SerpApi.Org
Conservatives are savaging Republican-led legislation as a “betrayal” of the party’s immigration agenda, and mobilizing President Donald Trump’s base to tank a yearslong effort aimed at helping farmers.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, and the House Freedom Caucus’ bloc of hard-right lawmakers are piling on against the Securing Agriculture's Workforce Act, a bill introduced by veteran House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson.
Thompson, a nine-term Pennsylvania Republican, is proposing a path to temporary legal status for some farmworkers who entered the country illegally — language that has won support from industry groups and dozens of House Republican cosponsors. But it has infuriated immigration hawks who characterize the legislation as stabbing “Trump’s deportation promise in the back.”
The dispute highlights a rift in the GOP’s economic vision: Republicans who see foreign laborers as a crucial way to stabilize a short-staffed agriculture workforce and the cost of food are butting against hardliners who have championed Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
“I think the agricultural lobby is very powerful, but it's a poor excuse to overturn what should be our nation's immigration policy,” said Randy Westlund, the Republican mayor of Post Falls, Idaho. “It's a betrayal of the base of Republican voters who have no interest in amnesty whatsoever.”
“We voted for Trump specifically to solve the immigration problem, to get mass deportations, that's what was promised,” said Westlund, whose city became the first in Idaho to join a federal immigration enforcement program. “To see something going against that is going against the MAGA agenda.”
For now, Trump and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whose panel has jurisdiction over the bill, are noncommittal on Thompson’s legislation.
“We're talking with all our conference on what's best on immigration policy,” Jordan told POLITICO on Tuesday. “We're talking to all sides.”
Jordan said Thompson’s proposals would not be included in a sweeping border security package that Republicans advanced through the Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Trump also demurred when asked about the bill.
“I don't know about it,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “I'll take a look at it.”
Plenty of conservatives have looked at it, and say they hate it.
“These Republicans just stabbed Trump’s deportation promise in the back with an amnesty farm bill,” Bovino said on X. “They’re only gonna get the message one way. Vote every single one of them out in a massive wave, and replace them with real immigration hawks.”
“No amnesty!” DeSantis thundered in his own social media post. “Amnesty is NOT what people voted for in 2024!”
Thompson says his legislation is intended to start addressing a thorny mix of policy challenges at the heart of the country’s immigration and agriculture systems and rejects claims that his bill would grant “amnesty” to undocumented migrants.
“There's a saying that's been valid around here for over 100 years — that ignorance is bliss,” Thompson said on Tuesday. “And what it is, is a few ignorant, and I assume illiterate, influencers that have somehow claimed that a temporary non-immigrant visa is amnesty.”
U.S. farming and ranching operations often turn to undocumented migrants in the absence of American workers willing to do labor like pick produce and milk cows. Labor shortages exacerbated byTrump-era immigration policies have also prompted the dairy industry and representatives of other shortstaffed agriculture sectors to pressure Congress to expand their ability to recruit legal foreign workers.
Thompson’s bill would expand the H-2A farm guest worker program in ways that major industry players in the farm economy have lobbied for, including a provision that would allow year-round agricultural operations such as dairy farms to qualify for H-2A workers.
“[The bill] does acknowledge that dairy farmers have never had a workable ag-labor visa program, and it provides a short-term mechanism that will avoid massive disruptions to its workforce, which would in turn devastate family farms, create supply chain disruptions, and increase consumer costs,” said Gregg Doud, president and CEO of the National Milk Producers Federation, in a statement.
Thompson argues his proposals are based on the need to overhaul what he has called a “broken” program for migrant labor. He has said that Trump’s work to secure the southern U.S. border has created an opportunity to help the agriculture industry find able workers when U.S. citizens won’t do the job.
Those wonky distinctions have not extinguished a growing political firestorm.
NumbersUSA, a prominent group that works to reduce both legal and illegal immigration, previously sent notices to hundreds of lawmakers urging them to oppose the bill. The nearly 50 Republicans who have co-sponsored Thompson’s bill have also been besieged by other conservatives for supporting the measure.
Some farm-state Republicans likely supported the bill because they don’t understand how dramatically the political climate around immigration has changed in the Trump era, said Anthony Constantini, policy director at Bull Moose Project, a Washington-based conservative think tank that advocates for “America-First results.”
“I think a lot of people are signing onto this not fully realizing how much the game has changed and how much that is no longer going to be something that is acceptable going forward,” Constantini said.
Changes to the H-2A program would not have garnered this much attention from the right a decade ago, he said. Now, Constantini said he would be “gobsmacked and shell-shocked” if the bill advanced out of the House.
“Lloyd Smucker is one of the people who is co-sponsoring that bill. That is a ruby red, ultra-pro-Trump district,” Constantini said. “The frustration that a lot of New Right people have is that there's no business of somebody from a district like that supporting this.”
Smucker, a Pennsylvania Republican, told POLITICO that “our farmers want to do things correctly, but they desperately need workers.”
“We want to ensure the food supply is solid, and so I think we need the workers, and we should ensure that we have workers available,” Smucker said. “It was important to secure the border first, but then we need to be sure that we have immigration policies that help to address the need that we have for workers.”
Agriculture industry leaders are still rallying behind Thompson’s bill amid the criticism.
John Hollay, president and CEO of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, said in a statement that the proposal “follows through on President Trump’s promise from last Spring to protect American agriculture and seeks to codify a system that will ensure all of agriculture has access to a legal workforce when Americans won’t do the job.”
The ultimate fate of Thompson’s bill is still uncertain.
“We understand how important agriculture is, and our food supply, we understand all that, but we're not going to be doing that on [the border security] bill today,” Jordan said Tuesday.
