Wilkie, the right-wing Republican who was Trump’s second VA Secretary during his first term. All of them have long operated on the “open shop” basis mandated by federal law. But now workers who voluntarily join and financially support federal unions must switch their dues paying to alternative methods, like AFGE and NNU’s “E-dues” collection systems, because payroll deduction of dues has been discontinued.

The AFL-CIO has tried to help fill any representational void by recruiting and training 1,000 lawyers in 42 states to serve as a Federal Workers Legal Defense Network. This group will provide legal advice and support for individual employees who face adverse action by their agencies, but still retain civil service rights and protections.

Federal workers, newly awakened to the dangers facing them, are also joining the Labor Notes-assisted Federal Unionist Network. FUN is a cross-union network of rank-and-filers who organized a successful “day of action” in February, with what was then minimal support from their respective national unions.

FUN co-founder Colin Smalley, an employee of the Army Corps of Engineers, is among those warning co-workers that federal sector labor relations have reverted, for the time being, to what they were before 1962, when the Kennedy Administration first recognized the right to unionize.

Despite that challenging new/old terrain, “federal workers still have legal protections against retaliation and reprisal for collectively using their workplace rights.” Even in the absence of a union contract, they can “act like a union” by following the advice contained in a new guide prepared by Smalley and posted by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.

Among its recommended responses, FUN counsels to: “Speak out: get creative with whistle-blowing. A well-scripted ‘march on the boss’ or a petition are great ways to take collective action that’s protected by the Whistleblower Protection Act, so long as they disclose any violation of law, regulation, rule, or policy, or an abuse of authority.”

VA Defenders

On April 16, members of the NNU, which represents 16,000 registered nurses at the VA nationwide, held a protest rally in San Diego against staffing cuts and union contract cancellation—one of many events around the country, involving VA patients, their families, labor and community allies.

“No matter who you cut from the VA, veterans are going to be affected,” warned RN Safiah Dhada. “If you cut housekeeping, nurses will be bagging trash, taking time away from patient care. If you cut supply techs, nurses will need to chase down supplies, delaying care…Our veterans deserve timely care, not delays that negatively impact health outcomes.”

One veteran of struggles against Trump during his first term is Irma Westmoreland, NNU secretary-treasurer and a nurse for 26 years who works at the VA Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia.

She’s optimistic about the outcome of the fight this time around, because “we came out stronger last time.” Nothing that Doug Collins does, she says, “will keep us from doing the things we need to do to represent VA nurses.” But “taken together, all of these actions are aimed at crippling and then privatizing the VA… And only the unions are standing in the way of privatization.”


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Steve Early

Steve Early has worked as a journalist, lawyer, labor organizer, or union representative since 1972. For nearly three decades, Early was a Boston-based national staff member of the Communications Workers of America who assisted organizing, bargaining and strikes in both the private and public sector. Early's free-lance writing about labor relations and workplace issues has appeared in The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, The Progressive, and many other publications. Early's latest book is called Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs (Duke University Press, 2022). He is also the author of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of An American City (Beacon Press, 2018); Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (Monthly Review Press, 2013); The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old? (Haymarket Books, 2011); and Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home (Monthly Review Press, 2009). Early is a member of the NewsGuild/CWA, the Richmond Progressive Alliance (in his new home town, Richmond, CA.) East Bay DSA, Solidarity, and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He is a current or past editorial advisory board member of New Labor Forum, Working USA, Labor Notes, and Social Policy. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com and via steveearly.org or ourvetsbook.com.

 

NIOSH Upheld Workplace Safety for Millions in the US. Trump Is Dismembering It.

Trump is destroying the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, sacrificing workers on industry’s altar.

By Sasha Abramsky

May 5, 2025

Source: Truthout

Image credit: Preston Keres/Flickr

For more than half a century, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a division of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), has worked to improve workplace safety and to study the effects on workers of exposures to toxins such as lead. Its teams of epidemiologists, occupational nurses, specialist doctors, toxins experts, and others do everything from going into pharmaceuticals production sites to monitor for dangerous levels of pharmaceutical dust, to making sure the ventilation at cannabis processing facilities is safe, to investigating fatalities and injuries at construction sites.

