MAGA Critics Accuse Jasmine Crockett of ‘Race Baiting’ After She Says Donald Trump Could Bring Back Slavery and Is Trying to ‘Make Us Go Back to the Fields’

Nearly 160 years after slavery was abolished in the United States, House Democrats Jasmine Crockett and Hank Johnson suggested President Donald Trump could bring back slavery with his education and anti-immigration policies.

The comments came during the inaugural State of the People address, a 24-hour livestream that brought together Black civil rights activists, scholars, politicians, and journalists in protest of Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on March 4.

With approximately half of the farmworkers in the U.S. undocumented, there’s no argument that Trump’s immigration crackdown could lead to significant labor shortages on farms across the nation.

Crockett weighed in on the mass deportations during the livestream, mentioning that some in the administration envision that role for the Black community. “They have decided to go after immigrants and things like that and say, ‘Oh. they taking your Black jobs, they taking your Black jobs.’”

“Not really,” she added emphatically, countering the contention that field work is a “Black job.”

“They are obviously jobs they want us to go back to, such as working the fields, those immigrants that come into our country work the fields, something that we ain’t done in a long time and clearly he is trying to make us go back to the fields,” she said, referring to Trump.

Crockett was not the only politician who had concerns over the impact of Trump’s policies on the Black community. Hank Johnson was another participant who raised the specter of slavery in his comments.

Speaking about Trump’s plans for education policy, he said, “It puts us back to when America was ‘great’ and we were picking cotton and doing the productivity that they’re putting my Latino brothers and sisters who migrate here to do that work because we are not suited intellectually to do it anymore.”

He continued, “But they would have us back, confined to doing that kind of work. We gotta watch out for where we are headed. It’s the people that will save our democracy that will stop this movement toward the past that Trump has us hurtling towards.”

Johnson’s comments came just days before the White House prepped an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education and return authority over U.S. schools to the states.

While the federal government doesn’t decide curriculum, the Department of Education currently plays a significant role in protecting students’ civil rights, disbursing Title 1 funds for students in poverty and with disabilities, and administering federal student loans for higher education, among other things. Trump’s platform also pledges to cut funding for any school “pushing critical race theory.”

Crockett and Johnson’s statements have drawn ridicule from Trump supporters, and a clip of Crockett has been making the rounds online. Criticisms have flooded the comment section on the Libs of TikTok account, run by far-right media influencer Chaya Raichik, a member of the Oklahoma Library Media Advisory Committee.