It’s early March in eastern Pennsylvania, a time when George Brittenburg describes work on the farm as akin to “trying to wake up a big giant.” Brittenburg grows organic vegetables and raises livestock across 200 acres and he needs help to shake off the winter and get things moving again. Like many farmers, in past years, he struggled to find people to do that.
So, in 2016, he started bringing in help through the federal government’s farm guestworker program, called H-2A. He’s not alone: In the past decade, the number of H-2A workers hired by American farmers has tripled. Many see it as the best pathway to hire immigrant workers legally, but workers can also face exploitation, since their legal status, housing, and often transportation are all linked to their employers.
In 2023, Brittenburg took time out of the growing season and invested resources into applying for a new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant opportunity he thought might help even further. Biden’s USDA pitched the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Program (FLSP) as a pilot project to improve conditions for workers while easing the strain some farmers experience paying and housing guestworkers. Brittenburg was looking forward to financial assistance that would allow him to bring in additional help and offer employees benefits like paid sick days. Now, grant funding has been paused. With no clear answers as to when that might change, he’s not sure what to do.
“At this point, I feel pretty uncertain about the future and how to forecast. . . . For our farm and for us, it is a big deal.”
Brittenburg and other grantees told Civil Eats that since Trump took office, the program has been frozen. They received emails from their contacts at the USDA saying office hours were canceled until further notice. They have asked questions about whether the program will be canceled and say they have not been given clear answers as to whether or when the funding might resume. Some have submitted requests for reimbursements and have not been paid. Others are reluctant to spend the money because they’re unsure if they’ll be paid back.
“At this point, I feel pretty uncertain about the future and how to forecast, and I don’t really want to be focused on that while I’m getting ready to plant,” Brittenburg said. “I know a lot of people are going through a lot right now and this isn’t the biggest deal, but for our farm and for us, it is a big deal.”
At the same time, some farmers have encountered challenges bringing their workers in because of ripple effects from the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID had been supporting the recruitment of guestworkers from countries in northern Central America and partnered with the USDA to help farmers bring in workers.
USAID and the H-2A Worker Pool
While most agricultural guestworkers come from Mexico, USAID began working to expand recruitment from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in 2019, during President Trump’s first term, according to a former USAID official, who agreed to speak to Civil Eats as long as he could remain anonymous.
But it didn’t pick up steam until the Biden administration made it a priority, he said. At an event in September 2022, USAID Administrator Samantha Power said the agency’s involvement was meant to meet the labor needs of American farmers, improve labor protections for workers coming to the U.S., and “alleviate the conditions that may spur someone to resort to dangerous, irregular migration.”
A screenshot of a USAID fact sheet summarizing the work they were doing to improve H-2A and H-2B recruitment in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
To that end, USAID provided funding and support to those Central American governments to try to make them the go-to resource for American farmers and provide the service at no cost. USAID partnered with the USDA to require some farmers, like those in the FLSP program, to begin recruiting from those countries as one way to boost the effort. However, according to a former USAID official, who agreed to speak to Civil Eats as long as they could remain anonymous, the goal was much more broad: To create a new worker pipeline for all farmers.
“What USAID was really focused on was how to have the labor ministries of these countries be able to facilitate that recruitment,” explained Joe Martinez, the CEO of Cierto Global, a farm labor contractor. Martinez co-founded Cierto to improve practices within H-2 program recruitment, which notoriously can involve unscrupulous actors and little oversight, and worked closely with USAID and individuals on the ground in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala who were involved in these projects.
In February, President Trump slashed staff at USAID and moved what was left of the agency into the Department of State. He said his administration would eliminate 90 percent of USAID’s foreign contracts.
Multiple sources with close knowledge of the programs said that included guestworker recruitment contracts in those three countries, but Civil Eats was unable to verify whether all USAID contracts for H-2 recruitment have been canceled. A spokesperson at the Department of State referred Civil Eats to the USDA. The USDA did not respond to emailed questions.
However, the former USAID official and Martinez both said that if the funding to those ministries is gone, it could lead to fewer guestworkers coming in from those countries to work on American farms, more individuals attempting to enter the U.S. illegally to find work, and recruiters who use illegal and unsafe practices stepping in to fill the gap. As to improving safe, efficient recruitment from those countries, “What ends up happening is you pretty much cut everyone off at their knees and there’s no way to facilitate this work,” Martinez said.
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