Hallie Shoffner, who took over her farm after a stint as a liberal activist, said earlier this month that ‘every farmer’ uses illegal labor
The Democratic Senate nominee in Arkansas, Hallie Shoffner, copped to employing illegal immigrants—or “undocumented” migrants, as she called them—on her family farm, telling a local podcast earlier this month that she’d “trade five Americans for just one” illegal alien “because of how hard they work.”
Shoffner discussed the issue during an appearance on the Free Arkansas podcast, saying that “every farmer” will tell you “we did or still do” employ illegal aliens.
“I was chatting yesterday with a Quorum Court member in rural Arkansas—Republican, farmer—and we were talking about labor, ’cause obviously, largest industry, agriculture, labor is a huge issue, especially when you don’t have a large workforce, and every farmer will tell you, ‘Yeah, at one point we did or still do employ undocumented immigrants,’” Shoffner said. “And honestly, we’d trade five Americans for just one of them because of how hard they work. And why is it that there’s no pathway for them to work here legally when they’re good workers? … We’re acting like all Republicans like what’s happening with ICE.”
Shoffner has since claimed she was relaying “a conversation she had with another farmer about challenges with labor.” But months earlier, in a January interview on the District 3 Podcast, Shoffner said she “grew up in an immigrant community” on her family’s farm and that many of those workers “were undocumented.”
“I grew up in an immigrant community because the farm workers for all the farms, um, were generally from Mexico and Honduras,” Shoffner said on the podcast. “Um, many of them were undocumented, but their children were, uh, U.S. citizens or dreamers.”
The National Agricultural Workers Survey, the only federal survey that asks farm workers about their legal status, does not publish state-level data. According to the Department of Agriculture, though, 42 percent of hired crop farmworkers from 2020 through 2022 did not have legal authorization to work in the United States.
Shoffner’s admission comes during a campaign against incumbent senator Tom Cotton (R.) in which she has faced scrutiny over her views on illegal immigration. Shoffner said she would “defund ICE as it exists right now” and “would not spend one more dime on ICE” at a June campaign event, the Washington Free Beacon reported. At the same event, Shoffner was asked what she “would do for the immigrant community” and the “undocumented community.” She said she does not “care whether these are folks that have documents or not.”
Shoffner has spent the months since denying that she said she would vote to defund ICE. An Arkansas news anchor asked her last month whether she had said “those things,” to which she replied, “No.” Shoffner said that “what [she has] called for when it comes to immigration is reform.” She started leaving comments on Cotton’s Facebook page as well. Under a video Cotton posted in which he responds to a voter’s question about the consequences of defunding ICE, Shoffner wrote, “I don’t want to defund ICE. I want to reform it.”
“Yet again, Tom Cotton and his allies can keep trying to twist her words, but it does not change the issues Arkansans are facing every day,” Shoffner campaign manager Anna-Lee Pittman told the Free Beacon. “After 14 years in Washington, Cotton should be answering for his own record on the rising cost of living, rural health care and the challenges facing Arkansas farmers. Hallie will remain focused on these issues and on the challenges Arkansas families are facing every day.”
Shoffner has not made immigration a core focus of her campaign to flip a deep-red state that President Donald Trump carried by more than 30 percentage points in 2024. She does, though, have a history of working on the issue as a left-wing activist.
Shoffner served as executive director of Seis Puentes, an Arkansas nonprofit that helps illegal immigrants navigate U.S. government systems and “engage them in the process,” the Free Beacon reported in January. She went on to serve as deputy campaign manager of a Democratic state legislator’s unsuccessful campaign for mayor of North Little Rock before joining an advertising and public relations agency in 2013.
It wasn’t until 2016 that Shoffner moved back to her family farm as her parents struggled to run it. Around that time, she hired a marketing firm to build a “new brand” as “FarmHerHallie” and published blogs on the website FarmHerHallie.com advocating for “big climate action,” the Free Beacon reported. She has nonetheless centered her campaign on her farming background, saying she’s been “a rice and soybean farmer” for her “whole life.”
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