The Biden administration “certainly accelerated” federal bias in favor of racial minorities, said Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, on Sunday, arguing that the Agriculture Department “handed out farm benefits to people based on skin color” rather than on merit. The USDA recently sent $2 billion in payments to 43,000 farmers who suffered discrimination when they applied for USDA farm loans.
Congress created the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program (DFAP) in 2022 after lawsuits stymied a $4 billion debt-relief plan aimed at farmers of color and criticized by Republican lawmakers as reverse discrimination. More than 58,000 people filed applications covering every category in DFAP — race, color, national origin, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and retaliation for civil rights activity, said the USDA.
On the CBS program “Face the Nation,” Vance said “there’s been this thing in America where we’ve said that we should judge people on their skin color, based on immutable characteristics…I frankly think that unfortunately, a lot of people on the left have leaned into this by trying to categorize people by skin color and then give special benefits or special amounts of discrimination.
“The Harris Administration, for example, handed out farm benefits to people based on skin color. I think that’s disgraceful. I don’t think we should say, ‘You get farm benefits if you’re a Black farmer, you don’t get farm benefits if you’re a white farmer,” said Vance, who did not specify the program he meant.
“But I think that President Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris have certainly accelerated it. I don’t think you’ve seen anything like what we’ve seen from Kamala Harris when it comes to handing out government benefits based on people’s immutable characteristics.”
Biden said the DFAP payments were “a bold step to address the effects of discrimination in farming and ranching.” In a statement announcing the payments, he said, “Farmers and ranchers work around the clock to put food on our tables and steward our Nation’s land. But for too long, many farmers and ranchers experienced discrimination in farm loan and have not had the same access to federal resources and support.”
The DFAP website does not provide a demographic breakdown of recipients. Payments went to every state, the District of Columbia, and three territories. More than half of recipients were producers in Mississippi and Alabama, who received a combined $905.5 million. The other states with more than $100 million in payments were Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Black farmers are most numerous in the South but they make up just 1.2 percent of the 3.4 million products in the country, according the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture.
Over the past generation, the USDA has acknowledged in legal settlements with Black, Hispanic, Native American, and women farmers a history of bias in the operation of its farm loan programs.
If Republican nominee Donald Trump is re-elected president, his administration would “take a sequential approach” to his promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history, said Vance on ABC’s “This Week” program. The 2024 Republican platform says the GOP “is committed to sending illegal aliens back home and removing those who have violated our laws.”
“There’s 20 million people here illegally. You start with what’s achievable. You do that. And then you go onto what’s achievable from there,” said Vance. “I think it’s interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let’s start with 1 million. That’s where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there.”
Estimates say more than a quarter and up to one-half of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented.