It’s been nearly two years since I started reporting on abuses of foreign farmworkers in Georgia. Some of the workers I tracked down had come to the U.S. legally through the H-2A visa program and were harmed and exploited by labor contractors — despite protections that were supposed to be guaranteed by the federal government.
During those two years, I’ve thought a lot about how the government’s obligation to keep foreign workers safe has collided with another priority: to help U.S. farmers stay in business.
Farmers have long pushed for fewer H-2A regulations. That’s in part because of the skyrocketing costs of the program, which sets minimum hourly wages and requires that farmers pay for workers’ housing and transportation. As one Georgia farmer wrote last year in a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor, “It has felt like every policy that pertained to the H2A program was made focusing solely on the benefit of the migrant worker.”
All of that brings to mind a freezing cold weekend in January 2025, early on in my reporting, when I showed up at a farmers’ conference in Savannah, Georgia. What the farmers sought at that gathering — and what happened in the months that followed — exemplifies the tension between keeping workers safe and keeping farms solvent.
After I made my way through a brightly lit convention hall — past the tractor salesman’s stall, the labor regulator’s booth, and tables of peach preserves and dried blueberries — I arrived in a room full of farmers eager to know what President Donald Trump’s second term would mean for an industry dependent on foreign labor and facing a rising number of bankruptcies.
A small group of lawyers and lobbyists gave several presentations to the farmers. One of them vowed that Trump could “profoundly” change the program, in part by making it easier to hire H-2A workers and pay them less. And if the lobbyists’ plans were successful, farmers would save even more money by facing fewer labor protections for workers.
“Everything is on the table,” said Braden Boucek, an attorney who has represented the farm industry in challenges to the H-2A program’s requirements.
In the year to come, Trump’s immigration policies would drastically reduce the number of immigrants crossing the border and accelerate deportations of people without legal status living in the country. But one important pathway — the H-2A visa program — would remain wide open. And the administration, under pressure from the farm industry, would be quick to embrace the types of changes the lobbyists told the farmers about on that frigid January weekend.
To get the financial relief that farmers were seeking, three key things had to change with the H-2A program, the lawyers and lobbyists told the farmers at the conference.
The first was to overturn parts of a rule enacted by the Biden administration. The rule granted workers the right to pursue certain union protections, including ones that would shield them from unfair treatment by their employers. Farmers opposed the rule because they felt it would make it harder to run their businesses.
At the conference, I listened as former U.S. Labor Department assistant secretary Leon Sequeira told farmers how several ongoing lawsuits could help “invalidate” parts of the rule. The previous June, a Georgia blueberry farm, along with 17 states, had sued the administration, alleging that the rule went beyond what Congress allowed. That lawsuit, along with two others, had led to injunctions that temporarily halted part of the rule.
Sequeira, who is a lawyer in one of the three cases, later told me that the legal effort “isn’t about denying more protection for workers.” Rather, it’s intended to protect farmers from overreach by the U.S. Labor Department.
“People can certainly differ on whether or not workers should receive more protection under the law,” he told me. “But as multiple courts have said, that is a decision for Congress to make in passing laws, not the agency.”
Five months after Trump took office, his administration suspended enforcement of President Joe Biden’s rule. It then proposed to rescind parts of it. That proposal is pending.
The second change was to slow or stop wage increases for H-2A workers that had soared during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. After months of industry pressure, the Trump administration last year reduced the hourly pay rate, which it expects will save farmers more than $2 billion a year. Those savings are projected to cost H-2A workers up to 32% of their annual wages, according to the think tank the Economic Policy Institute.
The last thing I heard at the conference was an ambitious legal strategy to advance the interests of farmers even further.
One of the lawyers, Ann Margaret Pointer, explained that three recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings had together diminished the powers of the federal government. One decision limits the ability of federal agencies to create new regulations. Another makes it harder for agencies to fine companies that violate some federal laws. And a third makes it easier for employers to challenge federal regulations that had been on the books for many years.
Pointer said those decisions could pave the way for future lawsuits challenging the visa program — and could strengthen the odds of farmers winning those lawsuits.
All three of those efforts were vital, she explained to the farmers at the conference, to “prevent some of the costs to comply with the H-2A program from falling on your shoulders.”
I recently reached out to the lawyers and lobbyists who spoke at that conference to ask how they felt about their progress on the plan they’d described.
Boucek, who is now a U.S. attorney in Tennessee, declined to comment for this story.
Pointer and Sequeira both said that the Trump administration’s initial changes to the program improved the way it works for farmers. Sequeira also said that the changes are just the beginning of the wish list for the agriculture industry.
Pointer and Sequeira said the larger changes the industry is seeking to the H-2A program will require action from Congress. They pointed to a recently filed bill that proposes to limit wage hikes, cut red tape for farmers and allow additional sectors of the farming industry to participate in H-2A. (Labor and immigrant advocacy organizations oppose the bill, saying it would harm farmworkers and would amount to executive overreach.)
Until Congress changes the statute, Sequeira said, the Labor Department “can only fiddle around the edges.”