One of the NIOSH units monitors firefighters suffering from cancers caused by exposure to toxins; another, based out of Morgantown, West Virginia, studies respiratory diseases that coal miners are prone to. Still another works on the health risks faced by first responders at the World Trade Center site after the 9/11 attacks. It runs a lab that certifies respiratory equipment used by firefighters and coal miners. The agency also helps train nongovernment industrial hygienists to replicate some of the research NIOSH teams have been doing.

All of that is now threatened. The demolition of the agency was, industrial hygienist Hannah Echt told me, “Kind of like a big FU for everything.”

“A lot of us wanted to work in these jobs because we wanted a job in public service,” Echt added. “They’re not even saying ‘thank you,’ they’re saying ‘you’re done. Get a real job.’”

NIOSH is a congressionally created, and funded, agency, having been established as part of the larger Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970. It has roughly 1,300 staff spread around the country, in offices in Washington, D.C.; Ohio; West Virginia; Alaska; Pennsylvania; Washington; Georgia and Colorado. Taken as a whole, despite the fact that the agency’s budget is only $363 million — which translates to a little over two dollars per year per U.S. worker — the agency’s employees do some of the most important public health and labor safety work in the country, carrying out, at the request both of employers and of employees and trade unions, evaluations, and then remediation, of potentially dangerous workplaces. The agency also does health monitoring of particularly at-risk categories of workers, such as firefighters and coal miners.

If any agency ought to have bipartisan support, it’s one that helps sick firefighters — several research projects in recent years have found that firefighters have a statistically more significant likelihood of developing cancer than does the population at large, though the exact numbers are somewhat hard to quantify — along with dying coal miners and first responders to domestic terror attacks. But, in Trump 2.0 that’s no longer the case.

HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moved NIOSH from under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and placed it under the auspices of the newly created Administration for a Healthy America, where it was summarily dismembered. Three months into the Trump presidency, NIOSH’s staff — like so many other workers at public health, labor safety, consumer rights and environmental agencies — is facing a wholesale destruction of their jobs and institution, leaving a gaping hole in the country’s ability to ensure safe workplaces and increasing the likelihood of deadly workplace accidents, toxic exposures and chronic illnesses. These are the collateral consequences of the rush to roll back regulations and to free up American industry from the pesky costs of government oversight under Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).

In fact, the antipathy toward agencies that work to protect the U.S.’s workers, especially those further down the income chain, is one of the most visible leitmotifs running through Trump 2.0. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, 1,400 out of 1,700 staffers were fired in an early April purge. DOGE has cancelled the leases for numerous regional offices of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and large-scale job cuts at the NLRB are likely. At the same time, OSHA’s ability to enforce new workplace standards and regulations looks to be in jeopardy. Well over three thousand staffers at the Food and Drug Administration are being fired; and 2,400 employees at the CDC are also being let go. The vast majority of staff at the CDC’s Office of Smoking and Health have been canned. And the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice has been forced to fire most of its team.

And then, to pour salt into the wound, there’s the all-out assault on NIOSH. Somewhere in the region of 900 of the agency’s employees have been sent Reduction-in-Force (RIF) notices telling them to expect to be fired in June; this represents nearly 10 percent of the entire staffing cuts that have been foisted on the sprawling Department of Health & Human Services to date. The RIF letters were a combination of brutal and saccharine, announcing that because of a Reduction in Force their services would no longer be required, and then concluding, “Thank you for your understanding and cooperation during this challenging time,” according to Echt. Administrators at the agency have already been put on administrative leave, so that even though they are still formally employed until the start of June, in reality they are already prohibited from doing any NIOSH work.

So extreme are the cuts that when one clicks on the agency’s website, a banner atop the front page declares, “Due to the reduction in force across NIOSH, no new health hazard evaluation requests can be accepted.”

