One bad order could undermine Trump’s strongest issue
Thank God President Trump walked back his misguided order to grant de facto amnesty to illegal alien farm workers. Now he needs to kill the policy for good.
Trump won in 2016 — and again in 2024 — on two core promises: lower the cost of living and stop the third-world invasion of the United States. Since he shows no interest in cutting deficits in a way that might restore pre-COVID price levels, immigration remains the battlefield that will define his presidency. And unless he corrects course, he risks failure on that front too.
No more half measures or donor-driven compromises. No more weakness. Only total war on the policies, programs, and pipelines that keep America under siege.
To his credit, Trump moved quickly to shut off the surge at the southern border during his first week in office. But he did the same in 2017, and the long-term results didn’t last. A future Democrat administration will simply escalate. If Biden brought in 10 million, the next one will aim for 20 million.
Temporary border control and modest deportation numbers won’t solve the crisis. Fewer than a million removals over a four-year term won’t reverse the demographic or economic damage — especially while legal immigration, foreign student visas, and guest worker programs continue at record highs.
Unforced errors
Trump must go beyond symbolic border enforcement. That means neutralizing judicial interference through must-pass legislation — or ignoring illegitimate court rulings outright. He should authorize maritime deportations using ships, suspend most of the 1.5 million foreign student visas — especially from China and Islamic countries — and permanently empower states to enforce immigration law.
Instead, Trump recently unveiled a set of policies that undermine those very goals.
He announced continued access for Chinese nationals to U.S. universities — just as a spy ring was uncovered at the University of Michigan. He expanded his support for white-collar visas for Indian nationals and revived his “golden visa” scheme, which allows wealthy Chinese Communist Party elites to buy their way into U.S. citizenship.
Worst of all, Trump issued an order halting removals of illegal aliens working in farming and hospitality. He later reversed course — but the damage was done.
In pushing for more illegal labor, Trump handed leftists a talking point they had already lost. He lent moral weight to one of their core claims: that America needs illegal immigrants to do the “jobs Americans won’t do.” That argument, long peddled by George W. Bush, John McCain, and the donor-class GOP, was the very reason millions turned to Trump in the first place.
Ten years after calling for a moratorium on illegal immigration and a drastic cut to legal migration, Trump now echoes the talking points he once dismantled. If he keeps this up, he won’t just squander his mandate — he’ll cement the invasion he was elected to stop.
Five points Trump should heed
- You can’t re-onshore manufacturing and offshore the workforce. Trump champions tariffs to bring jobs home — but what good is that if those jobs go to foreign nationals here illegally? Patriotism means putting Americans to work on American soil — not just moving the factory.
- This isn’t about labor shortages. It’s about labor suppression. Trump wants more white-collar visas even as tech jobs disappear. He supports handing green cards to foreign students. This isn’t policy — it’s donor-class economics wrapped in populist branding.
- You can’t modernize with AI while subsidizing human labor. Trump wants to “win the AI arms race” with China. Great. Start by automating farm work instead of importing cartel-affiliated field hands. Cheap labor delays innovation — and the status quo keeps us dependent.
- The welfare state distorts the labor market. Trump refuses to shrink entitlements and yet complains that Americans won’t work. Maybe that’s true — but the welfare state is the push, and illegal labor is the pull. Cut both, and you raise wages and get people off the couch.
- Illegal labor invites cartel exploitation. Agricultural guest labor provides the perfect cover. In 2019, an exposé by the Louisville Courier Journal revealed how Mexican farm workers served as mules for the Jalisco New Generation cartel. One man, Ciro Macias Martinez, groomed horses by day at Calumet Farm — and ran a $30 million drug ring by night.
The cash-based, transient, and legally vulnerable workforce offers a logistical gold mine for transnational criminal organizations. Cartels use job scams to traffic humans, set up safe houses, and move product. Rural communities lack the law enforcement resources to push back. The result: strategic sanctuary zones for America's most dangerous enemies.
RELATED: Trump shrugs at immigration law — here’s what he should have said
Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
When Trump says these workers are “hardworking” and “not criminals,” he ignores the obvious fact that every illegal alien is a criminal. Amnesty for farm workers isn’t just a policy mistake — it’s an operational gift to America’s foreign adversaries.
No room for ambiguity
Trump knows immigration is his strongest issue. The polls prove it. But if he wavers, even slightly, on mass deportations or illegal labor, he opens the door for his political enemies to sow doubt — and for cartel operatives to sow chaos.
He reversed the farm worker carve-out. Now he must bury it. Then, he needs to go farther. No more half measures. No more donor-driven compromises. No more weakness. Only total war on the policies, programs, and pipelines that keep America under siege.
