Democrat Hallie Shoffner, the sixth-generation “FarmHer” running to unseat Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), just told an Arkansas podcast that illegal alien field hands are so valuable she’d swap five U.S. workers for a single one of them.
The comments came on the Sept. 9 episode of Free Arkansas with host Andy McNeill, as Shoffner tried to sell her brand of “working-class” politics to a red state that has not sent a Democrat to the Senate in more than a decade, Breitbart reported.
“Every farmer will tell you at one point, we did, or still do, employ undocumented immigrants, and it’s absolutely ridiculous that these folks are being rounded up because they’re hardworking people,” Shoffner said.
“They’re some of the best people we know, and honestly, we’d trade five Americans for just one of them because of how hard they work.”
She kept going. “And why is it that there’s no pathway for them to work here legally when they’re good workers? We pay them well. They spend money here. They have family here.”
Laura Loomer highlighted the latest clip and put it plainly: Farmer Hallie puts illegal aliens first.
WATCH:
WATCH:
Arkansas Democrat US Senate Candidate Hallie Shoffner @hallieshoffner let it slip during a recent interview that she values illegal aliens over American workers.
She shockingly said she would trade 5 Americans for 1 illegal alien!!!!
Shoffner proclaimed her love for… https://t.co/xEPpfvvVjC pic.twitter.com/7RqvizCqXo
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) September 15, 2026
Shoffner has spent years arguing that American agriculture cannot function without foreign-born labor, legal guest workers and illegal aliens.
On the January 2026 District 3 Podcast, she said she “grew up in an immigrant community” because the workers on the farms around Newport “were generally from Mexico and Honduras.”
“Many of them were undocumented,” she added, “but their children were U.S. citizens or Dreamers. And so I learned Spanish.”
In a September 2025 interview, she called the H-2A guest-worker program “how farmers get labor” and complained that “we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation where we rely on foreign-born labor.”
She said her own operation brought in five Mexican workers who returned year after year. When DHS started inspecting H-2A housing, she suggested the government simply did not want farmers to have labor.
Long before the campaign hat and denim shirt, Shoffner ran Seis Puentes, a North Little Rock nonprofit she took over after graduating from the Clinton School.
In a May 16, 2012 Arkansas Times profile titled “Mi casa es su casa,” Shoffner said the center existed to help Latinos, including people without papers, “navigate American systems” and “engage them in the process.”
More from Breitbart:
Shoffner has criticized Department of Homeland Security inspections of housing for H-2A agricultural workers. In August 2025, Shoffner said Arkansas farms use the H-2A Agricultural Visa Program to recruit foreign-born workers from Mexico and South Africa. “Now the Department of Homeland Security has suddenly decided it’s their job to inspect H-2A Visa housing,” she said.
She questioned why the inspections were taking place, adding, “My only thinking is they don’t want farmers to access labor, they don’t want farmers to be successful, they don’t want farmers to grow food, and we are going to be a country reliant on others to feed us.”
Beyond immigration, Shoffner has connected agriculture to climate change. In 2020, she called climate change a threat to “my business, my way of life, and the legacy I will leave for my son: the farm.” Shoffner said “emissions-driven climate change amplifies extreme weather events,” including “longer droughts, more torrential rains, and stronger storms,” and stated that farmers could face “more challenging seasons jeopardizing our ability to make a profitable crop.”
She criticized the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency over changes to agricultural programs. In an April 2025 post, she listed “Farm to school programs (cancelled by DOGE), SNAP access at farmers markets (cancelled by DOGE), Local processing facilities (threatened by tariffs), Support for women- and BIPOC-owned farms (cancelled by Trump),” which she described as part of “the true path to health in rural America.”
Shoffner has also focused on race in her agricultural advocacy. Discussing three black farmers in a 2024 profile, Shoffner said, “As a society, we pretty much did everything possible to ensure that Black farmers did not become prosperous farm families.” She added that “women and minority farmers who live on the margins of the industry at large are deserving of a first shot at the specialty rice industry.”
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