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We Need The Help Goy – Trump expands the allotment of additional H-2B visas for more foreign workers

April 16, 2026

President Trump was walking into the lobby of one of his Florida golf clubs earlier this year when a group of associates with ties to his businesses approached him with a proposal to increase the number of visas for seasonal guest workers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Bernd Lembcke, the former manager of Mar-a-Lago who recently retired after a 30-year stint working at Trump’s properties, and Peter Petrina, a longtime Mar-a-Lago member, made the case to the president in January that the hospitality industry needed more workers ahead of the winter and spring peak tourism season. Adrian Tudor, a manager at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, helped facilitate the conversation, the people said.

The January meeting came after the administration late last year announced it planned to cut the number of seasonal worker slots, known as H-2B visas, to roughly 30,000 below the previous year’s nearly 65,000. Weeks after the meeting, the administration quietly reversed itself and released the maximum number of visas allowed under the law.

Trump’s businesses have long relied on the program to hire temporary foreign workers at some of his properties across the country, including Mar-a-Lago.

The January meeting was the culmination of a fierce lobbying campaign to persuade the administration to reverse course by industry leaders and members of Congress, such as Rep. Andy Harris (R., Md.), a Trump ally whose district along Maryland’s eastern shore relies heavily on the visas to pick crabs.

Trump took the lobbying campaign seriously, the people said. He called his advisers and directed them to work to expand the allotment of additional temporary visas through the H-2B program.

The visa program is used heavily by landscapers, fisheries and vacation towns that have trouble finding enough Americans willing or able to work only a few months out of the year. It is a frequent tension point between Trump’s anti-immigration political base, who think Americans would take the jobs in question if they paid better, and more business-minded Republicans.

The White House said the administration allowed more H-2B visas to be made available because, through its crackdown on illegal immigration, it has taken away work authorization from more than a million immigrants by terminating their temporary legal statuses.

“The Trump Administration’s number one priority is protecting American jobs and wages, while adequately responding to the demands of President Trump’s rapidly growing economy,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said.

Petrina leads the Seasonal Employment Alliance, which advocates for securing the maximum number of H-2B visas each year. Since 2016, Congress has allotted 33,000 visas for the winter and summer hiring seasons, for a total of 66,000. The law allows the president to nearly double that number if he determines the economy could use the extra visa slots.

Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, is skeptical of the program and worked throughout Trump’s first term to limit the number of extra visas the administration issued. That view is shared by conservative outside immigration groups that have been cheering the president’s planned mass deportations. Other prominent voices in the administration are more favorable to the program, including Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

The Trump administration announced Dec. 31 that it would only grant 35,000 additional visas for fiscal year 2026, far fewer than the nearly 65,000 maximum allowed by Congress. The administration said the move marked a nearly 50% reduction in supplemental visas when compared with fiscal years 2023-25. Two weeks after the January meeting at Trump’s Florida golf club, which hasn’t been previously reported, the administration changed course, saying it would authorize an additional 64,716 H-2B visas for the fiscal year.

People familiar with the decision said the lobbying campaign helped sway Trump to expand the number of H-2B visas.

“I think they convinced the president that this was worthwhile, and that, in fact, going up to the amount that had been issued in the past years, which brought up to about 65,000 additional visas, was the right thing to do,” Harris said in an interview.

The lobbying campaign to expand the number of visas issued under the H-2B program went beyond the president. David Jurcak, the president of the Grand Hotel in Mackinac Island, Mich., said that during a state Republican dinner in September, he approached then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about authorizing more visas through the program.

Jurcak said Noem helped set up a call with DHS officials to discuss the issue.

“I said to her, as we are going through immigration challenges, this is something where we could point to a good thing as part of the immigration policies,” Jurcak said in an interview.

The H-2B program is one of the rare immigration-related policies that the president has advocated for expanding. Since Trump’s election victory in 2024, the Trump Organization, through its properties, has sought to hire workers through the H-2B program, including cooks, bellmen and bartenders, according to job postings on the Labor Department’s website.

Trump has for months led a crackdown on illegal immigration. He has enacted mass deportations across the country, enhanced vetting for visa applicants and increased the American military presence at the U.S.-Mexico border.