H-2A Opens to Dairy. Advocates Say the Program Runs on Coercion.
The Trump administration opened the H-2A guestworker program to dairy farms. Farmworker advocates say it expands a system with documented trafficking, wage theft, and forced labor.
The Trump administration’s decision to open the H-2A guestworker program to dairy farms is being sold as a practical fix — a way to patch the chronic labor gap on U.S. dairies while federal immigration enforcement squeezes the undocumented workforce those same dairies have depended on for decades. That framing isn’t entirely wrong. The labor shortage on dairy operations is real and documented. But it obscures the thing farmworker advocates won’t let drop: the administration is expanding a program that has, at scale, enabled human trafficking, forced labor, sexual violence, wage theft, and housing conditions so bad they’ve drawn federal investigations. The question isn’t whether dairy needs workers. It’s what kind of program they’ll be entering.
What the policy does
On June 17, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued policy memo PM-602-0200, clarifying that dairy farms may petition for H-2A temporary agricultural workers when they can document a seasonal or temporary labor need — even if the underlying business runs year-round. That language — “even if the underlying business runs year-round” — is the unlock. Dairy was functionally excluded from H-2A before because its operations don’t stop between seasons. The new guidance says that’s no longer disqualifying.
USDA, DHS, and DOL jointly announced the change. The White House framed it as relief for an industry facing genuine shortages. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins called it “additional certainty for dairy producers.” The timing matters: it arrives as federal immigration enforcement has been cutting into the undocumented workforce that has historically staffed U.S. dairies — particularly in Vermont, New York, and the Upper Midwest — and as farms are simultaneously facing record debt loads and rising bankruptcies.
The program dairy is entering
The H-2A program now certifies more than 400,000 worker positions annually, a number that has surged 17 percent in fiscal year 2026 alone. It has become the spine of seasonal agricultural labor in the U.S., with workers recruited overwhelmingly from Mexico and Central America.
On paper, those workers have protections: a federally mandated wage floor, employer-provided housing, and transportation reimbursement. In practice, federal investigations and civil litigation have documented a consistent pattern of abuse — wage theft through illegal deductions, housing that fails basic habitability standards, retaliation against workers who complain, and in the most serious cases, labor trafficking and sexual violence.
The structural reason isn’t complicated. An H-2A worker’s visa is tied to a single employer. That employer often also controls the worker’s housing. If you report an abuse, you risk losing both your visa status and the roof over your head — in a country where you may not speak the language, have no savings, and have taken on debt to pay the recruitment fees that got you here in the first place. Farmworker Justice and other advocacy organizations have documented this pattern for years. It isn’t a bug in the H-2A system. It is the H-2A system.
Why dairy is a particular risk
Dairy is different from crop agriculture in ways that compound this vulnerability. Milking cows doesn’t follow a harvest calendar. It runs every day, twice a day, at hours that start before most people wake up. The work is physically grinding and mentally isolating — conditions that, on the best dairies, workers tolerate because the pay and stability make it worth it. On the worst, those same conditions become tools of control.
Dairy farms are also typically located in rural areas with limited transportation and few alternative employers. An H-2A worker on a Wisconsin or Vermont dairy who wants to leave a bad situation can’t walk to another job. The combination of employer-controlled housing, remote geography, and visa dependency creates the conditions that advocates describe as structural coercion — not conspiracy, just a system where the incentives align against ever complaining out loud.
New York’s dairy industry has seen this tension play out in real time. The state extended overtime and collective bargaining rights to farmworkers in 2019, but dairy workers still face gaps in those protections — and advocates have been fighting to close them while the same workers face pressure from shifting federal policy.
Cuts, then expansion
The timing of the H-2A dairy expansion is jarring in another way. In the same months that USCIS opened the door to dairy, the Department of Labor moved to cut the Adverse Effect Wage Rate — the H-2A minimum wage — by as much as $5 per hour in some states. According to analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the new wage rules could cost farmworkers $4.4 to $5.4 billion annually. Employers who provide housing can now also deduct $2 to $3 per hour from base pay — which on dairy, where housing is nearly always part of the arrangement, means the effective cut runs deeper.
Expanding access while cutting pay and weakening enforcement is a formula advocates call a race to the bottom. The administration is simultaneously telling dairy farmers: you can now recruit workers through a legal channel — and telling those workers: that channel will pay you less, house you in employer-controlled quarters, and leave you fewer tools to contest violations.
What needs to change
The H-2A program isn’t inherently unreformable. Worker advocates and labor researchers have identified specific structural changes that would reduce coercion: portability — allowing workers to change employers without losing their visa status — is the most critical. Prohibitions on employer control of housing, or meaningful alternatives to employer-provided housing, would remove another lever of dependency. And enforcement: the Wage and Hour Division has a thin presence relative to the scale of the program.
None of those reforms are on the table in the current policy moment. What is on the table is a larger program, on lower wages, in a new sector where the workers will have even less ability to leave.
The dairy labor crisis is real. Farmers who can’t find workers are not inventing a problem. But the answer to a broken labor supply chain isn’t to funnel more workers into a system that has demonstrably failed to protect them. It’s to fix the system first.
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