California Is Giving Free Solar Panels to Illegal Aliens

California is spending millions of dollars on a program that provides free solar panels, refrigerators, and windows to “low-income” farmworkers, including illegal immigrants.

The initiative, called the Farmworker Housing Component of the Low-Income Weatherization Program, is part of California’s sprawling, multibillion-dollar “cap-and-trade” system, which taxes carbon producers and redistributes approximately $3 billion per year to energy programs and left-wing social causes—all under the banner of fighting “climate change.”

Since 2019, California’s government has earmarked $49 million for the farmworker program, which operates through an opaque web that includes a government agency, nonprofit providers, and private contractors. California’s Department of Community Services and Development selected La Cooperativa Campesina de California, a nonprofit that serves farmworkers, to administer the program. La Cooperativa, in turn, has partnered with a for-profit, “minority owned” company, MAROMA Energy Services, to help run the program. Contractors do the work of installing solar panels and other appliances.

These organizations have heavily advertised the program to California’s nearly 900,000 agricultural workers, half to three-quarters of whom are illegal immigrants. In its official documentation, California’s Department of Community Services and Development acknowledges that non-citizens are eligible for the program and that they even accept identification from foreign governments.

In a Spanish-language radio broadcast, Natalie Velores, a program manager for MAROMA, confirmed that participants do not need “legal status” in the United States and can use a matrìcula consular, a common form of identification that the Mexican consulate provides to migrants who have crossed the border, to apply.

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Beneficiaries work hard to loop laborers into the system. A contractor for John Harrison Contracting—a California-based “Minority Business Enterprise” and Farmworker Housing Component subcontractor—would drive “hundreds of miles a day” across Southern California, trying to persuade farmworkers to sign up for the program, Inside Climate News previously reported. One challenge was to convince workers that the program was not a scam. The other challenge, after the Trump administration increased ICE raids, was finding potential clients, many of whom “stopped showing up to job sites.”

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