Politics
California farmers were big Trump backers. They may be on collision course over immigrant deportation
SAN JACINTO, Calif. — A paradox has settled across California’s velvet green fields and orchards. California farmers, who are some of the most ardent supporters of Donald Trump, would seem to be on a collision course with one of the president-elect’s most important campaign promises.
Trump has pledged to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants across the country, including, he has said in recent days, rounding up people and putting them in newly built detention camps.
If any such effort penetrated California’s heartland — where half the fruits and vegetables consumed in the U.S. are grown — it almost surely would decimate the workforce that farmers rely on to plant and harvest their crops. At least half of the state’s 162,000 farmworkers are undocumented, according to estimates from the federal Department of Labor and research conducted by UC Merced. Without sufficient workers, food would rot in the fields, sending grocery prices skyrocketing.
If the Trump administration conducts mass deportation efforts in California’s heartland, farm contractors and other experts said it would decimate the workforce
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
And yet, farmers are not railing in protest. Many say they expect the president will support their workforce needs, either through a robust legalization program for workers already here or by leaving farms be and focusing enforcement elsewhere.
Some are also pushing the government to make it easier for them to import temporary guest workers under the H-2A visa program, which allows farms to hire seasonal agricultural workers when the domestic labor supply falls short.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition team, did not respond to questions about agricultural workers specifically, but said: “The American people reelected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail, like deporting migrant criminals and restoring our economic greatness. He will deliver.”
In that context, Steve Scaroni, the founder one of the largest guest-worker companies in the country, Fresh Harvest, predicted an increased demand for the thousands of workers his company brings in each year from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador for three- to 10-month stints picking lettuce, strawberries and other crops.
“Most farmers are realizing that they’re going to need to implement the H-2A program at some level to assure that they have labor,” Scaroni said. “Because we just don’t know what the deportation is going to look like.”
Farmworkers and their advocates are anxious — both at the prospect of mass deportations and a huge expansion of guest worker programs that in the past have spawned complaints about shorted paychecks, unpaid travel time and unsafe housing.
Sara, a farmworker living in Riverside County who asked to be identified by only her first name because she is undocumented, said she and fellow workers harvesting cilantro in the eastern Coachella Valley share a pervasive sense of dread.
“Undocumented people are the ones who are really doing the tough work,” she said, “because we need to make money to feed our children and elderly.”
Asked about calls to expand the H-2A program, Sara responded: “Why not give work permits to the people who are already here, instead of bringing more people, when there are lots of farmworkers here already?”
Whatever happens, said Edward Orozco Flores, faculty director of UC Merced’s Community and Labor Center, people should be braced for disruption.
“Up to this point, it was just campaign rhetoric,” he said. “Now comes the messy part.”
For decades, California farmers and the workers who tend their crops have been engaged in a complicated ballet. It is technically illegal for farmers to hire undocumented workers, but some people in the industry say it happens regularly, an assertion research backs up.
One major hiring route is through farm labor contractors, who seek out workers, request their government paperwork and dispatch the workers to farms during harvest and planting seasons. The contractors routinely tell farmers that the workers have valid paperwork. But, according to people knowledgeable about the industry, they don’t always verify that paperwork.
“Our hard stance is we are not document experts,” said one contractor, who asked not to be identified to discuss sensitive legal matters. He noted that workers give him Social Security numbers. And months later, he said, he often receives notice from the government informing him that many of those numbers do not match the names the workers have given. But by then, the harvest is over and the workers are gone.
“Everybody knows how the game is played,” he said.
Given this state of affairs, he predicted: “If any of these mass deportations happen, it’s going to be catastrophic” for the industry.
It’s not yet clear how Trump’s rhetoric on deportations will play out. He and his advisers have stressed that their first priority will be criminals and those who pose a threat to national security. It is possible that most farmworkers, documented or not, would be unaffected.
One potential model for what could come next is a deportation campaign the U.S. launched 75 years ago, under President Eisenhower. Trump has spoken admirably of it, telling “60 Minutes” in 2015: “You look back in the 1950s, you look back at the Eisenhower administration, take a look at what they did, and it worked.”
The government called it “Operation Wetback,” and in June 1954, authorities dispatched officers across the Southwest. In the first days of the campaign, border patrol agents set up roadblocks from California to Texas, arresting thousands of people of Mexican descent and sending them south on buses, trains and airplanes. Among those removed were not just undocumented workers, but also American citizens caught up in a racist dragnet.
