Arkansas Democratic Senate nominee Hallie Shoffner employed three illegal immigrants at the family farming company she led, a former senior employee told the Washington Free Beacon, contradicting Shoffner's claims as she campaigns against Republican incumbent Tom Cotton.
The former employee—who worked for Shoffner for years at her family research farm, SFR Seed, and spoke on background as his current employer did not authorize him to discuss the matter—said the candidate employed one of the illegal immigrants in a full-time role and the other two in part-time roles. Shoffner used the names and social security numbers of the workers' children on their tax forms, according to the former employee.
"Me and her talked about the full-time one quite a bit, being a risk to us. She referred to him as having a 'questionable social security number,'" the former employee told the Free Beacon. "But I realized what was going on when I had to pass out W2s in the spring, and his W2 I know had his son's name on it, so I'm gonna say they were using his son's social security number. The part-time [workers], their W2s had their daughters."
"Her and her parents always talked about them not being legal," the former employee continued. "And so I figured out how they were getting W2s."
The arrangement reflects remarks Shoffner has made about the family farm on the campaign trail.
"I grew up in an immigrant community because the farm workers for all the farms, um, were generally from Mexico and Honduras," Shoffner said in a January interview with the District 3 Podcast. "Um, many of them were undocumented, but their children, uh, were U.S. citizens or DREAMers." Months later, during another podcast interview, Shoffner said "every farmer" will tell you "we did or still do" employ illegal aliens. "And, honestly, we'd trade five Americans for just one of them because of how hard they work," she added.
But Shoffner has since walked back those remarks. Asked by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette whether she had employed illegal aliens, Shoffner said she "only hired immigrants through the federal H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers Program," which allows farmers to bring foreign nationals to the United States for seasonal work, and "went through the added expense and trouble to make sure her hires were legal."
"That's a lie," the former employee said.
Shoffner's campaign demanded "credible evidence" that the employees in question were illegal, including "documentation that the individuals were not authorized to work in the United States," and said it would "consult with counsel accordingly."
Shoffner's ancestors first started a farm in Jackson County, located about 90 miles northeast of Little Rock, in the 1860s. In addition to farming crops like soybean and corn, Shoffner's parents started SFR Seed, a research farm that produced bespoke soybean and rice seeds for agricultural companies, in 1988.
Shoffner has placed that farming background at the center of her campaign, saying she's been "a rice and soybean farmer" for her "whole life." Shoffner, however, left the family farm to spend years working as a left-wing activist for groups like Seis Puentes, an Arkansas nonprofit that helps illegal immigrants navigate U.S. government systems and "engage them in the process," the Free Beacon reported. She returned to the farm in 2016 and began publishing blogs on the website FarmHerHallie.com advocating for "big climate action." She served as SFR Seed's CEO, meanwhile, from 2019 to 2024.
Shoffner shut down both the broader family farm and SFR Seed in 2025, saying "rising costs, bad markets, [and] new tariffs" made it too expensive to operate. Shoffner's most recent personal financial disclosure, however, shows that she holds up to $3.1 million in assets—including up to $1,547,000 in individual stocks and up to $1.1 million in business entities—and holds a position in a family trust. And while Shoffner's family still owns the land that hosted its farm, Shoffner does not live there, instead residing in a nationally recognized historic home in Little Rock, a roughly 90-minute drive from the farm.
Shoffner's former employee said that, contrary to Shoffner's claims, SFR Seed was "making around a 12 percent profit" when he left the company, a margin that it owed to its specialty seeds, which yielded a "premium per bushel" that "was almost double the amount of what a regular farmer was getting per bushel." He took issue with Shoffner characterizing her operation "in a way that it's like everybody else's farming operation."
"She was only there two days on the farm out of the seven days of the week," the former employee told the Free Beacon. "She lived in Little Rock, and Monday and Tuesday she'd drive up. … Sometimes during the harvest she'd stay longer, but most of the time, she's just there two days a week."
