Westfield, Pennsylvania

John Painter is a third generation Pennsylvania organic dairy farmer and three-time Donald Trump voter with a beef against Trump’s immigration policies.

Painter and his family own and operate Painterland Farms, where they milk 450 cows and grow corn, oats, alfalfa, wheat, and hay on 5,000 acres. During Donald Trump’s first term, Painter began using immigrant labor. He made that decision, he told Politico, because he couldn’t find enough willing Americans. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do,” Painter said.

He wound up hiring a Mexican couple, and they stuck with him for two years – until the husband got pulled over during an out-of-state trip, arrested for falsifying papers, and deported to Mexico. “I understand that he was here illegally, but I also understand that he’s human,” Painter said. “They want the American dream, and they want to work.”

Later he hired another husband and wife, this time from Guatemala. But with the wife expecting in November, Painter fears he could be caught short-handed again, and he has reason to think it might not be easy to find someone in the current environment. A 2025 analysis of Census Bureau data by the Pew Research Center found that as of June the immigrant workforce in the U.S. was down by “over 750,000 workers since January.” The resulting labor shortage has Painter, among many other farmers, on edge. “The whole thing is screwed up,” he told Politico.

At a press conference in June, President Trump expressed a desire to “do something” for farmers who, he acknowledged, were “being hurt badly” by his administration’s crackdown on immigrant workers. It wasn’t realistic to send “all their people” packing, Trump said. “We can’t do that to our farmers.”

But others in his administration apparently failed to get the message. The mass deportations would continue, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said in early July. Any difficulties could be overcome with ”automation and 100 percent American participation,” she asserted, suggesting that the millions of Medicaid recipients facing new work requirements under the GOP’s budget act could handle all the agriculture sector’s job needs. Rollins added that this could be accomplished “fairly quickly.”

Like many of his fellow farmers, Painter doesn’t believe it. Immigration authorities should focus on “the troublemakers,” not on people who are “working and paying their taxes,” Painter told Politico. The administration’s sweeping arrests were “not right,” he said. “All of us, if we look back in history, including the president, we have somebody that came to this country for the American dream.”

Posted on October 8, 2025