Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2025

A farmworker who moves from the new status to a green card would pay a $1,000 penalty fee on top of the normal processing fee. The fee can be paid in installments, or waived if they cannot afford it.

Congress would be cleared to spend up to $2.7 billion a year on rent aid in USDA-financed apartments through 2035. The money still has to be approved in yearly spending bills.

If the hiring check wrongly says you cannot work and you lose your job, you can appeal. When the mistake was purely the government's, it would have to pay the wages you lost.

Workers granted the new farm status would count as lawfully present. Even so, the bill blocks them from federal need-based benefits and from the tax credit that lowers health plan premiums.

Farms hiring guest workers would have to keep a written heat illness plan. It must cover training, water, shade, breaks, and what to do in an emergency, and be posted where workers can read it.

A farm that brings in guest workers would have to offer U.S. workers in the same job the same pay, benefits, and conditions. It also could not put extra rules on them that guest workers do not face.

A six-year test program would let up to 10,000 guest workers move between registered farms without a new petition each time. A worker who does not find a new job within 60 days would have to leave the country.

A federal wage floor sets the lowest pay on farms that hire guest workers, and it covers U.S. workers in the same jobs. From 2027 through 2035 it could not rise more than 3.25% or fall more than 1.5% in a year. It would be frozen for 2026.

The farm and its agents could not take money from a worker for any part of the visa process. That includes lawyer fees and recruiting costs. Workers can still be asked to pay their own passport fees.

A worker who appears to qualify could not be jailed or removed while the case is open. Cases already in immigration court would be dropped. An old removal order could be wiped out once the status is granted.

What a worker puts on the form could not be used to deport them. It could not be sent to ICE or Border Patrol. It can still be shared in fraud, national security, or felony cases. A leak carries a $10,000 fine.

Anyone could open an account to see each time their number is run for a job. You could freeze your own number against further use, and parents could freeze a child's number under a pilot program.

Every farm employer would have to run new hires through a federal identity and work-permission check. Big farms start about six months after sign-ups close and the smallest start 15 months after.

A worker turned down for the new status could ask the agency to take another look. A judge could only review that denial as part of a deportation case, not in a lawsuit of its own.

Lying on an application for the new farm status or the green card that follows, or supplying a fake document for one, would be a federal crime. It carries a fine and up to five years in prison.

An employer with a pattern of hiring people it knows cannot work legally could be fined $5,000 per worker and jailed up to 18 months. Repeat offenders can also be shut out of federal contracts and grants.

Using a fake Social Security number to get hired is a crime today. Workers who win the new farm status could not be charged for doing that before they got it.

A farm that hands over work records to help a worker apply could not have those records used against it for having hired that worker illegally. The shield drops if the records turn out to be fake.

Farms now file with several agencies to bring in guest workers. Within a year of passage, one website would handle it all. That covers the job request, the visa filing, and any fixes.

Guest farm visas only cover temporary or seasonal work today. Dairies and other year-round farms could use them too. The cap is 20,000 for the first three years, then set each year.

The Labor Department would run one public website listing every job a farm files to fill with guest workers. U.S. workers could search it by job, date, place, and employer.

Recruiters who sign up farm workers abroad would have to register with the Labor Department and post a bond. The list would be posted on U.S. embassy websites. So would the names of those who lose the right to recruit.

The first rules for the new farm status would take effect the day they are printed. The public could not weigh in first. Comments would be taken after that, and a final rule is due within a year of passage.

Inside the farm visa title is a change to the total number of work-based green cards for everyone, not just farmworkers. The yearly nationwide cap would go from 140,000 to 180,000.

Half of the new year-round farm visas would be set aside for dairy work in each half of the year. A separate carve-out allows up to 500 visas for sheep and goat herding.

Title III wipes out the law behind E-Verify and puts a new system in its place. Federal contractors and firms under state rules would move to the new system too, even though they are not farms.