None of this vandalism-like destruction, either at NIOSH or the other agencies, has been approved by Congress; and yet, the cuts are likely to stand simply because the GOP majority shows absolutely no interest in pushing back against them. Astoundingly, in the year 2025, the U.S. government is rolling back regulatory agencies that have existed, in some cases, for more than a century. And this rollback is occurring not because there is mass public support for it, but because Donald Trump’s inner circle is intent on smashing to smithereens any agency that protects the public’s health, its working conditions and its environment from the evermore predatory actions of the U.S.’s new oligarchy.Email

Sasha Abramsky

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column.

 

Farmers Fought Back When Trump Administration Stopped Paying Them to Help Feed Needy Californians?

By George B. Sanchéz-Tello

May 6, 2025

Source: Capital and Main

Image in public domain

Every year brings its own unique challenges for California farmers: water shortages, fires, finding laborers to do the work, bureaucrats in Sacramento adding new requirements and fees, and more. But the second term of President Donald Trump has made this year very different.

As part of deep cuts across much of the government, the administration of President Donald Trump chopped $1 billion from the U.S. Department of Agriculture almost without warning. This led to  widespread financial pain that affected already struggling farmers and left hungry patrons of food banks in many parts of the country desperate for other sources of healthy food.

On Feb. 28, California officials warned farmers who had grown food for schools and food banks that there was funding only for work done up to Jan. 19, despite the fact that farmers had submitted invoices for work and harvests past that date.

California farmers quickly organized a phone call and email campaign over the span of seven days in early March to demand the attention of elected representatives and answers from federal officials. By March 7, their efforts were successful: They would receive pay for the fall and for harvests for the rest of this year. But their success was overshadowed by news that the program would stop at the end of 2025.

For Bryce Loewen, a farmer who co-owns Blossom Bluff Orchards in Fresno County, the first freeze in funding meant that the USDA failed to hand over more than $30,000 that it owed the business for growing food to help feed Californians who could not afford it. 

There isn’t really a good time to get stiffed for your work. But during winter, the slowest season on the farm, there’s downtime, and California farmers like Loewen recently used that lull to fight to regain the money farmers were owed and help feed some of their most vulnerable neighbors. 

“A farmer’s instinct is to fix things,” Loewen said. “And that’s what we did.” 

Loewen’s farm is in the small town of Parlier, California, which has a declining population of less than 15,000. On March 1, Loewen picked up the phone to call federal officials to change their minds about the funding cut. Farming is a business of slim margins, and Loewen was trying to keep his farm from falling into debt, he said.

Loewen was just one of many farmers in California and around the country who called and emailed officials that day. They asked why they hadn’t been paid, and they described the economic benefit of the USDA funds to small farms and public health services and to agencies that feed people in their own communities who are struggling.

Loewen left messages and wrote emails to Rep. Jim Costa (D-Fresno); Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture; and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York. Other farmers also contacted Rollins, their local representatives, Congressional and Senate leadership on both sides of the political aisle.

The impromptu campaign was somewhat successful. Six days later, the USDA agreed to pay farmers for their fall harvest and contracts for 2025, but not beyond. 

The USDA did not respond to calls and emails from Capital & Main about why the cuts were made or why they were restored. Neither the USDA nor Rollins have publicly acknowledged hearing from farmers about the cuts.

In securing payments for slightly more than nine additional months, the farmers’ relative success might offer lessons for other groups targeted by government cuts as they seek to claw back some resources for crucial programs. 

California may be world famous for its beaches, Hollywood and Big Tech, but many people don’t realize that the state’s vast Central Valley supplies a quarter of all food to the United States. In the Golden State, agriculture is the backbone of many local economies, from the state’s southern frontier with Mexico all the way to its northern border with Oregon. This is especially true in the state’s agricultural heartland.

Yet many residents who live in what dust-bowl musician Woody Guthrie once referred to as the “Pastures of Plenty” cannot afford the fresh, locally grown food that surrounds them in the region’s villages and towns. The Healthy Fresno County Community Dashboard, which publishes local health information, reported that 16% of the county’s 1 million residents in 2022 were considered “food insecure.” Those rates were higher for the county’s Black and Hispanic residents in comparison to their white peers.  