A 1954 photograph of Mexican workers awaiting deportation during “Operation Wetback.”
(Los Angeles Times / UCLA Archives)
As the campaign continued, officers swept north into cities. They raided landmarks such as the Biltmore and Beverly Hills hotels, and a detention camp was set up in Los Angeles’ Elysian Park to temporarily house the people picked up. Officers also swarmed the fields, scooping up workers near Salinas, Fresno and Sacramento.
Dolores Huerta, now 94 and one of the founders of the United Farm Workers, was then a young woman in Stockton. She vividly recalled agents raiding the hotel her mother owned and a movie theater across the street. Huerta said the fear created by those raids helped propel her into the fight for farmworker rights.
Then, as now, many of the people who toiled in agricultural fields were from Mexico. The deportation program did not change that, but it did alter the terms under which many workers labored.
Sandra Reyes, right, with the legal services group TODEC, is hosting “Know Your Rights” event for farmworkers who might be affected by deportation efforts.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Following the deportation sweeps of 1954, according to UCLA history professor Kelly Hernandez, border patrol officers pressed farmers, particularly in south Texas, to stop hiring undocumented workers and instead avail themselves of the bracero program. That guest worker program was launched during World War II to bring Mexican workers to America’s fields while American workers were fighting overseas, and continued to grow after the war ended. According to statistics from the University of Colorado, the number of braceros in the United States jumped by more than 100% from 1952 to 1956, rising to 445,000.
Many braceros ultimately settled in the U.S. But while in the program, many were subject to exploitation, working long hours for little money and facing demeaning treatment at work sites.
Antonio De Loera-Brust, a spokesperson for the UFW, said he fears similar abuses could follow an expansion of the H-2A program.
Under H-2A, agricultural employers can hire workers from other countries on temporary permits, so long as they show they were unable to hire U.S. workers first. The imported worker is dependent upon the employer for food, housing and safe working conditions.
De Loera-Brust called the program “a recipe for exploitation” because a worker’s permission to be in the country is tied to the employer. “Employers control nearly every aspect of the workers’ lives,” he said.
NumbersUSA, which bills itself as the nation’s largest grassroots immigration-reduction organization, supports use of the H-2A program in agriculture. However, the organization doesn’t support expanding the program to include full-time jobs or jobs not directly tied to farm work, noting there are many unemployed U.S.-born adults.
“It is not plausible for the agribusiness lobby to argue that employers in this sector cannot recruit, train, and retain workers from this large labor pool,” said Eric Ruark, research director for NumbersUSA.
Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League, said he plans to work urgently on legislation that would provide work authorization for current farmworkers and ensure that longtime workers benefit from the Social Security system that they and their employers have paid into.
Cunha, who declined to say how he voted in the presidential election, also aims to revise the wage structure in the H-2A program. In California, employers must pay H-2A workers $19.75 per hour — the second highest rate in the country, after Washington, D.C. — unless the prevailing hourly rate, the collective bargaining rate, or the applicable state or local minimum wage is higher.
The wages are designed to ensure that the hiring of foreign guest workers doesn’t adversely affect the working conditions of U.S. workers. But at that rate, Cunha said, California “can’t compete” with producers in states such as Florida, where the required wage for H-2A workers is $14.77 an hour, unless other wages are higher.
Fresno County farmer Joe Del Bosque recalls earlier crackdowns on illegal immigration that left unpicked crops rotting in the fields.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Fresno County farmer Joe Del Bosque says it’s still unclear what the Trump administration has planned for undocumented farmworkers. But he said he has concerns.
Del Bosque, who also declined to say how he voted, knows federal policies can have real impacts in the fields. The last time he experienced a serious labor shortage, he said, was under the Obama administration. During that period, fewer people were entering the country due to tight border security, more people were being targeted for deportation, and others weren’t working out of fear, he said.
“During Obama, there were times where I didn’t have enough people show up, and we couldn’t get the crops picked and we left some of the crops to rot in the fields,” he said. “That hurt me, and I’m sure it hurt the people who probably wanted to be working here, but they couldn’t come.”
In the past, Del Bosque has been active in advocating for immigration reform, including the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would have revised the H-2A visa program and created a certified agricultural worker status, to provide eligible laborers with employment authorization and an optional path to residency.
This time around, Del Bosque wants to send a message directly to Trump.