His base expects it. The country needs it. The future depends on it.
Going Soft On Illegal Labor Is A Betrayal Of American Workers Like My Family
Trump Flirts With Repeating Republicans’ Greatest Blunder
It minimizes the crime of trampling on America’s sovereignty
Illegal labor isn’t farming’s future. It’s Big Ag’s crutch.
I’m a strong supporter of President Trump. I respect his drive to secure our borders, restore national sovereignty, and bring real vitality back to the American economy.
But the Department of Homeland Security’s latest move — limiting workplace enforcement and putting a stop to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on agricultural employers — cuts against the very heart of the America First agenda. It protects the same corporate giants that are bleeding rural communities dry.
If DHS and USDA want to fix agriculture, they need to stop hiding behind the word ‘farmer’ when they’re really talking about corporate middlemen.
Let’s not kid ourselves: This policy isn’t about helping “farmers.” It’s a gift to foreign-owned industrial agriculture giants like JBS and other multinationals that built their business models on cheap labor, government handouts, and total control over every link in the supply chain.
These are the corporations responsible for wiping out independent family farms across the country.
The Biden administration let Big Ag off the hook. Is Trump really about to follow suit?
Hiring legally and thriving
You don’t need to hire illegal workers to run a successful farm or ranch. In fact, some of the best in the business don’t.
Look at White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. Or Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. Or Meriwether Farms out in Wyoming. These aren’t fantasy models. They’re real, thriving operations built on legal labor, strong local roots, and, when needed, carefully managed visa programs.
They don’t rely on mass illegal labor. They don’t need to.
What they do is create real jobs. They pay honest wages. They bring life back to rural towns.
Will Harris is the biggest employer in Bluffton — not because he cuts corners on labor, but because he heals the land, strengthens his community, and delivers food independence.
This is what Trump’s golden age of American farming should look like: self-reliance, real prosperity, and pride in a job well done.
A free pass for Big Ag
With this new policy, DHS basically gave corporate amnesty to the likes of Tyson, Smithfield, JBS, Cargill — you name it. These are companies that depend on cheap, illegal labor to keep their bloated, centralized model afloat.
We’ve been down this road before. Remember Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty? Legalization now, enforcement later — except “later” never came.
And now, we’re repeating the same mistake.
This policy protects a broken system built on:
- Top-down corporate control
- Massive consolidation
- Debt traps and labor abuse
- De facto open borders
- Slave-wage labor
- Legal loopholes for billion-dollar companies
What we’re left with is what journalist Christopher Leonard called “chickenization” — a corporate takeover of the food system that treats farmers like serfs and workers like machines.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s loyalty to these monopolies has already hollowed out towns, forced families off their land, and turned our food supply into a global pipeline where cartel-linked produce replaces homegrown independence.
This doesn’t serve America. It serves the bottom lines of a few mega-firms that like open borders and look the other way on enforcement.
And whether it admits it or not, this is how the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals get implemented — quietly, through broken farms, outsourced jobs, and illegal hires.
Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
This isn’t just about agriculture. It’s about national security.
A nation that can’t feed itself without breaking its own laws isn’t sovereign. And one that lets multinationals run roughshod over the heartland while outsourcing production to places run by cartels is heading for trouble.
We can do better
If DHS and USDA want to fix agriculture, they need to stop hiding behind the word “farmer” when they’re really talking about corporate middlemen.
Trump has a chance to change course — one that truly puts Americans first. That means backing the producers who follow the law, hiring citizens or legal workers, and building food systems that support independence, not dependence.
Independent farmers and ranchers are ready to help. They’ve already shown what works: strong property rights, legal labor, fair water access, and a commitment to community.
This isn’t some policy wish list. It’s already happening.
And it’s winning.
Let’s not give our food, our land, or our future back to the monopolies that wrecked the past.
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Arkansas punches back at woke finance with a bold new law
On March 25, Arkansas became the first state in the 2025 legislative session to take a strong stand against the tyranny of environmental, social, and governance systems. By passing Act 406 — originally introduced as Senate Bill 409 — the state protected its agricultural industry from politically driven discrimination and debanking by financial institutions.
The law also offers a model for other states to follow.
When access to banking, credit, loans, and insurance depends on ideological alignment, free markets no longer exist — and neither does freedom.
State Rep. Randy Torres, the Republican who sponsored the bill, explained the law’s key provisions during a House floor speech on March 20. “It does four things,” he said. “It prevents discrimination against farmers; it limits environmental, social, and governance policies; it creates a public list of financial institutions that discriminate; and it allows farmers to report discrimination.”
