President Donald Trump will allow farmers to help some undocumented migrant workers avoid deportation under new rules that risk reigniting another MAGA showdown over immigration.
Months after tensions between Elon Musk and the president’s MAGA base spilled out over highly skilled foreigners in U.S. tech firms, a new “work program” could soon make it easier for some agricultural migrant workers to stay in the country.
Under the policy, farmers will be able to vouch for immigrants on their farms, even if they entered the country illegally, but the priority will remain on weeding out dangerous and violent criminals.
The H-2A visa program, which generally allows U.S. employers to give foreign nationals a temporary agricultural job by filing a petition on their behalf, will also be streamlined, according to Trump administration officials.
The president hinted at the shift during a speech last week in Iowa, which was also attended by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
“If a farmer’s willing to vouch for these people, in some way, Kristi, I think we’re going to have to just say that’s going to be good, right?” he said.
Trump added to his comments during a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, telling reporters: “We are doing a work program” in order to “give the farmers the protection they need.”
While Trump insists the changes will not amount to an amnesty, special protections of any sort could prove contentious for parts of Trump’s MAGA base, who want to see “mass deportations with zero exceptions” across the board.
Last week, right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer accused Rollins of not supporting Trump’s America First agenda after the president acknowledged the Agriculture Secretary had been a driving force in convincing him to give farmers greater protections.
And this week, conservative activist Charlie Kirk weighed in, telling “the elite class” who had been in Trump’s ear: “If you want to break our coalition, go and push amnesty.”
Asked to explain the latest policy, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Daily Beast: “President Trump remains committed to carrying out the largest mass deportation operation in history by removing dangerous, violent criminal illegal aliens from American communities and targeting the sanctuary cities that provide safe harbor to criminal illegals.”
The push to protect farmers highlights a longstanding challenge with Trump’s mass deportation plan: that the majority of undocumented immigrants in America are not violent criminals—contrary to his election rhetoric—but rather, people living and working in industries such as agriculture, construction, and hospitality.
The Department of Agriculture, for instance, estimates that 40 percent of farm workers in the U.S. lacked legal status, including some people who have been contributing to society for years.
Some Republican senators have raised concerns about the prospect of businesses shuttering or supply chains being severely disrupted.
In central California, migrant farm workers have also been skipping shifts or staying off the job entirely for fear of being arrested by ICE agents and deported from the country.
Iowa Farmers Union president Aaron Heley Lehman said migrants were a valued part of the workforce, and the sector needed some “common sense reform” and consistency, rather than political point-scoring and “twists and turns.”
“The fear that some people in our communities are feeling doesn’t make for a better workforce,” he told the Daily Beast.
“There’s room for a solution that will help our farms, help our communities, and be fair to workers,” said Lehman, “but it’s really hard to find that space at the moment.”
Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow and director at the Migration Policy Institute, also hit out at the administration’s constant flip-flopping and questioned how additional protections for farmers would align with Trump’s deportation targets.
“He wants to have 1 million people a year deported,” he said.
“They are doing everything they can to go off to the lowest hanging fruit—but even then, it’s proving difficult to get to a million a year.”
Immigration policy was also a pressure point for the president earlier this year—only then it was over H-1B visas, which are heavily relied on in industries such as Elon Musk’s tech sector.
At the time, one-time White House strategist Steve Bannon warned Musk that MAGA diehards were going to “rip your face off” unless the Tesla boss stopped pushing the visas, which he said were taking tech industry jobs away from Americans.
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