A Judge in Kentucky Says That Biden’s Plans to Protect Temporary Foreign Farmworkers Are Not Legal

About 370,000 foreigners were given H-2A visas by the U.S. in fiscal year 2022 so they could work on farms like this one in Jessamine County.

A judge in Kentucky has stopped the Biden administration from making it easier for farmworkers with H-2A cards to work in the United States.

The order from U.S. District Judge Danny Reeves on Monday is valid in Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. Farmers in Kentucky and the Republican attorneys general from four other states brought the case, saying that the rules set by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) would let foreign farmworkers form unions.

Reeves agreed and said that the rules change the National Labor Relations Act so that foreign H-2A workers have the same right to join a union as American workers. He said that Congress would have to make this change.

It’s not so sneaky that the Final Rule gives H-2A agricultural workers real group bargaining rights by making their employers follow certain “prohibitions,” Reeves wrote. “The DOL tries to give H-2A workers real rights without permission from Congress by saying that these rules are just extensions of anti-retaliation laws.”

The DOL had finished making the rules that would give temporary farmworkers more legal rights against retaliation from their bosses, unsafe working conditions, and unfair hiring practices.

A voicemail message asking about the ban was left with the U.S. Department of Labor’s media relations office, but it wasn’t returned right away.

During the fiscal year of 2022, the DOL approved H-2A visas for about 370,000 workers. The Center for Global Development, a non-profit study group, says that most H-2A visa workers are from Mexico.

Coleman, the attorney general of Kentucky, said in a statement that the Biden administration rule was “illegal and unnecessary.” He also said that it would have been harder for farmers’ goods to get to grocery store shelves and prices for families would have gone up even more.

Coleman said, “We will keep doing the right thing to support Kentucky’s farmers.”

The plaintiffs asked Reeves to stop the federal rules across the whole country, but he said no. This meant that his order would only affect the states, the farmers, and the farm labor groups that asked for it.

Once upon a time, a federal judge in Georgia had already ruled against the new rules in 17 other states.

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