“A country can’t be strong if it doesn’t have a reliable food supply,” Del Bosque said, “and we can’t do that without a reliable workforce.”
This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.
Politics
Sen Murphy warns ‘people are going to die’ as Congress punts on expiring Obamacare subsidies
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A bipartisan Obamacare fix remains out of reach in the Senate, for now, and lawmakers can’t agree on who is at fault.
While many agree that the forthcoming healthcare cliff will cause financial pain, the partisan divide quickly devolved into pointing the finger across the aisle at who owns the looming healthcare premium spikes that Americans who use the healthcare exchange will face.
Part of the finger-pointing has yielded another surprising agreement: Lawmakers don’t see the fast-approaching expiration of the Biden-era enhanced Obamacare subsidies as Congress failing to act in time.
“Obviously, it’s not a failure of Congress to act,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Fox News Digital. “It’s a failure of Republicans to act. Democrats are united and wanting to expand subsidies. Republicans want premium increases to go up.”
Partisan rancor over Obamacare has seeped into how lawmakers view the effect that expiring subsidies will have on their constituents. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., argued that it was a “life or death” situation, while Republicans contended that Democrats set up the very cliff they maligned. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
DEMOCRATS’ LAST-MINUTE MOVE TO BLOCK GOP FUNDING PLAN SENDS LAWMAKERS HOME EARLY
Senate Republicans and Democrats both tried, and failed, to advance their own partisan plans to replace or extend the subsidies earlier this month. And since then, no action has been taken to deal with the fast-approaching issue, guaranteeing that the subsidies will lapse at the end of the year.
A report published last month by Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit healthcare think tank, found that Americans who use the credits will see an average increase of 114% in their premium costs.
The increase can vary depending on how high above the poverty level a person is. The original premium subsidies set a cap at 400% above the poverty level, while the enhanced subsidies, which were passed during the COVID-19 pandemic, torched the cap.
For example, a person 60 years or older making 401% of the poverty level, or about $62,000 per year, would on average see their premium prices double. That number can skyrocket depending on the state. Wyoming clocks in at the highest spike at 421%.
SENATE MULLS NEXT STEPS AFTER DUELING OBAMACARE FIXES GO UP IN FLAMES
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., doesn’t want to blow up Obamacare or get rid of Obamacare subsidies, but he does want to provide Americans with more options for healthcare. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
In Murphy’s home state of Connecticut, premiums under the same parameters would hike in price by 316%.
“When these do lapse, people are going to die,” Murphy said. “I mean, I was talking to a couple a few months ago who have two parents, both with chronic, potentially life-threatening illnesses, and they will only be able to afford insurance for one of them. So they’re talking about which parent is going to survive to raise their three kids. The stakes are life and death.”
Both sides hold opposing views on the solution. Senate Republicans argue that the credits effectively subsidize insurance companies, not patients, by funneling money directly to them, and that the program is rife with fraud.
Senate Democrats want to extend the subsidies as they are, and are willing to negotiate fixes down the line. But for the GOP, they want to see some immediate reforms, like income caps, anti-fraud measures and more stringent anti-abortion language tied to the subsidies.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who produced his own healthcare plan that would convert subsidies into health savings accounts (HSAs), argued that congressional Democrats “set this up to expire.”
SENATE REPUBLICANS LAND ON OBAMACARE FIX, TEE UP DUELING VOTE WITH DEMS
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., panned Senate Democrats’ Obamacare subsidy proposal as “obviously designed to fail.” (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
But he doesn’t share the view that the subsidies’ expected expiration is a life-or-death situation.
“I’m not taxing somebody who makes 20 bucks an hour to pay for healthcare for somebody who makes half a million dollars a year, that’s what they did,” he told Fox News Digital. “All they did was mask the increase in healthcare costs. That’s all they did with it.”
Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., similarly scoffed at the notion, and told Fox News Digital, “The Democrat plan to extend COVID-era Obamacare subsidies might help less than half a percent of the American population.”
“The Republican plan brings down healthcare costs for 100% of Americans,” he said. “More competition, expands health savings accounts. That needs to be the focus.”
Democrats are also not hiding their disdain for the partisan divide between their approaches to healthcare.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told Fox News Digital that the idea that this “is a congressional failure and not a Republican policy is preposterous.”
