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The agricultural industry is feeling the strain from President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, and Republican lawmakers are certainly hearing about it back home.

What elected officials will do about farmers’ frustrations is much less clear — an indication that relief could be far away.

“Members are beginning to talk about it, but it doesn’t feel as though a particular solution is coming into focus yet, and clearly the White House is going to be the most important player in these conversations,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee.

Ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in agricultural centers, from California to Wisconsin to New York, have increased pressure on members of Congress to provide fixes for farmers who say they are facing labor shortages.

In Wisconsin, for example, a 2023 University of Wisconsin study found that 70% of labor on the state’s dairy farms was done by undocumented workers. Many of those farmers have turned to existing temporary visas — like the H-2A visa, a seasonal agricultural visa — to staff their farms. The Trump administration moved to strip back labor protections for farmers hiring workers on the visa earlier this year, in an effort to streamline H-2A visas.

But those visas are inherently limited for year-round work, like at dairy farms.

The program is also associated with high costs and a slow-moving bureaucracy. Democrats and immigrant advocates said the administration’s move put workers at risk of abuse and exploitation. Approximately 17% of agricultural workers have an H-2A visa.

There are currently several proposed reforms floating around the Capitol.

A bipartisan bill introduced in May by Reps. Dan Newhouse and Zoe Lofgren proposes streamlining the H-2A visa process and providing visas for year-round agricultural employers.

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden has proposed legislation that would allow undocumented farmworkers to gain legal employment status, as long as they haven’t committed a crime. Both immigrants and their employers would be required to acknowledge the worker’s status and pay a fine.

“We got to understand, at this point these people are our neighbors. Our kids go to school together, and they’re part of our communities,” Van Orden said. “I don’t want these people having to hide underneath a trailer when immigration shows up.”

Van Orden’s bill has no co-sponsors.

Lawmakers formed a task force in 2023 to consider possible reforms to the H-2A visa program and improve the industry’s reliable labor shortage.

The Republican-majority House Committee on Agriculture has readied a bill that largely follows task force recommendations — which include proposals to streamline administrative paperwork, expedite application review by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and change the wage system — to overhaul the H-2A program.

Committee chair Rep. Glenn Thompson said the bill is awaiting “technical assistance” from the Department of Labor. That final step had been delayed by shutdown furloughs, he said. The Department of Labor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We’re very close to introducing a very strong, I’ll call it a tripartisan bill, because that includes Republicans, Democrats and individuals from the industry,” Thompson said.

The bill draft is expected to be ready for public review by early January.

Rep. Salud Carbajal, a Democrat on the agriculture committee, however, says he hasn’t heard from his Republican colleagues or the White House on the issue.

“There’s been no communication from my colleagues on the other side and from this administration,” he said.

Republicans say the White House is engaged on the issue. Thompson told NOTUS that he’s been in “frequent discussions” with the White House and the Department of Agriculture about immigrant farmworkers.

Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who also sits on the House Agriculture Committee, said the White House is “in the mood here to engage” on farmworker visas.

“A while back, the president acknowledged in a speech that we got to up the game on having more and simpler processes for having farm workers available. I know we feel that in California with our specialty crops,” LaMalfa said.

Trump in June suggested that farms would get a pass in the deportation crackdown — a statement that senior administration officials seemed to disagree with.

Immigration advocates haven’t been happy with the administration’s visa policy changes thus far.

Alexandra Sossa, the chief executive officer with the Farmworker and Landscaper Advocacy Project, said that her organization is “not in favor” of the H-2A visa program, which it associates with “human labor trafficking and labor exploitation.”

And now, with the ongoing immigration raids, she says, farmworkers who are brought to the country under the visa program fear deportation, and those who are considering coming under the program are apprehensive about doing so.

“We are talking about workers who wake up at 4 a.m. in the morning and start working at 5 a.m. and end working around 9 to 10 p.m., Monday to Sunday. So that’s not easy to find, and it’s a difficult job to do. The consequences on the economy are reflected when you go to the grocery store to buy food,” Sossa said.

Democrats, meanwhile, are calling for larger immigration reform to address the dangerous working conditions that the H-2A program has led to, while also giving a bigger pathway to work.

“When people are exploited, we’ve got to crack down on that,” Rep. Jim McGovern, a Democrat on the House Committee on Agriculture, said about the concerns regarding H-2A visas. “But I just think the climate that’s been created by this administration makes it difficult for some Republicans to even want to talk about the issue.”

“I hear from farmers all the time about concerns that their labor force will disappear, or that they can’t count on workers,” McGovern said.

This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.

