USDA Moves to Expand Migrant Farm Worker Visas Amid Labour Shortage Caused by Trump's Own Immigration Crackdown

The Trump administration is rushing to import more migrant farmworkers to fix an agricultural labour crisis that its own immigration policies created.

Federal officials have overhauled the H-2A temporary agricultural visa programme, which allows US employers to hire foreign workers for seasonal farm jobs, cutting minimum wage requirements by as much as £5.40 ($7) per hour in some states and allowing employers to deduct housing costs from workers' pay for the first time in the programme's history.

The move has drawn a lawsuit from the United Farm Workers (UFW), exposed internal dysfunction inside the Labour Department, and forced the administration into an open contradiction: a president who ran on ending illegal immigration is now accelerating the expansion of legal foreign labour precisely because he removed the undocumented workforce that American agriculture had relied on for decades.

A Labour Market the Administration Built — and Is Now Scrambling to Fix

Approximately 40% of America's estimated two million farmworkers are undocumented, according to government survey data cited by the Department of Labor itself. As ICE enforcement intensified through 2025 and the Trump administration deported more than 500,000 people in its first term back in office, farm operators began reporting the rapid loss of experienced workers.

The Labour Department acknowledged this directly in its October 2025 regulatory filing, warning of the 'near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens' and its threat to 'the stability of domestic food production and prices for US consumers.'

The filing went further. It warned that the labour shortage would intensify as the provisions of Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1), his signature domestic policy legislation, were rolled out, potentially deterring a further 225,000 farm labourers. In a striking departure from the administration's public messaging, the department stated in writing that its immigration policies were creating an agricultural crisis, not solving one.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had previously told Congress that labour shortages from increased enforcement were a 'hypothetical' issue. After the raids hit farms, she was quoted by Politico saying: 'The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way, and we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation.

What the New H-2A Rules Do — and Who Is Suing to Stop Them

The centrepiece of the administration's overhaul is a revision to the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) ,the federally mandated minimum wage for H-2A workers, designed by law to prevent foreign guest workers from undercutting the wages of American labourers. Under the previous methodology, based on USDA Farm Labor Survey data, the average H-2A wage had risen from £6.60 ($8.56) per hour in 2005 to £13.67 ($17.74) per hour by 2025.

The new interim final rule, published in the Federal Register on 2 October 2025, replaced the USDA survey basis with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey, and introduced a two-tier pay structure splitting workers into 'lower-skilled' and 'higher-skilled' categories.

It also, for the first time, permitted employers to deduct the cost of employer-provided housing from workers' wages. The Department of Labor acknowledged in its filing that the rule would save employers an estimated £1.88 billion ($2.46 billion) per year, a figure its own economists confirmed represents a direct transfer from workers to farm operators.

In practice, the wage cuts are significant. In California, the hourly minimum for H-2A workers fell from £15.38 ($19.97) to £12.66 ($16.45). In Georgia, it dropped from £12.38 ($16.08) to £9.44 ($12.27). In Washington State, pay fell from £15.24 ($19.82) to £12.73 ($16.53), according to UFW calculations based on Department of Labor data. Because employers are legally required to pay domestic workers the same rate as H-2A workers at shared worksites, the cuts also pull down wages for US-citizen farmworkers.

On 21 November 2025, the United Farm Workers of America, the UFW Foundation, and 18 individual farmworkers filed suit in the US District Court for the Eastern District of California, naming the Department of Labor, Secretary Chavez-DeRemer, and acting assistant secretary Lori Frazier Bearden as defendants.

The lawsuit alleges the rule violates the statutory requirement that H-2A wages must not 'adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States similarly employed,' and that the department violated the Administrative Procedure Act by bypassing the required public notice-and-comment period.

Internal Emails Reveal a Department Struggling to Deliver Its Own Promises

As the wage overhaul advanced, Labour Secretary Chavez-DeRemer announced a separate initiative in June 2025: the creation of a new Office of Immigration Policy, which would act as a 'one-stop shop' to streamline the H-2A application process, eliminating the need for farmers to navigate three separate federal agencies. 'We're going to see that change come across fairly rapidly, because that's the problem, and they want a solution, and they wanted it yesterday,' she told The Packer in June 2025.

Eight months later, internal emails obtained by Investigate Midwest through a public records request show the office has largely failed to deliver. In an email thread titled 'Single Electronic H-2A Visa Portal System,' the head of the new office at the time wrote: 'The larger issue is that DOL does not control or have legal authorities to access DHS and DOS systems/data (which are far more protected than DOL) and the DOGE team found that out pretty quickly.'

The emails also reveal that the office's industry contacts identified the 'real hangups' in the H-2A process as sitting with the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, both outside the Labour Department's jurisdiction. In one telling exchange, Jamie Fussel, director of labour relations at the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, contacted the new office after State Department visa approvals in New Jersey held up more than 200 H-2A blueberry pickers.

'There's been a lot of crop loss at this point because the berries remained on the bush and went bad,' Fussel wrote. Brian Pasternak, then head of the new office, replied: 'I know ... that you know ... our authority here is a bit limited.'

In January 2026, the veteran civil servant Pasternak was replaced as the office's head by Brian Kennedy, a former senior adviser to the director of ICE and previously policy director for the House Committee on Homeland Security.

The Labour Department told Investigate Midwest the office was 'already delivering results' but did not confirm whether the single portal had been built or when it would be operational. The State Department, in a statement, said the consulate processes H-2A visas in three days or less 'in the majority of cases.' DHS declined to comment.

An administration that promised to put American workers first has built a policy where those workers earn less, the farms that employ them go bankrupt at record rates, and the only growth sector in the agricultural labour market is the foreign guest worker programme it once threatened to abolish.