Thompson’s Farm Labor Bill Faces Its First Gatekeeper: Jim Jordan

House Ag chairman’s sweeping H-2A overhaul has 400-plus farm groups behind it — but an undecided Judiciary chairman, a wary White House and Stephen Miller’s shadow stand between the bill and a markup

House Ag Committee Chairman GT Thompson (R-Pa.) has assembled the broadest coalition behind an agricultural labor bill in a generation. What he does not yet have is the one signature that matters most right now: House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) agreement to even take the measure up.

Thompson’s Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act (SAWA), unveiled June 30, would deliver the first major statutory overhaul of the H-2A guestworker program in nearly four decades. The bill scraps the program’s seasonality requirement — the single biggest barrier for dairy and year-round livestock operations — allowing workers to stay up to 350 days annually with a single employer. It expands H-2A eligibility to forestry, aquaculture, equine operations, livestock harvesting and controlled-environment agriculture; codifies the Labor Department’s revised Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) methodology while capping annual wage-rate increases at 3.25%; creates a single online application portal spanning the Labor, Homeland Security and State departments; and shifts authority to define “agricultural labor” from the Labor secretary to the Agriculture secretary.

The politically combustible piece is the legalization mechanism. Unauthorized workers who can show at least 180 days of agricultural employment over the past two years could apply — with background checks and interviews, processed at border locations — for legal H-2A status. Thompson’s team stresses the bill contains no pathway to citizenship, only conversion to temporary visa status. That distinction is the entire ballgame in the House GOP conference, where the word “amnesty” kills bills.

The Jordan question. Because SAWA is immigration legislation, it falls squarely within House Judiciary’s jurisdiction, not Thompson’s Agriculture Committee. Jordan has said he is undecided on whether to take up the legislation — a stance that should worry the bill’s backers less than an outright “no,” but is hardly the green light 400-plus farm organizations were hoping for. Thompson says he has been in discussions with Jordan for several months and argues the bill should appeal to the chairman because it “enshrines into law” many of President Trump’s executive actions on ag labor, including the AEWR relief that Thompson says cut grower payroll costs by more than $2 billion.

Perspective: Jordan’s indecision is rational politics. He built his brand as an immigration hardliner, and his committee includes some of the loudest “no amnesty, period” voices in Congress — notably Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas), who has been campaigning openly against the bill’s legalization title, and Freedom Caucus members who pledged this spring to reject any measure conferring legal status on unauthorized immigrants. A markup would force Jordan’s members to cast recorded votes on a status-adjustment provision in an election year. Jordan will not schedule that fight unless he is confident the White House has his back — which brings us to the second gatekeeper.
 

The White House: studied silence. The administration has taken no formal position on SAWA. A White House spokesperson has said only that officials “do not get ahead of the president on pending legislation.” The record of the past year is a study in mixed signals. President Trump has repeatedly voiced sympathy for farmers losing workers to enforcement — at one point floating a “temporary pass” for agriculture and hospitality workers and a touchback scheme letting undocumented farmworkers leave and return legally with employer sponsorship. But USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins drew the hardest of lines last July: “no amnesty under any circumstances” for farmworkers lacking legal status, a “100% American workforce” as the goal, and automation — not legalization — as the answer to labor shortages.

Notably, SAWA’s architecture appears designed to thread exactly this needle: its border-processing requirement mimics Trump’s own touchback concept, and its H-2A streamlining codifies the administration’s regulatory actions. Some say Thompson is betting the president’s practical instincts on farm labor will outweigh the ideological objections of his staff.

Will Stephen Miller oppose it? Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of the administration’s mass-deportation campaign, has not publicly weighed in on the Thompson bill. But his track record leaves little mystery about his instincts. Miller spent Trump’s first term smothering every legalization proposal that reached the West Wing, was widely credited with the June 2025 reversal that resumed worksite enforcement at farms days after Trump suggested sparing them, and has ordered “full steam ahead” on deportations. Any provision that converts unauthorized workers to legal status — however temporary, however hedged — is precisely the kind of measure Miller has made a career of blocking, on the theory that it rewards illegal entry and creates a magnet for more.

The realistic expectation, then, is that Miller will oppose the legalization title, and the open question is whether he can live with the rest. A plausible landing zone — one some Judiciary Republicans may quietly prefer — is a stripped-down SAWA that keeps the H-2A modernization (year-round eligibility, wage caps, single portal) while jettisoning or drastically narrowing the status-adjustment waiver. Whether the farm coalition would accept that trade is doubtful: dairy and specialty crop groups view legalizing the existing experienced workforce, not just future guestworker flows, as the core of the problem, since an estimated 40% or more of current farmworkers lack legal status.

Bottom line: Thompson has the votes to introduce, the groups to lobby and a credible “border is secure, now fix the workforce” argument that even the U.S. Chamber is echoing. But the bill’s path runs through two men who have never met a legalization provision they liked. Sources say to watch for three tells in the coming weeks: whether Jordan agrees to so much as a hearing before the August recess; whether Trump himself — not a spokesperson — says anything favorable when farm-state allies press him; and whether Miller’s allies begin briefing against the bill as “amnesty” in conservative media, the traditional kill signal. Even if SAWA clears the House, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-Iowa) warning looms over the whole enterprise: on immigration, “you never get even 60 votes” in the Senate.
 

Key Farm Labor Issues at a Glance

The problems behind the farm labor crisis, how SAWA would address them, and the political outlook