Farmers are feeling the squeeze from Trump’s mass deportations. Congress isn’t close to a fix. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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As Democrats across the country devise ways to match Republican redistricting efforts, a long-standing battle over congressional maps has been quietly progressing in one of the nation’s most competitive swing states.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is taking up two gerrymandering lawsuits challenging the state’s congressional maps after years of back-and-forth litigation on the issue. Over the summer, it appeared redistricting efforts would go nowhere before the midterms; the state’s high court in June rejected similar lawsuits.

But liberal groups have found new ways to challenge the maps that the state Supreme Court appears open to considering. This time, plaintiffs are requesting the court appoint a three-judge panel to hear their partisan gerrymandering case, and a new group has stepped into the fray with a lawsuit that argues a novel anticompetitive gerrymandering claim.

The jury is still out on whether those rulings will come in time for 2026.

“Could they be? Yes. Will they be? That’s hard to say,” said Janine Geske, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice.

Some developments in the cases in October indicate that the gerrymandering fight in Wisconsin is far from over.

The justices have allowed Wisconsin’s six Republican congressmen to join the cases as defendants. The congressmen are now looking to force two of the court’s liberal justices, Janet Protasiewicz and Susan Crawford, to recuse themselves from the cases. Both justices were endorsed by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin; Protasiewicz criticized the maps on the campaign trail, and Crawford’s donors billed her as a justice who could help Democrats flip seats.

Some are unsure why the Republican congressmen are entering the fight now, months after the liberal groups filed the new cases.

“They took their time to even seek intervention, and now they’re seeking recusal, and now they’re trying to hold up the appointment process. I’m sure their goal is to try to throw sand in the gears of this litigation,” said Abha Khanna, a plaintiff attorney in Bothfeld v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, the partisan gerrymandering case requesting that the courts appoint a three-judge panel to review the maps.

The offices and campaigns of the six Republican congressmen did not respond to requests for comment.

Khanna said her team filed the lawsuit with enough time to potentially redraw the maps, despite the congressmen’s recent actions.

“There certainly is time to affect the 2026 elections,” she said.

This lawsuit lays out a more familiar partisan gerrymandering argument, in which lawyers say Wisconsin’s congressional maps discriminate against Democratic voters. Six of the state’s eight House seats are filled by Republicans, even though statewide elections have been close partisan races. Sens. Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin — a Republican and Democrat, respectively — won their most recent statewide elections by a percentage point or less, while Gov. Tony Evers kept his office by more than 3 percentage points in 2022 (Evers will not be seeking reelection in 2026).

The plaintiffs believe they ultimately have a strong case because the state’s high court ruled in 2023 that the “least change” principle — which dictated the 2021 maps to be drawn “consistent with existing boundaries” of the 2011 maps — should no longer be used as primary criteria in redistricting. The state legislative maps were changed. But the federal district maps were not.

In effect, the maps that were proposed by Evers in 2021 continued on the legacy of Republican gerrymandering, Khanna said. The lawsuit, filed in July, requests the appointment of a three-judge panel to hear the case, after the state Supreme Court in June rejected the plaintiffs’ petition.

“It’s a judicially created metric that violates the principles of the (Wisconsin) constitution,” Khanna said. “This can be decided without any fact-finding at all. The court can decide it as a matter of law, and then we can proceed quickly to a remedial map.”

Not everyone involved is so optimistic that this will be resolved quickly. Jeff Mandell, a plaintiff attorney in the redistricting lawsuit alleging that the maps are illegally too favorable to incumbents — a new argument that hasn’t been tested in the state — said it is “exceedingly unlikely” that new maps could be drawn in time for the midterm elections. Primary candidates must file their nomination papers to the elections commission by June 1, 2026. The final district lines must be in place by spring for candidates to circulate their papers among the right voters.

“If we don’t have maps by the end of March or so, it’s very, very difficult to run the election next November,” Mandell said.

Even if the Wisconsin Supreme Court rules that the current maps are unconstitutional, the most likely scenario would punt the task of redrawing to partisan officeholders, he added — a process that could hinder easy consensus and potentially draw out the timeline for months.

Mandell’s lawsuit is arguably facing a bigger hurdle as it attempts to make the case that the districts are drawn in a way that makes it extremely difficult for challengers to have a real chance.

The exception is Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, where Rep. Derrick Van Orden has won by fewer-than-four-point margins and is currently facing three challengers, including the well-funded Democrat Rebecca Cooke, who lost to him in 2024.

The median margin of victory in Wisconsin’s remaining congressional districts is about 29 percentage points, according to a NOTUS review.

“Thirty points is not something you can overcome by having a really good candidate, it’s not something you can overcome by having a great campaign plan and executing it flawlessly, it’s not something you can overcome when there’s a swing election,” Mandell said.

The next months will prove whether the incumbent argument is convincing to Wisconsin’s justices, who have heard their share of redistricting cases.