Torres went on to say that the new law builds on Arkansas’ 2023 legislation, Act 411, which protects the state’s energy, fossil fuel, firearms, and ammunition industries from ESG-based discrimination. Under the law, discrimination includes refusing to trade goods or services or ending existing relationships based on an entity’s involvement in those industries. Act 406 expands that protection to include agricultural producers.
To enforce the law, Arkansas maintains a public list of financial institutions found to have engaged in prohibited discriminatory practices. If an institution appears on the list and fails to change its behavior, the state treasurer — as well as state and local governments — is legally required to divest all direct and indirect holdings with that institution.
These enforcement mechanisms go beyond symbolism. They impose real financial consequences on institutions that discriminate based on ESG criteria.
How ESG threatens agriculture
Adding agriculture to Act 406 is both necessary and long overdue. ESG frameworks often apply environmental metrics that label traditional farming as harmful. These metrics target greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water consumption, and chemical fertilizer use — classifying them as “too high” by ESG standards.
Farmers routinely rely on fertilizers, pesticides, and large quantities of water to grow crops. They also need significant land and inevitably emit carbon dioxide through standard agricultural operations. Yet ESG criteria can penalize these practices by restricting access to credit, capital, insurance, or even basic financial services.
The entities behind these standards include international organizations such as the United Nations and industry groups like the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. These groups operate without accountability to American farmers — or to American voters at all.
Much like the disastrous ESG-driven agricultural crackdowns in Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, American farmers now face mounting pressure to overhaul their operations to fit a radical environmental agenda.
Bureaucrats and financial elites are restricting the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers, pushing farmers to electrify equipment, and demanding that they scale back meat and dairy production — all to meet arbitrary emissions targets. These mandates are marketed as voluntary, but the consequences of noncompliance are very real. Farmers who refuse to play along risk losing access to critical financing.
A 2023 report by the Buckeye Institute lays out the economic wreckage such policies would cause. ESG reporting compliance would raise farm operating costs by 34%, triggering massive price hikes across the board: 79% for American cheese, 70% for beef, 47% for strawberries, and 39% for chicken. Nationwide, grocery bills could climb 15%.
Arkansas lawmakers didn’t wait for a full-blown crisis. Act 406 provides a firewall, protecting the state’s farmers from ESG-based financial retaliation. It ensures they can keep producing without having to bow to a globalist agenda that punishes agriculture and drives up food prices for everyone else.
The broader scope
The attack on farmers is just one piece of a broader ESG-driven assault on Americans who don’t conform to progressive orthodoxy. Across the country, banks and financial institutions have weaponized ESG scoring to deny or restrict services — not just to farmers, but to gun dealers, fossil fuel producers, religious groups, and anyone else whose values clash with the left’s ideological agenda.
Major banks have shut down checking accounts, canceled lines of credit, and withheld insurance from perfectly legal businesses — not because of criminal behavior, but because of their industry or beliefs. Victims are often left in the dark, cut off without warning or explanation, with no real path to appeal.
This isn’t conspiracy theory — it’s documented policy. A report from Sustainalytics, an ESG firm owned by Morningstar, spells it out:
Most major banks screen their lending portfolios against specific ESG risks … and many embrace positive or negative screening. … Negative screening and norm-based screening involve the exclusion or avoidance of transactions not aligned with environmental, social, and ethical standards.
The report states clearly that ESG exclusion criteria often target industries like weapons manufacturing, tobacco, and fossil fuels. These policies result in favorable treatment for companies that support left-wing causes, while conservative and religious organizations are systematically sidelined. This kind of selective enforcement distorts the market, giving political activists in the financial sector — many of whom take direction from unelected globalist regulators — the power to impose agendas never approved by voters or their elected leaders.
This isn’t just a conservative concern. Any business, movement, or political voice that deviates from the prevailing ESG orthodoxy could be next. The implications are dangerous. When access to banking, credit, loans, and insurance depends on ideological alignment, free markets no longer exist — and neither does freedom.
That’s why laws like Arkansas’ Act 406 aren’t just helpful, they’re essential.
A blueprint for other states
By enacting Act 406, Arkansas has established a clear and effective model for defending its agricultural industry from ESG-driven discrimination. Other states should follow suit and expand these protections to safeguard all industries and citizens from political interference in the financial system.
If left unchecked, ESG will continue punishing industries essential to America’s prosperity and national security. It will undermine representative government, distort free markets, and erode individual liberty. Arkansas has drawn a firm line. Now it’s time for other states to do the same.
