With deportation raids sending a chill across farm country, the Trump administration wants to make it easier for U.S. farms to hire migrant workers, angering critics across the political spectrum.
On January 1, new emergency rules took effect, allowing U.S. farms to hire more workers and pay less in wages for migrants coming in on H-2A temporary labor visas.
Speaking during a visit to Louisiana this week, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins framed the changes as a way to help farmers struggling to find U.S. workers in the absence of deeper congressional reforms.
“We are working to make very quick change as quickly as we can to basically open up the market so that these labor questions can be resolved,” Rollins said.
Last fall, as the Trump team proposed the new rules, it put a finer point on the situation: the administration’s deportation raids and border crackdown were exacerbating the farm world’s already chronic shortage of workers. Trump has carried out a massive deportation effort across the nation, with some critics warning it could impact farms where migrants were employed. They warned that a reduction in farm workers could lead to food price increases.
“The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers,” the Department of Labor warned, adding that stepped-up immigration enforcement under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” could eliminate another estimated 225,000 farm workers.