“No Hate in the Dairy State” – Family Farmers and Farm Workers Unite to Defend Immigrant Rights at WI State Capitol.

Since our organization, the Family Farm Defenders (FFD), began in the early 1990s, we knew that the fate of food and farm systems around the world are inexorably linked to one another. We witnessed how free trade deals uprooted people globally, depressing prices for all farmers thus destroying rural communities worldwide. Visits our members have taken around the world, including to Mali, the European Union, Brazil, and Mexico, among other places, have helped us understand the realities of farmers and farm workers, and how the health of our planet and one another are intricately linked.

This knowledge grounds our strong opposition to the Trump administration’s program of mass deportation. Facts and reporting show that the administration’s claim that they are “going after the worst first,” is a lie. We know that the mass, indiscriminate arrests of migrants, including of farm workers and day laborers, silences workers by terrorizing them. Not to help the country, mass arrests and detention lines the pockets of executives in the private, for-profit immigration detention complex, led by corporations like Geo Group and CoreCivic. Always central to Trump’s racist and dehumanizing rhetoric concerning migrants, his administration’s plans are different this time for their scale and intensity.

Meanwhile, most farm groups also denounce the plan to engage in mass deportations, because they view migrants – particularly farm workers – as critical inputs to their businesses as well as the food processing and distribution industry. We, too, understand that........

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