Farmworkers in fields south of Bakersfield, Calif., earlier this year.

WASHINGTON—President Trump’s aggressive deportation policies are spawning a new GOP-led policy push in Congress: Specific immigration-law changes to help protect the workforce in the agriculture industry, which relies heavily on unauthorized laborers.

A small but growing group of House Republican lawmakers is encouraging the Trump administration and other factions of their party to pivot toward addressing immigration policy inside the country now that Trump has brought illegal border crossings to effectively zero. The lawmakers argue the party should focus on changing immigration law to allow some workers to gain temporary legal status and make sure people can remain on the job.

“The excuse that we’ve had from not taking steps to pass measures ensuring certainty and availability of workforce has been that the border hasn’t been under control,” said Rep. GT Thompson (R., Pa.), the chair of the House Committee on Agriculture. “That excuse is gone,” he said.

GOP backers of changes warn of food shortages and economic calamity if the uncertainty about immigrant labor isn’t addressed soon, pushing them to pursue a position that potentially puts them at odds with the Trump administration’s goal of mass deportations of people who entered the country illegally. It also risks a replay of more than four decades of failed efforts since Congress’s last successful overhaul.

Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R., Ind.), a rancher, whipped out his phone to show a message from a poultry farmer in his district who was worried about having enough workers not only to raise and process birds but also to move them from farms to stores.

“I have people they call me. They’re like, ‘I’m not sure if my crew is going to show up for work Monday morning, because if there’s a raid, or something like that, right?” said Stutzman, a conservative in the House Freedom Caucus. Of unauthorized immigrants, he said: “If you try to deport all of them, you’re gonna crash the economy.”

Federal immigration agents faced protesters during a raid last week in Camarillo, Calif.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who controls what bills come to the floor, signaled any immigration overhaul would face an uphill battle.

“There’s lots of discussions about it,” he told The Wall Street Journal, while pointing to past stalled efforts. “It’s very complicated.” Johnson deferred to Trump, saying there would need to be coordination with the White House on any efforts they undertake.

Immigration experts estimate that roughly half of the more than two million people employed on farms are working in the U.S. illegally. Farm owners aren’t required by law to use the government’s system for checking work eligibility known as E-Verify, but even if they do use it, the system is fairly easy for immigrants to fool.

Last month, the administration abruptly announced it was going to pause immigration arrests at farms and hotels, at the urging of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. But the government reversed its position just days later.

Administration officials have repeatedly pledged to hit a goal of arresting a million unauthorized immigrants in Trump’s first year in office, though they have hit less than a fifth of that number so far. Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, opposes providing any relief to industries including farms, according to people familiar with his thinking, and would also oppose efforts to create a new, more generous guest-worker program.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said that Trump “trusts farmers and is committed to ensuring they have the workforce needed to remain successful. But there will be no safe harbor for the countless, unvetted, criminal illegal aliens that Joe Biden let waltz into the country.”

Farm areas skew heavily toward Republicans, raising the political stakes for the party. The vast majority of agriculture acreage—GOP lawmakers put it at over 90%—is represented by Republicans in Congress. If farms can’t hire all of the workers they need, the lawmakers argue, they risk being forced to leave crops to spoil or paying more for labor, which could lead to higher food costs.

“I think what it does is it exposes the overall need for this immigration reform because a lot of the ag workers, in a lot of cases, have been here for years, years upon years,” said Rep. Brad Finstad (R., Minn.), a fourth-generation farmer who runs an agriculture business in the state.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins speaking at a news conference last week.

There are several visa programs available to farm owners, including the H-2A visa program specifically for seasonal farm labor. But the agriculture industry has argued the visas come with too many regulations, including government-set salaries and a requirement to provide housing for workers. People using the visas also need to return to their home countries for a chunk of each year, meaning farms with year-round work, like dairy farms, can’t use them.

An Agriculture Department spokesman said Rollins “fully supports President Trump’s immigration agenda, starting with strong border security and deportations of all illegally present.” Foreign-born workers “must have entered our country legally—not through amnesty or backdoor legalization,” the spokesman said.

The Labor Department recently established the Office of Immigration Policy, which aims to streamline and modernize the process for employers—including agricultural employers—as they navigate the various programs that include supporting legal pathways to work.

Immigration is a particularly thorny issue for Republicans. Most recently, a bipartisan group led by Sens. James Lankford (R., Okla.), Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) and then-Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I., Ariz.), saw their bill torpedoed by then-candidate Trump in 2024. Former House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) spearheaded two different, and ultimately unsuccessful, versions of an immigration bill that aimed to give undocumented immigrants a chance at legal status if Congress employed tough border security measures.

Former Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), now Secretary of State, took a hit from the conservative wing of his party in 2013 after pushing for a comprehensive immigration bill.

“At the end of the day, I don’t know that the economic arguments are ever going to outweigh the cultural arguments,” said Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who worked for Rubio during the immigration effort.