‘No amnesty!’: Migrant farmworker bill opens major rift within GOP

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Conservatives are savaging Republican-led legislation as a “betrayal” of the party’s immigration agenda, and mobilizing President Donald Trump’s base to tank a yearslong effort aimed at helping farmers. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, and the House Freedom Caucus’ bloc of hard-right lawmakers are piling on against the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act, a bill introduced by veteran House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson.

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Thompson, a nine-term Pennsylvania Republican, is proposing a path to temporary legal status for some farmworkers who entered the country illegally — language that has won support from industry groups and dozens of House Republican cosponsors. But it has infuriated immigration hawks who characterize the legislation as stabbing “Trump’s deportation promise in the back.” The dispute highlights a rift in the GOP’s economic vision: Republicans who see foreign laborers as a crucial way to stabilize a short-staffed agriculture workforce and the cost of food are butting against hardliners who have championed Trump’s mass deportation campaign. “I think the agricultural lobby is very powerful, but it’s a poor excuse to overturn what should be our nation’s immigration policy,” said Randy Westlund, the Republican mayor of Post Falls, Idaho. “It’s a betrayal of the base of Republican voters who have no interest in amnesty whatsoever.” “We voted for Trump specifically to solve the immigration problem, to get mass deportations, that’s what was promised,” said Westlund, whose city became the first in Idaho to join a federal immigration enforcement program. “To see something going against that is going against the MAGA agenda.”

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