The Trump administration’s position on allowing undocumented immigrants to work on farms has been a moving target for weeks. In mid-June, for example, the White House’s line was relatively straightforward: Officials would intensify their deportation campaign by targeting undocumented immigrants at U.S. worksites — without exception. A day later, the president and his team shifted in the opposite direction.

Soon after, Team Trump reversed course, and then reversed course yet again. As recently as last week, the president talked about developing a temporary pass for immigrants who work on farms, which was the opposite of what his “border czar” said a week earlier.

This week, as Reuters reported, the moving target moved again:

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said on Tuesday that there will be ‘no amnesty’ for agricultural workers from the Trump administration’s efforts to deport all immigrants in the country illegally. The farm sector has warned that mass deportation of farm workers would disrupt the U.S. food supply.

To be sure, the Cabinet secretary’s comments were newsworthy, though if recent history is any guide, a prominent White House official, including possibly Donald Trump himself, will contradict Rollins very soon.

But of particular interest was something else the agriculture secretary said.

“I can’t emphasize this enough,” Rollins said. “There will be no amnesty; the mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way; and we move the workforce toward automation and 100% American participation, which with 34 million able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do fairly quickly.”

In other words, as the agriculture secretary sees it, there’s no need for concern about farmers losing out on immigrant labor because those workers can be replaced thanks to “automation” and Medicaid beneficiaries.

A lot of words come to mind when trying to describe such an approach, but for now, let’s go with “flawed.”

Right off the bat, let’s note the fact that most Americans on Medicaid already have jobs, so they won’t be available to pick crops and replace the victims of the White House’s mass deportation campaign.

Recommended

MS NOW Opinion

Trump’s White House can’t defend the shutdown — so it’s dehumanizing immigrants again

Michael A. Cohen

Maddowblog

Trump suggests undocumented farm workers are ‘naturally’ designed for field work

Steve Benen

What’s more, many Medicaid beneficiaries live in urban areas, which tend to be nowhere near farms, and I have a hunch the administration doesn’t intend to pay for an elaborate travel-reimbursement program to shuttle city residents to and from agricultural areas. (History offers some examples of regimes that forced urban residents to work on farms, but the Trump administration should probably try to avoid emulating Stalin’s five-year plan.)

Alas, there’s no reason to stop there. It’s also true, for example, that many Americans on Medicaid have physical disabilities and/or live in nursing homes, so asking them to work in fields to collect produce for consumers probably won’t go well.

But what I find myself stuck on is Rollins’ quote in the context of the Republicans’ domestic policy megabill. GOP policymakers approved sweeping and unprecedented cuts to Medicaid, arguing that Americans who lose coverage can simply get jobs that offer health insurance.

It’s against this backdrop that the secretary of agriculture suggested that Medicaid beneficiaries — whose coverage is at risk — can replace immigrants as farmworkers, brushing past the inconvenient fact that farmworkers tend not to get health care coverage.

All of which is to say, if the administration is counting on Americans on Medicaid replacing immigrants on farms, officials should probably start working on a Plan B.