“They’ve hated the Affordable Care Act since its inception and tried to repeal it at every possible opportunity,” he said, referring to Obamacare. “The president hates ACA, speaker hates ACA, majority leader hates ACA, rank-and-file hate ACA. And so this is not some failure of bipartisanship.”
While the partisan rancor runs deep on the matter of Obamacare, there are Republicans and Democrats working together to build a new plan. Still, it wouldn’t deal with the rapidly approaching Dec. 31 deadline to extend the subsidies.
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., predicted that the Senate would have a long road to travel before a bipartisan plan came together in the new year, but he didn’t rule it out.
“It’s the Christmas season. It would take a Christmas miracle to execute on actually getting something done there,” he said. “But, you know, I think there’s a potential path, but it’ll be heavy lift.”
Politics
Column: What Epstein ‘hoax’? The facts are bad enough
Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky and Woody Allen were among the familiar faces in the latest batch of photographs released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee in connection to the late Jeffrey Epstein. With the Justice Department preparing to make additional files public, the images underscore an uncomfortable truth for us all: The convicted sex offender moved comfortably among some of the most intelligent men in the world. Rhodes scholars, technology leaders and artists.
Also in the release was a photograph of a woman’s lower leg and foot on what appears to be a bed, with a paperback copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” visible in the background. The 1955 novel centers on a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl. Epstein, a serial sexual abuser, famously nicknamed one of his private planes “The Lolita Express.” And we are to believe that some of the globe’s brightest minds could not put the dots together?
Donald Trump, who once described himself as “a very stable genius,” included.
“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Later, the two had a public falling out, and Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Great. But denial after the fact is only one side of this story. The other is harder to digest: Either the self-proclaimed “very stable genius” spent nearly two decades around Epstein without recognizing what was happening in plain sight — or he recognized it and chose silence. Neither explanation reflects on intelligence as much as it does on character. No wonder Trump’s defenders keep raising the most overused word in American politics today: hoax.
“Once again, House Democrats are selectively releasing cherry-picked photos with random redactions to try and create a false narrative,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson. “Here’s the reality: Democrats like Stacey Plaskett and Hakeem Jeffries were soliciting money and meetings from Epstein after he was a convicted sex offender. The Democrat hoax against President Trump has been repeatedly debunked, and the Trump administration has done more for Epstein’s victims than Democrats ever have by repeatedly calling for transparency, releasing thousands of pages of documents and calling for further investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends.”
Jackson has a point.
Democrats were cherry-picking which photos to release, even if many of the men pictured were aligned with progressives. That includes the president, who was a Democrat when he and Epstein were running together in New York in the 2000s. Trump didn’t register as a Republican until 2009. Now whether the choice of photos and timing was designed to shield political friends or weaponize against perceived enemies isn’t clear. What is clear is that it doesn’t take a genius to see that none of this is a hoax.
The victims are real. The flight logs are real. The millions that flowed into Epstein’s bank account have wire transfer confirmation numbers that can be traced. What Democrats are doing with the information is politics as usual. And you don’t want politics to dictate who gets justice and who gets vilified.
Whatever the politicians’ intentions, Americans can decide how to react to the disclosures. And what the men around Epstein did with the information they gathered on his jet or his island fits squarely at the heart of the national conversation about masculinity. What kind of men could allow such abuse to continue?
I’m not saying the intelligent men in Epstein’s ecosystem did something criminal, but the lack of whistleblowing before his arrest raises questions about their fortitude for right and wrong. And the Trump White House trying to characterize this conversation as a partisan witch hunt — a hoax — is an ineffective strategy because the pattern with their use of that word is so clear.
We saw what happened on Jan. 6, and Trump tells us the investigation is a hoax. We hear the recording of him pressuring Georgia officials to find votes, and he tells us the investigation is a hoax. Trump campaigned on affordability issues — the cost of bacon, no taxes on tips — but now that he’s in office such talk is a hoax by Democrats. As if we don’t know the price of groceries in real time. Ten years ago, Trump told us he had proof that President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. We’re still waiting.
In his book, “Art of the Deal,” Trump framed his lies as “truthful hyperbole” but by now we should understand for him hyperbole matters more than truth — and his felony convictions confirm that some of his claims were indeed simply false.
So if there is a hoax, it is the notion that none of the brilliant men whom Epstein kept in his orbit had any idea what was going on.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
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Ideas expressed in the piece
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The release of photographs and documents from the House Oversight Committee demonstrates that Epstein moved freely among some of the world’s most accomplished and intelligent individuals, including Rhodes scholars, technology leaders and artists.