This story was produced andoriginally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.

Wisconsin’s redistricting fight isn’t over, but will new maps be drawn in time for 2026 election? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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The clock is ticking before Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits will be delayed for approximately 42 million Americans in November due to the federal government shutdown.

That leaves just nine days until Wisconsin — a key battleground state with two competitive House races in the 2026 midterms — runs out of funding for its food assistance program, Gov. Tony Evers announced Tuesday. Already, November benefits will certainly be delayed, Evers said.

“President Trump and Republicans in Congress must work across the aisle and end this shutdown now so Wisconsinites and Americans across our country have access to basic necessities like food and groceries that they need to survive,” Evers said in a statement.

The governor is one of several Wisconsin Democrats who added SNAP delays to the long list of shutdown impacts they blame on Republicans.

“I want the government to reopen and to lower health care costs and to undo some of the devastating things that were done in Trump’s signature legislation, the ‘Big, Ugly bill,’” Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin told NOTUS. “It’s in the Republicans’ hands to do that.”

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced legislation on Tuesday to use unappropriated Treasury funds for payment of SNAP benefits during the shutdown. It is unclear if his bill will gain traction in the Senate.

“We need to start forcing Democrats to make some tough votes during this shutdown,” he said in an X post.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson declined to comment on SNAP’s funding lapsing.

Nearly 700,000 people rely on FoodShare, Wisconsin’s SNAP program for families and seniors that is entirely funded by federal dollars. Wisconsin’s program already took a hit from Trump’s budget law, which will raise the state’s portion of administrative costs for running FoodShare by at least $43.5 million annually.

Wisconsin is among a slew of states sounding the alarm on SNAP funding, with Texas officials setting Oct. 27 as the last day before benefits will be disrupted. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said his state’s food assistance program may be disrupted if the government does not reopen by Thursday, and Pennsylvania’s Department of Health Services announced that benefits will not be paid starting last week.

Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan, who represents the Madison area, lamented risks to FoodShare in a statement to NOTUS.

“This funding risk could be resolved tomorrow if Republicans would return to Washington to vote with Democrats on a bill to fund the government and protect access to affordable health care for millions of Americans,” he said.

November benefits will be delayed in Wisconsin “even if the shutdown ends tomorrow,” according to the announcement from Evers’ office.

It is not yet certain that delays in benefits will occur, and any disruptions would be a deliberate “policy choice,” said Gina Plata-Nino, the interim director for SNAP at the Food Research & Action Center.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture could use a similar tactic as Trump did when he directed the Defense Department and the Office of Management and Budget on Oct. 15 to issue on-time paychecks to active duty members of the military using leftover appropriated funds, Plata-Nino told NOTUS.

The Trump administration transferred $300 million to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children to prevent benefits disruptions earlier this month. The Department of Agriculture will release more than $3 billion in aid to farmers during the shutdown.

“It is in their hands to issue a letter to the states and say, ‘We have $6 billion in contingency funding. We’re going to go ahead and utilize that, and we’re looking for sources of funding like we did for WIC, but then also how we’ve done to farmers when there’s been issues,” Plata-Nino said.

Plata-Nino said states and Electronic Benefit Transfer processors — companies that process EBT transactions for stores — would need to know they are getting contingency funds by later this week or early next week for SNAP benefits to go out smoothly on Nov. 1.

“Even if on the 30th, the USDA acts late and then finally issues its contingency funds, benefits are still going to be late,” she added.

Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, said in a statement Republicans should “come to the negotiating table” on the shutdown.

“After already cutting FoodShare in their One Beautiful Bill, Republicans’ inaction could again increase hunger and food insecurity,” she said.

When asked about FoodShare delays, Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican from northern Wisconsin who is running to replace Evers, pointed to Democrats’ 11 votes against Republicans’ continuing resolution bills.

“Maybe Governor Evers should ask Senator Baldwin why she is blocking the bipartisan budget bill and holding these programs hostage,” Tiffany said in a statement.

Republican Rep. Tony Wied, who represents the Green Bay area, pointed at Baldwin and other Democrats’ votes against the continuing resolution, accusing them of playing “political games.”

“House Republicans voted for a clean continuing resolution to keep the government open and ensure critical programs like FoodShare continue uninterrupted,” Wied said in a statement to NOTUS. “I am calling on Senator Baldwin and the rest of her Democratic colleagues to change course and vote to open the government immediately so Wisconsinites in need do not have to worry about going hungry.”

But Danielle Nierenberg, the president of the nonpartisan advocacy organization Food Tank, said Democrats and Republicans are “both in the wrong” for potential SNAP disruptions.

“Food should never have been politicized in this way. So whether you’re Democrat or a Republican you shouldn’t be punishing poor people for just being poor and denying them the benefits they deserve,” Nierenberg said.

