Devin Nunes' farm in Steve King's Iowa district; employs undocumented workers?
According to this explosive Esquire article by Ryan Lizza, Devin Nunes' family quietly moved their family farm to Iowa a few years ago and appear to want to keep this a secret.
Nunes is the conservative Republican chair of the House intelligence committee, who has been doing his damnedest to undermine Congress' efforts to investigate allegations that the Trump campaign may have conspired with Russia to win the election, and that Trump may have obstructed justice by interfering in the investigation.
Nunes has represented a California district for more than 15 years. His grandfather moved to California from Portugal and set up a dairy farm there, which Nunes highlights in all his campaign material. But his brother and parents moved the farm to Steve King's district in Iowa a few years ago.
They apparently want to keep this a secret (Lizza provides pretty convincing details on why he thinks this in the article).
Lizza traveled to the Iowa district last month to interview locals & try to interview Nunes' family, but things got really strange. People in white vans started following him. Sources abruptly stopped talking to him in the middle of interviews after they got unexpected phone calls. An obscure article published in an online trade publication that had mentioned that the Nunes family had moved to Iowa disappeared from the internet.
And multiple locals that Rizza interviewed, from local reporters to farmers to workers themselves, said that almost all of the workers on the dairy farms in the region are undocumented and that the farm owners all know this. They are all terrified that Trump's ICE agents could swoop in and start taking down their operations.
Despite this, Steve King continues to win every election, even though he is one of the most anti-immigrant, pro-ICE members of Congress.
The farmers in the region don't agree with King on his immigration stance, but they still seem to vote for him. As Lizza writes:
There is massive political hypocrisy at the center of this: Trump’s and King’s rural-farm supporters embrace anti-immigrant politicians while employing undocumented immigrants. The greatest threat to Iowa dairy farmers, of course, is not the press. It’s Donald Trump.
Lizza talked with a priest at a church across the border in Worthingon, Minnesota, less than 30 minutes away, who told him that ICE are in Worthington (which is a Hispanic hub in the area) terrorizing families two or three times a week. Yet the city administrator in Nunes' area said they had not been aware of ICE agents coming to their own area in the past 4 years.
So here are a bunch of big issues:
(1) Will the national & local media ignore this story?
(2) Will anybody on CNN, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC ask the ubiquitous Steve King whether ICE should be investigating the dairy farms in his district, where apparently most of the workers are undocumented immigrants?
(3) Will anybody in the White House press corps ask Trump (or Huckabee Sanders) about this--especially since a big demand by Trump in the NAFTA renegotiations with Canada that have been underway involves DAIRY FARMS?
(4) Are there any debates coming up in Iowa's 4th district, and will Democratic challenger JD Scholten campaign on this issue (immigration reform, the current role of ICE, & balancing farmers' needs with lawful employment of immigrants)?
Steve King won his last House election in the district 61%-39%.
Does his Democratic challenger JD Scholten stand a chance this time around?
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a23471864/devin-nunes-family-farm-iowa-california/
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