Trump Agriculture Chief Pushes Outrageous Plan for Medicaid Recipients

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Tuesday seemingly contradicted President Trump’s recent pledge to let immigrant farmworkers remain in the United States if their employers vouch for them. Instead, she put forth an insane scheme in which Medicaid recipients will replace deported farm laborers.

“There will be no amnesty,” Rollins said. “The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100 percent American participation, which, again, with 34 million … able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”

Notably, there are only roughly four million able-bodied adults without dependents on Medicaid who work fewer than 80 hours a month, per Matt Bruenig at the People’s Policy Project.

Nonetheless, Rollins is here barbarically proposing that the government have Medicaid recipients toil in fields in order to keep their health care coverage under recently passed Medicaid work requirements. All this to implausibly avoid crippling the U.S. food supply after immigrant farmworkers have been mass-deported.

Behold: MAGA populism.

The MAGA base is still irate at the Trump administration’s decision to essentially drop the Jeffrey Epstein case. 

Trump made a dubiously timed Truth Social post on Monday praising FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino for “locking up criminals, and cleaning up America’s streets.” The praise came after a day of excoriation from the deep MAGA base, as they called for the heads of Patel, Bongino, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. And they have a point—all three of the senior Trump officials (and even Vice President JD Vance) either outright pushed or fanned the flames of the idea that Epstein didn’t kill himself. 

When Bongino replied to Trump’s praise with a nonchalant “We are doubling down. No letting up,” the supporters who once felt represented by Bongino came for him. Nearly every reply to the post was a reference to Epstein and Bongino’s broken promise. 

“Sorry sir, today is not a good day to try and inspire confidence. How did we go from ‘the client list is on my desk’ to there is no list and he killed himself?” said one dismayed loyalist. “How is [Ghislaine] Maxwell in prison for trafficking to no one?”

“Dan we need answers on the Epstein stuff bro, can’t let Bondi off the hook for lying to everybody,” the Hodge Twins posted. 

“The only thing we see you doubling down on is covering up the Epstein stuff. He trafficked kids to someone, and I don’t buy for a second that the FBI doesn’t know a single one of his clients,” an account with “America First Christian” in its bio wrote. “You should resign in disgrace.”

Frankly, it is weird. Unearthing the Epstein case and exposing Democrats like the Clintons and Obamas has been a longtime talking point of MAGA’s QAnon wing that reached the campaign’s mainstream. This current moment highlights the “real MAGA” versus “traditional neocon” split that has been a constant point of friction within Trump’s administrations. And it is surfacing once again as people like Patel and Bongino, who are of that “real MAGA” ilk, make decisions that so many of their supporters feel are aligned with the “deep state,” which must certainly feel like a dagger to the heart to them.   

“Sorry Dan. Practically been a zealot behind you forever. After yesterday, I no longer trust you or anyone else there. You people are no better than the last admin. You just talk a better game,” said another. “We’re not stupid.” 

As Donald Trump has rapidly expanded immigration enforcement, he and his administration have also begun stripping government oversight—and people are already dying, according to a report published by CNN Tuesday.

Court documents filed in April as part of a lawsuit against the Trump administration revealed that the Trump administration effectively shuttered three watchdog organizations at the Department of Homeland Security. Employees at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, or CRCL; the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, or CISOMB; and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, or OIDO, were abruptly suspended in March and given a separation date of May 23.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s budget requests for the fiscal year 2026, zeroed out the OIDO budget. The Trump administration has claimed that the budget request was merely a recommendation from the president, according to CNN.

While the DHS has claimed to have plans to reconstruct department oversight, rebuilding the watchdogs would likely take time—time that immigrant detainees don’t have. The new Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman Ronald Sartini, the person charged with reassessing the DHS’s oversight efforts, was stranded as the only employee assigned to CISOMB, CRCL, and OIDO, according to CNN.

As DHS carries out a massive reduction in force, the size of its detainment and deportation operation has only grown. Since Trump’s inauguration in January, 60 local, state, and federal prisons—public and private—have been detaining immigrants for DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At least 12 people have already died in ICE custody so far this year, the same number that died in all of 2024. Administration officials have brushed off these deaths as business as usual, but Michelle Brané, a former Immigration Detention Ombudsman, told CNN that the death toll “could be much higher.”

“People’s lives are at risk,” Brané said.

Katie Shepherd, who previously served as a senior policy advisor at CRCL before she was removed as part of the DHS oversight cuts, said the agency was moving in the wrong direction.

“As the Trump administration is doubling down on immigration enforcement, and the number of people in custody is rapidly increasing, we should be increasing oversight, not eliminating it,” Shepherd said.

When asked about the ongoing cases at CRCL, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told CNN that the department was still “committed to civil rights,” claiming that CRCL had “actually undermined civil rights protections as well as basic federal law enforcement.”

“All legally required functions are still being carried out—but in a more efficient and cost-effective way, and without compromising the department’s core mission of securing the homeland,” McLaughlin said. “Oversight offices continue to receive and open new complaints and investigations.”