Since 2006, the USDA has used the term “food insecurity” to describe the status that leads to weakness, illness and harm to families who lack stable access to food. It disproportionately affects lower-income groups in the state. Food insecurity includes the inability to afford a balanced diet, fear that a home’s food supply won’t last or having to eat less because one can’t afford to buy more food. An insecure food supply causes physical pangs of hunger in adults, as well as  stress and depression, particularly in mothers. Limited food intake affects brain development in children, prompting stress among preschoolers and affecting a student’s ability to learn basic subjects such as math and writing. 

In California, nine of 20 adults with low incomes reported “limited, uncertain or inconsistent” access to food in 2023, according to a California Health Interview Survey. 

Loewen’s farm helps feed some struggling Californians with the help of money through a $400 million federal program called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. The California Department of Social Services distributes the funds across the state through a program called Farms Together. 

Farmers weren’t the only ones to feel the pain of the USDA cuts between late February and March 11, said Paul Towers, executive director of Community Alliance With Family Farmers. His organization helps distribute food from small farms to food banks and school districts. During a two-week period, food banks did not receive any such food, which left people who rely on that food aid to scramble for something to eat. 

“That’s two weeks of lost income” for farmers, Towers said. “And two weeks of no food.”

Farmers learned from a Feb. 28 email from the California Department of Social Services that the USDA was late in paying for the fall’s harvest. The short message noted that the state was able to pay only for work done up to Jan. 19, which was the last day of Joe Biden’s presidency. The calling and email campaign began the next day.

Within six days, California farmers discovered that the USDA wasn’t simply late with the fall payment. The federal agency also planned to end the local food program altogether before the start of 2026. 

In a March 7 letter to the California Department of Social Services obtained by Capital & Main, USDA Agricultural Marketing Service Deputy Administrator Jack Tuckwiller said that “termination of the award is appropriate.” (The USDA ultimately honored invoices for the fall.) There was no explanation about how the decision was made. 

But the farmers’ limited victory was overshadowed by concerns about the large threats to public health and local economies when such programs end for good at the end of the year. 

Nationwide, 18 million Americans were food insecure in 2023, according to the USDA. Most of those people live in rural counties such as Fresno County, according to Feeding America, a national network of food banks and pantries. 

By March 10, news of the cuts was spreading. The online agriculture and food policy news outlet Agri-Pulse warned in a headline: “Trump administration cancelling local food initiatives.” 

On March 11, Fox News highlighted the cuts to farmers — who voted disproportionately in favor of Trump during his presidential campaigns — in a live interview with Rollins. 

“America’s Newsroom” anchor Bill Hemmer asked Rollins to justify the $1 billion cuts in food security aid to schools and food banks. Rollins offered conflicting responses.

The cuts were to pandemic-era food programs and were aimed at new and nonessential programs, she said.

Rollins said the program’s cost had grown but didn’t offer any evidence to back that up. The initial iteration of the local food purchasing assistance, the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, was a multibillion dollar pandemic food aid project started during Trump’s first term. But Rollins didn’t share that detail. 

Speaking of other cuts made the day before the interview, she added that authorities had canceled “more contracts on food justice for trans people in New York and San Francisco; obviously that’s different than the food programs in the schools, but it is really important.”

The local food purchase agreement didn’t, and still doesn’t favor food aid or food justice to trans people. It pays for farmers to grow food that goes to food banks and school districts. 

Rollins didn’t acknowledge that the cuts were overzealous or the harm that they might cause. “As we have always said, if we are making mistakes, we will own those mistakes, and we will reconfigure, but right now, from what we are viewing, [the local food purchase assistance] program was nonessential … it was a new program, and it was an effort by the Left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that [was] not necessary,” Rollins told Fox News.   

On March 11, the Community Alliance With Family Farmers posted on its blog: “The reinstatement of Farms Together is a victory worth celebrating. Through collective action, the voices of farmers and allies were heard, but the fight isn’t over. Farms Together IS restored — though only temporarily.”

“Our intent,” Towers said, “was to make sure Secretary Rollins heard directly from farmers that they were harmed by the cuts to these programs.”

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George B. Sanchéz-Tello

George B. Sanchéz-Tello is a writer for Capital & Main, and more of his articles can be read here: https://capitalandmain.com/author/gsancheztello