This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.

Wisconsin members of Congress point fingers as SNAP benefits run out is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Devin Remiker, the 33-year-old new chair of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, has a plan to win it all in 2026, when voters will elect a new governor, state legislators, a state Supreme Court justice, and potentially flip seats crucial to Democrats’ efforts to retake the House.

The job is “about building a bulwark against a hostile administration that seems intent on subverting democracy,” he told NOTUS. “That really places in me an immense sense of responsibility to help make sure that we can be that bulwark ahead of 2028.”

Remiker is one of 24 chairs of Democratic state parties elected since the party lost the presidency, Senate and most governor’s races in November. While that turnover for party chairs is not unusual, it leaves Democrats’ fresh-faced state leadership to chart the party’s new course at a time of unprecedented political upheaval. As the chair of one of the most fiercely competitive states on the map, Remiker has a significant role to play in that future.

“Devin matches what I would argue we need in a chair,” said Jane Kleeb, president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, an organization within the Democratic National Committee that represents state parties.

Kleeb said professionalism and optimism are the “key characteristics” the party has sought in new chairs, in addition to exceptional fundraising skills and the ability to persuade donors that the party is making structural changes to win as far out as 2028.

Remiker is taking over the chair position from Ben Wikler, who grew the party’s fundraising into eight-digit territory each election cycle. Wikler created new virtual volunteer opportunities and expanded the party’s existing neighbor-to-neighbor organizing teams into a year-round campaign apparatus, Wikler said. When Wikler assumed the post in 2019, Remiker was a political director, later moving up to executive director before working as a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’ campaign in Wisconsin, according to the party site.

“Even if you’re taking the baton from a well-qualified chair who built up an incredible infrastructure like Ben Wikler … even that is daunting,” Kleeb said.

Remiker told NOTUS his job is to continue growing the bread and butter of Wisconsin Democrats’ campaigning.

“The core of the party’s work in Wisconsin is year-round organizing, both in traditional organizing — knocking on doors, getting neighbors to talk to neighbors about the issues that impact them most — but also year-round communications infrastructure,” he said. “Right now, where our party has the most room to grow is in communicating with folks in new, innovative ways that meet voters where they’re at.”

Remiker is working on ways to tailor the party’s messaging to voters in each of the state’s 72 counties — work that’s overseen by a new director for the all-county strategy, he said. Remiker is also looking to change how the party communicates with voters by putting more resources into relational organizing and social media outreach.

He emphasized getting the party’s message to rural voters by sending canvassers to parades, farmers markets and other public events that can help the Democrats build a community presence across the state and save time walking up long rural driveways.

“What we uniquely have here in Wisconsin is a foundation to build upon, and that’s really how I view my role coming into this job,” Remiker said. “I’m here to, yes, fix or tweak what wasn’t working or wasn’t working the best, but to really build upon the foundation” set by Wikler and Martha Laning, Wikler’s predecessor who expanded the party’s voter outreach.

That plan echoes what Wikler envisions for his successor.

“A lot of people are coming into these roles with a mandate for change. In Wisconsin, Devin’s mandate is to learn everything about what can be improved but it’s also really to keep building things that we know have had a huge effect that helped Tammy Baldwin win in 2024,” Wikler said.

Remiker’s approach could make inroads in rural Wisconsin, which overwhelmingly voted Republican in 2024. Wisconsin Democrats lost to President Donald Trump by less than a percentage point, but reelected Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

The party followed that up in April by holding onto a liberal majority in the state Supreme Court — a race that drew over $53 million in spending by conservative groups and led Elon Musk to host a $1 million sweepstakes for voters. Remiker led the Democrats’ “People v. Musk” campaign in the months before his election as chair and will now preside over the party as a redistricting lawsuit winds its way through the state’s courts, a case that could help the Democrats flip seats if decided in time to redraw maps before the midterm elections.

The Wisconsin Democrats’ full-force organizing for candidates up and down the ballot in all corners of the state has been something of a blueprint for other state parties. Newly minted Democratic chairs of swing states told NOTUS they are working toward the year-round operation at the center of Wisconsin’s successful program.

Eugene DePasquale, the chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party who was elected last month, praised Wisconsin Democrats’ use of data to “help drive” strategy and their development of campaign infrastructure to last beyond any one cycle.

“What we’ve done in Pennsylvania is like Groundhog Day all over again, which is you build up an infrastructure, win or lose the campaign, then it goes away, then you start up again next summer,” he said. “I want to hopefully build with the team we’re putting together an infrastructure that lasts, where we’re basically going year-round.”

This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.

New Wisconsin Dems chair says he’s ‘building a bulwark’ against the Trump administration is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.