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One of the House’s most conservative members finds himself in an uncomfortable spot as he defends his push for the U.S. to expand its cap on temporary foreign workers while facing criticism from members of his own party for supposedly betraying Donald Trump’s agenda.
Rep. Andy Harris is Maryland’s lone Republican congressman and chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, a collection of lawmakers typically aligned closely with the president but often in conflict with House leadership over funding levels and other issues.
Harris was profiled by Politico this week as he pushes for the U.S. to expand the cap on H-2B visas, which allow a maximum of 66,000 workers to come into the United States every year and perform non-agricultural work around the country. In Harris’s home state and district, Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the immigrant workers are an important source of labor for Maryland’s often-struggling seafood industry.
Trump’s first and second terms have seen White House and Department of Homeland Security officials aim to issue a lower number of H-2B visas than the law permits. But Harris, Politico reports, visited the West Wing at a crucial moment this January and persuaded the administration to hike 2026’s count to just under the legal cap; 65,000 visas will be issued this year by DHS.
“This is not an immigration issue — this is a temporary foreign worker issue,” he insisted to Politico.
Harris is one of a group of Republicans working with the Senate on the DIGNIDAD Act, a broad piece of immigration legislation that would represent the most serious effort by Congress to address the issue in years. It would expand E-verification tools and requirements while also providing a path for currently undocumented workers to live and work freely in America, though stopping short of making full citizenship possible.
For companies that rely in whole or part on workers using H-2B visas, the legislation is massively important because it revives a provision once championed by another Maryland lawmaker, Sen. Barbara Mikulski. Mikulski, a Democrat and legend of the upper chamber who died in 2017, led the effort for Congress to exclude returning foreign workers from the yearly caps, an effective gradual expansion of those caps, which was then brought to an end in the first year of Donald Trump’s first term. Harris is a key ally of that policy, demonstrating its bipartisan appeal.
But that isn’t an explanation that is gaining any traction with the anti-immigration hardliners in the Republican Party, including War Room podcast host Steve Bannon, who raged about the expansion of the DHS’s H-2B visas with the head of the far-right Immigration Accountability Project during a recent episode.
“Where’s your compassion for Americans?” the head of that organization, Rosemary Jenks, questioned the lawmakers working on the DIGNIDAD Act during the interview.
“There are 20 Republicans…who are basically passing off this ‘Dignity Act’, which should be called the ’SAAW Act’, for ‘Screw All American Workers’, that’s what it should be called because that’s what it does,” she added, claiming that “tens of millions” of immigrants would receive “mass amnesty” for them and their families.
Other members of the Trump administration, like Stephen Miller, remain opposed to the expansion of H-2B visas and have accused lawmakers who support it of importing “monsters” and “mass murderers”, echoing the worst of his boss’s anti-immigrant rhetoric against various ethnic communities.
“The Democrat Party mass imported monsters who are mass murdering Americans. And the Democrat Party and its corrupt judges are fighting relentlessly to keep them here,” Miller wrote on X last week.
It isn’t just anti-immigration groups like Jenks’s that oppose the increase in H-2B visas. Some unions have spoken out against the announcement as well, claiming it will drive down wages for all workers.
“Flooding the labor market with exploitable foreign workers drives down wages and weakens the standard for all workers, the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) said in a statement. “If employers truly face hiring challenges, the answer is better wages, safer conditions, and real workforce investment.”
Harris enters the spring having cheated his political death. The Maryland state Senate, controlled by Democrats, is refusing to bring up redistricting legislation championed by Gov. Wes Moore that was aimed at redrawing his seat and making it more favorable to a Democratic candidate and possibly allowing Democrats to take the last of the state’s eight congressional seats. They already control the other seven. Moore’s bid was launched in response to an effort to do the same in Texas and other red states by Republicans, including Donald Trump.
The congressman won his eighth term in the House by more than 20 points over his Democratic challenger in 2024. In that same cycle, he won his primary by 60 points. He’s likely insulated from any challenge on the right, unless he were to somehow lose the support and endorsement of the president.
Trump did just that to several other Republicans this cycle. In Texas, he withheld his endorsement for incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who subsequently came in less than two percentage points ahead of his closest rival, Ken Paxton, in the first round of the primary election for his seat in March.
Another sitting Republican senator, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, is now facing a primary challenger backed by the president, though Cassidy’s support has not appeared to crater just yet.