The United States doesn’t have the missile stockpile it needs for the Pentagon’s military plans.

The country has only 25 percent of the Patriot missile interceptors left from its initial stockpile level after heavy use of the weapon in the Middle East “in recent months,” reported The Guardian Tuesday. The arsenal issue raised concerns within the Defense Department that U.S. military operations could be jeopardized, with the situation becoming “more acute” in the wake of Donald Trump’s attack on Iranian nuclear facilities last month. The president ordered the use of nearly 30 Patriot missiles in an exchange with Iran’s military.

The U.S. produces some 600 Patriot missiles per year, but concerns remain over Iran’s stockpile, which is believed to contain more than 1,000 ballistic missiles. Those could theoretically be weaponized against U.S. bases if the ceasefire with Israel were to collapse, reported The Guardian. Meanwhile, the U.S. has also divided up its reserves to aid Ukraine while it fights Russia, earmarking dozens of Patriot missiles for the Eastern European nation.

The reported shortage also halted a weapons shipment to Ukraine last week in what a White House spokesperson described as a move to “put America’s interests first,” blindsiding practically everyone outside of the White House, including the State Department, Congress, officials in Kyiv, and America’s European allies, reported NBC News.

The decision to cancel the shipment was grounded in the Pentagon’s global munitions tracker, which highlighted that a number of critical munitions had fallen below a minimum readiness standard for several years, at least since President Joe Biden began sending weapons to assist Ukraine in its war against Russia.

Trump appeared unconcerned by the shortage come Monday, however, when he told reporters ahead of a dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would “send some more weapons” to Ukraine. He did not, however, disclose whether those shipments would include the Patriot missiles.

Trump also told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that he was “not responsible” for the canceled shipment, telling the war-battered leader that he had directed a review of U.S. stockpiles but did not order the freeze, according to sources that spoke with The Guardian.

The news of a shortage comes at a pivotal moment, with U.S. officials wavering on the country’s commitments to aiding Ukraine and Democrats and Republicans alike excoriating the White House’s decision to pull back.

Democratic Representative Adam Smith referred to the decision to halt aid as “disingenuous,” claiming that his office had “seen the numbers” and had not seen any evidence that would warrant peeling back support from Ukraine.

“We are not at any lower point, stockpile-wise, than we’ve been in the three and a half years of the Ukraine conflict,” Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told NBC News.

Last week, after news of the halted shipment broke, an analysis by senior military officers similarly found that a Ukraine aid package would not jeopardize U.S. supplies, reported NBC.

Donald Trump announced Monday that the U.S. will send more weapons to Ukraine to combat Russia—making a lot of MAGA world livid.

Seemingly shifting his stance from days earlier, when the president halted certain weapons shipments to Ukraine, Trump told reporters, “We’re going to send some more weapons. We have to. They have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard now. They’re getting hit very hard. We’re going to have to send more weapons. Yeah, defensive weapons, primarily. But they’re getting hit very, very hard.”

This was confirmed in a Pentagon statement, which read: “At President Trump’s direction, the Department of Defense is sending additional defensive weapons to Ukraine to ensure the Ukrainians can defend themselves while we work to secure a lasting peace and ensure the killing stops.”

To many MAGA Republicans who support Trump for his supposed “America First” foreign policy approach, the news was aggravating.

“I did not vote for this,” wrote Trump-pardoned January 6-er Derrick Evans. Natalie Danelishen, who works for a foundation that seeks to build upon Trump’s idea of “freedom cities,” echoed the sentiment, adding, “What the actual fuck?”

“Who in the hell is telling Trump that we need to send more weapons to Ukraine?” posted the conservative comedy and political commentary duo Keith and Kevin Hodge.

“So Trump just said we’re gonna support funding Ukraine’s proxy war now?” wrote “America First” influencer @TiffMoodNukes, who likened Trump’s behavior to a MAGA talking point alleging President Joe Biden was a puppet for the deep state.

For other Trump supporters, the decision was salt in a fresh wound, after a Trump Department of Justice memo published by Axios this weekend denied the existence of a much-anticipated “client list” maintained by Jeffrey Epstein, thereby deflating MAGA conspiracy theories—that Trump and his team had long entertained—about elites’ connections to the deceased sex trafficker and financier.

Many within MAGA world have been left feeling that either Trump had strung them along or, worse, that his administration is now in on the imagined cover-up.

Newsmax host Todd Starnes posted, “The White House just announced they are going to send more weapons to Ukraine.… And it turns out the Epstein files were just an urban legend. I did not vote for this.”

“Hey, you didn’t get the Epstein List, but at least Ukraine is getting weapons!” posted a “MAGA Activist” who goes by “Chief Trumpster.”

“There was a time when I was willing to entertain the idea of ‘trust the plan,’” posted Mike Adams, a right-wing health influencer known as “Health Ranger.” “But after the Epstein files have been memory holed … and the ‘peace president’ is sending more bombs to Israel and Ukraine, and we all realize we’ve been lied to about so many things, the idea that anyone could still trust the plan is truly idiotic.”