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Either these prominent men failed to recognize warning signs despite obvious indicators like Epstein’s “Lolita Express” nickname referencing a novel about child sexual abuse, or they recognized the reality and chose silence—neither explanation reflects well on their character.
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Claims that this is a hoax lack credibility because the evidence is concrete: the victims are real[1], the flight logs are documented[1][3], and the millions flowing through Epstein’s bank accounts have verifiable wire transfer confirmation numbers.
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The apparent lack of whistleblowing from the men in Epstein’s ecosystem before his 2019 arrest raises serious questions about their moral fortitude and willingness to stand against wrongdoing.
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The Trump administration’s strategy of characterizing these disclosures as a partisan witch hunt is ineffective, given the pattern of applying the term “hoax” to numerous matters that subsequently proved to be substantiated, from investigations into January 6 to documented pressuring of Georgia officials.
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Regardless of whether Democrats’ selection of which photographs to release was politically motivated, legitimate questions about masculinity and moral responsibility remain central to the national conversation.
Different views on the topic
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Democrats selectively released cherry-picked photographs with random redactions designed to create a false narrative while attempting to shield their own political allies, including figures like Stacey Plaskett and Hakeem Jeffries who solicited money and meetings from Epstein after his conviction.
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The timing and selection of photographs released by House Democrats appear strategically designed to weaponize the Epstein matter against political opponents while deflecting scrutiny from Democratic figures who also maintained connections to the convicted sex offender[2].
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The Trump administration has demonstrated greater commitment to transparency on the Epstein matter through the release of thousands of pages of documents and calls for further investigations into Epstein’s connections to Democratic associates.
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Characterizing this as purely a partisan response overlooks the fact that prominent figures across the political spectrum, including those who were Democrats when they associated with Epstein in the 2000s, had connections requiring examination[2].
Politics
Trump administration touts ‘most secure border in history’ as 2.5 million migrants exit US
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Friday that more than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the United States since President Donald Trump returned to office this year, citing a sweeping immigration crackdown that it says led to the “most secure border in American history.”
In a year-end report highlighting the agency’s accomplishments, DHS claimed that illegal border crossings plunged 93% year-over-year, fentanyl trafficking was cut in half, and hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal immigrants were either arrested or deported, amounting to a dramatic shift from the Biden administration.
“In less than a year, President Trump has delivered some of the most historic and consequential achievements in presidential history—and this Administration is just getting started,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are making America safe again and putting the American people first. In record-time we have secured the border, taken the fight to cartels, and arrested thousands upon thousands of criminal illegal aliens.”
EXCLUSIVE: MILLIONS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS LEAVE US IN RECORD-BREAKING YEAR UNDER TRUMP POLICIES, DHS SAYS
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Friday that President Donald Trump “has delivered some of the most historic and consequential achievements in presidential history” since he took office on Jan. 20. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
While Trump’s first year back in office was “historic,” the administration “won’t rest until the job is done,” Noem added.
Of the 2.5 million illegal immigrants that left the country since Trump took office on Jan. 20, an estimated 1.9 million self-deported and more than 622,000 were deported, according to DHS.
The Trump administration has encouraged anyone living in the United States illegally to return to their native countries using the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Home Mobile App, which allows users to claim a complimentary plane ticket home and a $1,000 exit bonus upon their return.
BIDEN ADMIN MARKED ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT, ALLEGED MURDERER AS ‘NON-ENFORCEMENT PRIORITY,’ DHS REVEALS
United States Customs and Border Protection sent boats to the Chicago River amid “Operation Midway Blitz” on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025. (Chicago Tribune/Getty Images)
CBP seized nearly 540,000 pounds of drugs this year, almost a 10% increase compared to the same time frame in 2024, DHS said, adding that the U.S. Coast Guard has retrieved roughly 470,000 pounds of cocaine, or enough to kill 177 million people.
Taxpayers have been saved more than $13 billion at DHS, the agency said, noting that several agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Secret Service have returned “to their core missions.”
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Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem touted the progress made during President Trump’s first year back in office. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Secretary Noem awarded $10,000 bonuses earlier this year to TSA officers and personnel who displayed exemplary service, overcame hardships, and displayed the utmost patriotism during the 43-day government shutdown.
DHS touted the administration’s achievements, asserting that “countless lives have been saved” this year and “the American people have been put first again.”
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