The Democratic candidate who will run to replace outgoing Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik in upstate New York can be heard in a resurfaced interview condemning U.S. Border Patrol for apprehending illegal immigrants and disparaging off-duty corrections officers and local American laborers he hired to work on his dairy farm.
Blake Gendebien, the owner and president of Twin Mill Farms in Lisbon, New York, since 2002, was tapped Tuesday to run in an eventual special election in New York’s 21st Congressional District.
The U.S. House seat will be vacated by Stefanik, President Donald Trump’s nominee to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but the powerful House Republican still awaits a Senate confirmation vote. With the special election timeline hanging in the balance, the 15 Democratic chairmen of NY-21 announced their unanimous support for Gendebien, championing him as “an authentic voice that will fight for sensible solutions.”
The Democrats categorized Gendebien, who also serves as vice chairman of the Agri-Mark Dairy Cooperative covering New York and New England, as a husband, father, small business owner and former school board member who “will fight to lower costs and secure our borders.” Celebrating him as “an outsider to the political arena,” they said Gendebien “embodies the voice and grit that distinguishes this district.”
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Blake Gendebien is an upstate New York dairy farmer running for Congress. (Blake Gendebien For Congress)
Republican state leadership, however, quickly condemned Gendebien as a “far-left Democrat,” arguing that the candidate “not only supported Joe Biden’s open border policies, but also bailed out illegals from ICE.”
New York GOP Chair Ed Cox referenced the dairy farmer’s past comments made in a more than hour-long interview with a local newspaper reporter on March 13, 2014.
According to the recorded audio reviewed by Fox News Digital, Gendebien voiced frustrations about the labor market in upstate New York. Among his comments, he claimed local correction officers “don’t have much self-worth,” and described North County workers as not having “practical independence and ability to think,” in contrast to his foreign farm laborers.
“Far Left Democrat Blake Gendebien even castigated hardworking North Country workers as ‘awful‘ people who ‘drank too much,’” Cox said in a statement. “This radical Far Left Democrat is a longtime major donor and groupie of leftist, gun-grabbing, Taxin’ Tedra Cobb, a supporter of Kathy Hochul, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and a public supporter of Biden’s inflation policies, which devastated NY21 families. Democrats didn’t do their homework when they selected Blake Gendebien and his catastrophic statements. Republicans will easily hold this seat in the upcoming special election, because the North Country is unquestionably Trump Country.”
In the 2014 interview, Gendebien is heard explaining why he much preferred “Hispanic labor,” generalizing local residents as having drinking problems and being involved in child custody disputes.
“If it weren’t for the Hispanic labor, I wouldn’t be doing this,” Gendebien said while describing the process for milking cows. “So there’s three Hispanic employees. They would need to be replaced by probably six local people. And it’s hard to find one person that does not have domestic abuse problems, alcohol problems, wage garnishments.”
“So when you hire these local guys, all of a sudden you’re bombarded with social program stuff like what do you call it? I don’t even – I’m not in that world, so I don’t know,” he went on. “So the court will call you. Is Brian showing up to work? What is Brian making? He has a child with this girl. He has a child with this girl. He has a court date. He needs to appear on this day. So you’ve got all of these plans and these guys have to leave for court all the time because they’re in custody battles and, what’s it called, child support battles. And they want you to lie and tell that you don’t make this money. And it’s just awful. And they show up late. They show up. They drink too much. There is just no labor force out there.”
Regarding other farm help, Gendebien said he hired a corrections officer.
Rep. Elise Stefanik listens to Sen. Tom Cotton introduce her as she is set to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on her nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations on Jan. 21, 2025. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
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“You probably know that they don’t have much self-worth in their jobs as corrections officers, so they’ll work extra time and get maybe three, four weeks’ vacation. And in that vacation they will do things, plumbing or electrician work or something, just so that they feel some self-worth,” Gendebien told the reporter. “So we gave him all hunting rights. You can hunt all 800 acres and he does the work for basically materials. But he also gets some self-worth. He gets the hunting rights, and we get a guy that we trust to do a lot of work and a good deal. He did my house, he did the barn. He did a lot of things.”
At one point, Gendebien complained that a Border Patrol agent took one of his workers, an illegal immigrant, into custody.
“So Border Patrol is up and down this road,” Gendebien relayed to the reporter, according to the audio archived by the Library of Congress. “As far as I know, these guys are illegal. I have all their paperwork, and I’m not obligated to check. Not obligated to E-Verify. So I get the same paperwork from them as I get from anyone else. And we move along. But Border Patrol will profile by skin color, crossing the road and they’ll stop. And then they will interrogate and scream at the person.”
After Border Patrol confronted one farmworker and took him into custody, Gendebien said he called up the high school’s soccer coach, a 30-year Border Patrol agent, who told him that new Border Patrol agents sent to upstate New York from places like Arizona want to make more apprehensions, causing some friction within leadership at their command.
House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik attends the inauguration of Donald Trump in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 20, 2025. (Kevin Lamarque – Pool/Getty Images)
Gendebien said the man told him, “I don’t pick up farmworkers, but we get young men and women from Arizona that are gung-ho, and all they want to do is pick people up. And he said when they bring someone in, we have to support them. We can’t say no because then they’ll want our jobs. They want our senior jobs. So they’ll quickly say, ‘You are, you know, you’re not supporting me with this illegal person.’”
One Christmas Eve, Gendebien said, he bailed out an illegal immigrant for $10,000 so that he had help on the farm over the holiday.
While talking about how his family came to live in North County, Gendebien said his father-in-law was a first-generation Cuban immigrant who was a superintendent of an apartment building in New York City, while his own parents worked in the Peace Corps in South America and got kicked out of Bolivia with other Americans “when it turned communist.” His parents bought a farm in upstate in New York, where Gendebien said they felt like outsiders at the time.
Because his family speaks Spanish, Gendebien said they have an advantage compared to other farmers who do not while training foreign workers.
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“But here I speak Spanish, Carmen speaks Spanish, mom speaks Spanish, dad speaks Spanish,” Gendebien said. “So we can explain things to do. And they’re very capable. Incredibly capable of incredibly practical knowledge and capable. A thing that the local kids around here don’t have. They don’t have a practical independence and ability to think and knowledge like these guys do. Which is too bad these other farms aren’t getting that out of them, mainly because of the language barrier.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Gendebien’s campaign, but they did not immediately respond.
Danielle Wallace is a breaking news and politics reporter at Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to [email protected] and on X: @danimwallace.