EXCLUSIVE: Republican Voters Sound Alarm On Chinese Ownership Of US Farmland
'Republicans are very concerned about the outsourcing of our food supply to China'
Cleaning up Biden’s bird flu mess falls to Trump
The Biden administration’s brilliant plan to address avian flu involved using a non-sterilizing, leaky vaccine on chickens — two years into the pandemic, when most live chickens have already been exposed to the virus. Where have we heard that idea before, and how did it end again?
Over the past four years, I’ve examined numerous studies and firsthand accounts showing how imperfect vaccines, notably the COVID shots, can lead to negative efficacy. The problem with a leaky vaccine is that it allows the most resilient mutations to thrive and become dominant strains. This doesn’t mean the vaccines cause these mutations, but they do foster natural selection that favors the worst variants.
This administration urgently needs to signal a shift away from Biden’s disastrous biosecurity policies, especially concerning avian flu.
The mass vaccination of chickens against Marek’s disease in the 1970s is a stark example of this problem. The use of a leaky vaccine in that case led to the emergence of more virulent strains, making the disease far deadlier for unvaccinated chickens.
As Quanta magazine warned in 2018:
The problem with leaky vaccines, Read says, is that they enable pathogens to replicate unchecked while also protecting hosts from illness and death, thereby removing the costs associated with increased virulence. Over time, then, in a world of leaky vaccinations, a pathogen might evolve to become deadlier to unvaccinated hosts because it can reap the benefits of virulence without the costs — much as Marek’s disease has slowly become more lethal to unvaccinated chickens. This virulence can also cause the vaccine to start failing by causing illness in vaccinated hosts.
History not only repeats itself but also rhymes. Last weekend, South Dakota-based veterinary biologics company Medgene announced that the USDA was nearing conditional approval for its H5N1 vaccine for dairy cattle. What happens if this vaccine spreads to the animal kingdom and eventually reaches humans?
The risks of non-sterilizing, leaky vaccines are well documented. Despite the disastrous outcomes linked to the COVID vaccines, the government has not paused its push for respiratory viral vaccines. Instead, it is actively promoting the new RSV shots, ignoring the potential dangers.
Even Anthony Fauci acknowledged these risks in a 2023 academic paper, co-authored with David Morens, then a senior scientific adviser at NIAID. The paper, published in the journal Cell in January 2023, admitted that flu-like vaccines are non-sterilizing and have significant shortcomings.
“Deficiencies in these vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become apparent,” Fauci conceded, adding that “they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection.” This admission underscores the need for a more cautious approach to vaccine approval and distribution.
Why are we still allowing the flu vaccine to continue, and why are we even calling it a vaccine? Flu shots do not sterilize the virus. In fact, Fauci expressed concerns about “disease tolerance” and “immune tolerance,” which result from “immune defense mechanisms that allow hosts to ‘accept’ infection and other antigenic stimuli to optimize survival.”
In other words, leaky, waning vaccines that rely on suboptimal antibodies against rapidly mutating viruses can lead to immune tolerance and imprinting. This can cause the immune system to misfire, resulting in negative efficacy. Any short-term protection against severe disease often comes at a long-term cost as the viruses adapt and grow stronger.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Australia and New Zealand saw almost no fatalities in 2020, before vaccines were introduced. However, deaths surged only after vaccination campaigns began. Renowned cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough warns that we may be repeating the same mistakes with avian flu vaccines.
“Remember, when we have bird flu, it’s always a mixture of strains, not a single strain,” McCullough said on my podcast last week. “It’s going to nudge the overall population to more virulent strains. The southeast Asians have now been vaccinating poultry for several decades, and there’s tons of information that it’s backfiring.”
What’s worse is that human vaccines are also in the works. “We’re even more concerned about the human bird flu vaccines,” McCullough said. “We have a CSL Seqirus vaccine that was FDA-cleared in 2021. It's an antigen-based vaccine; in the randomized trials of normal human volunteers, they died with this vaccine. So it frankly looks dangerous from the onset.”
Fortunately, this vaccine was not made commercially available. But why should we think that future efforts would succeed when we have failed to concoct safe and effective respiratory viral vaccines?
This administration urgently needs to signal a shift away from Biden’s disastrous biosecurity policies, especially concerning avian flu. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins outlined a five-part plan with $1 billion in subsidies but did not suggest pausing the vaccination campaign or halting the harmful culling of chickens.
She might be reconsidering. This week, Rollins acknowledged that “not enough research has been done” and emphasized the need to ensure that a vaccine would help contain the virus rather than strengthen it or cause it to spread to other species.
Now it’s up to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to scrap this plan entirely. RFK was made for a moment like this. His first major test began the moment he took office, and the clock is ticking.
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