The United Farm Workers — along with multiple U.S. citizen farmworkers — sued the Trump administration on Friday over a new rule that substantially lowers pay for seasonal guest-workers in agriculture.
The union said the Labor Department rule, which lowers pay for the H-2A agricultural visa program by about $5 to $7 an hour, “dramatically undercuts” wages for U.S. farmworkers in violation of federal immigration law.
“Farmworkers are struggling to support their families. Many of them are U.S. citizens and legal residents,” Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers union, said in a phone interview. “If there is really a shortage, wages need to go up, not down. That’s what a normal labor market would do.”
The Trump administration implemented the rule on Oct. 2, saying it would reduce farmers’ labor costs by $24 billion over the next 10 years — offering the agriculture industry cheaper foreign labor as it reels from the impact of Trump’s trade wars and has raised alarms about immigration raids that have targeted some farms.
The United Farm Workers, which filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, is seeking to reverse the pay cuts, which it alleges violate laws that prevent the guest-worker program from driving down pay for U.S. farmworkers.
The pay cuts apply to U.S. citizen farmworkers who share worksites with migrant H-2A workers, but the union says they will also lower wages across the industry and related work and, paradoxically, drive up incentives to rely on the H-2A program. The guest-worker program will grow by more than 120,000 workers by 2034 under the new pay model, according to Trump administration estimates.
Labor advocates have criticized the program for exposing migrant laborers who are tied to a single employer to labor abuses, including wage theft and unsafe working conditions.
The White House and Labor Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration said in a filing in the Federal Register in October that the rule is a response to “ample data showing immediate dangers to the American food supply” caused by its own immigration policies, which have effectively sealed off the southern border.
The union alleges that the Trump administration also violated the law by implementing the rule without a comment period before it took effect.
In 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the Labor Department moved to implement a wage freeze for migrant H-2A farmworkers. But a federal court blocked the rule, in response to a United Farm Workers lawsuit, saying it would drive down wages for American farmworkers as well.
The agriculture industry has increasingly turned to the H-2A program to source workers, mainly from Mexico, in recent years. The Labor Department certified about 391,000 positions in fiscal year 2024. Farmers in California, Florida, Georgia, Washington and North Carolina are among the top users of the program, according to USDA data.
Under the new Labor Department rule, pay for agricultural guest-workers in California will fall from $19.97 to $16.45 an hour, according to the United Farm Workers. In Georgia, wages will drop from $16.08 to $12.27 an hour, and in Washington, pay will drop from $19.82 to $16.53 an hour.
Crisanto Serrano, a plaintiff on the lawsuit and a U.S. citizen, expects his pay on the hops farm where he works in Washington’s Yakima Valley to fall by more than $3 an hour next year because of the new rule.
“I do not like that farmworkers who are already living in the United States are having their wages downgraded,” said Serrano in Spanish. He has worked on farms in the United States for more than 40 years and became a U.S. citizen in the early 1990s. “Our rent, food and electricity bills are sky-high and go up every year. I worry about what will happen to us.”
A significant share of U.S. crop workers are undocumented immigrants. In 2021 and 2022, the most recent period for which survey data is available, 38 percent were U.S. citizens and 58 percent were authorized to work in the United States, according to a Labor Department report.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said earlier this year that the U.S. farm workforce will become “100 percent American” as a result of mass deportations. But the Labor Department noted in its reasoning for lowering barriers to the H-2A program in October that “qualified and eligible U.S. workers will not make themselves available in sufficient numbers,” to fill open agricultural jobs.
UFW president Romero balks at the idea that there is no available agricultural workforce in the United States.
“Yes, we have undocumented workers in agriculture, but we have a large percentage of workers that are U.S. citizens or legal residents,” said Romero. “And we are displacing U.S. citizens to bring in H-2A workers. It just doesn’t make sense.”
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