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Wisconsin attorney pleased with Florida USDA injunction

The lead attorney representing a dozen farmers in nine Midwestern states suing the USDA says a Florida judge’s actions were correct and help his clients.  Daniel Lennington with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty tells Brownfield a Florida case brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of farmer Scott Wynn now has an injunction preventing the Biden administration from forgiving farm loans for Black and other farmers of color. “As far as we’re concerned in our case, the more injunctions mean the more likely the federal program will not be able to go forward and we’re going to have to talk about a remedy, that is, what do we do with this four billion dollars and what do we do with loan forgiveness? Do we extend it to all farmers or not?”

Lennington says there are multiple court cases working to stop the race-biased forgiveness of USDA loans. “The first case is Miller vs. Vilsack. That’s filed in Texas. There’s our case in Wisconsin. There’s a case called Carpenter which is a female rancher from Wyoming. There’s a case in Tennessee called Hallman. There’s a case in southern Illinois called Kent, and there’s another case in Texas called McKinney.” Lennington tells Brownfield he is expecting another lawsuit to be filed soon in Minnesota.

USDA had planned to start issuing loan forgiveness plus 20% of the borrowed amount back to selected farmers this month with funds from President Biden’s American Rescue Act (section 1005.)