Chapter 13. Human Trafficking
How some H-2A employers cross a disturbing line
We eat a lot of blueberries at our house. There’s almost always a clear plastic bin or two in our fridge, waiting to top off a bowl of cereal or yogurt. We buy them from the Harris Teeter grocery store here in Carrboro, or the Food Lion, or at the Trader Joe’s over in Chapel Hill—wherever the plump little fruit and their prices look just right. I wonder if produce buyers at national chains know that some of the farmworkers who pick blueberries, if their allegations are true, were victims of human trafficking.
In a case filed in 2020 in US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, nine plaintiffs were among the men and women hired to pick berries sold under the brand names Cottle Farms, Driscoll’s, and Sleepy Creek Farms. Each of the farmworkers was brought to the United States under the H-2A visa program.
The blueberry growers behind the popular brands are not the only named defendants in the case. The first is Francisco Valadez Jr., a farm labor contractor whose operation is known to farmworkers as Los Panchos.[1] He was the FLC allegedly hired by these growers to recruit, house, and manage the workers on their behalf.
The story of the plaintiffs in the Valadez case, based on what’s in the sixty-five pages of the complaint, begins in Mexico in 2017. That’s when they were recruited in their home states of Guanajuato and Chiapas to come to North Carolina the next year and work for six months in our crop fields. I don’t know what those workers were promised, but in a contract of that length, at the minimum H-2A hourly pay rate, each worker might easily earn as much as $10,000. That might be why each was willing to pay the recruiter from 16,000 to 50,000 pesos—or $800 to $2,500 USD—for this seemingly amazing opportunity. They might not have known that charging a recruitment fee for an H-2A contract is a violation of US law. One recruit, who presumably did not have that much money on hand, signed over the title to his family’s house. Aside from allegedly getting ripped off by recruitment fees, so far so good.
But things wouldn’t stay so good.
According to the complaint, in early 2018, after trips that took as long as ten days and required the workers to come up with even more money to cover their travel and visa costs, they arrived in eastern North Carolina. Like everyone going through the US Consulate in Monterrey, they had had to pass an interview there. Unlike others, they had been provided a script—which they were instructed to memorize and not bring with them to the interview—which trained them to lie to US Consulate officials and say they had not paid anything for their visas or other expenses, when in fact they had.
H-2A employers are required to provide housing to their farmworkers. Some of these workers spent the first night in a bus parked at the contractor’s house. The next night, they slept outside, fully exposed to the elements. Lacking any means of buying or preparing meals or bathing, the workers were allowed to use the toilet at a neighbor’s house. On day three, they were taken to a motel, where other workers were living, to bathe before being taken at last to various labor camps. It’s not clear how much, if anything, they had had to eat during these first days.
I don’t know what the motel was like, but compared to the labor camps it must have seemed like a palace. Among their camp’s features: two working toilets for more than fifty men, cold water only, shower spigots that did not work, and soiled mattresses in disrepair. And, for roommates, some critters: insects, rats, and numerous snakes, including one in a kitchen and a rather big one in a room where they slept. The men killed those.
Some of the workers had no idea where they were. The remote camps were hidden from the view of any public road and lacked decent cellular phone coverage. At one of them, Los Panchos and his operatives, apparently concerned about outreach workers getting into the camp or farmworkers getting out, secured the only public entrance to the camp with a metal chain and multiple padlocks. The H-2A farmworkers were literally locked inside their camp.
These men and women finally got to work, weeks later than they had expected, but it was work, nonetheless. Unfortunately, before some of them were paid, they had to sign documents saying they had been reimbursed for their travel expenses—which they had not. Several were paid far less than the then-required rate of $11.46 per hour. Some were paid less than even the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Some were forced to pay additional fees to the contractor and his men.
Mired in debt and with far less income than expected, some of these workers began to flee. Some who remained were threatened with being reported to US immigration authorities if they followed. Eventually, all the plaintiffs would escape, and their story would get the attention of attorneys at two places that have lots of experience with this sort of thing. One is the North Carolina Justice Center and the other is Legal Aid of North Carolina, who together would file the case against Valdez and the other defendants. Each of these law offices has a unit dedicated to correcting violations of farmworker rights under the law.
The two firms often collaborate, as they did on the Valadez case, acting in concert. In fact, there are strict boundaries for what each of them can and cannot do. For example, LANC generally can only represent people who have legal authorization to work in the United States whereas the NCJC can represent anyone. There’s a story behind this separation.
There used to be just one place in eastern North Carolina handling most farmworker cases. Farmworkers Legal Services of North Carolina (FLSNC) was a special program launched in 1978 by Legal Services of North Carolina (LSNC), a legal-aid operation funded by the Legal Service Corporation (LSC). Established in 1974, when Richard Nixon was president, the LSC is a source of federal funding for groups like LSNC. In 1998, Mary Lee Hall was the managing attorney of the FLSNC. That’s when a political firestorm would all but burn that program to the ground. I caught up with Mary Lee, who retired in 2015, to learn more about it.
The trouble began when she led a 1998 trip to Mexico. The purpose of the trip was to help workers who had been to the United States on H-2A visas to learn about their rights, and to contact existing clients who had returned to Mexico—as those clients are, of course, required to do. But LSC has a rule limiting the programs they fund to representing a noncitizen client when he or she “is present in the United States.” Mary Lee did not see this as a limitation for H-2A workers whose claims began when they were very much present in the United States, working on a farm in North Carolina. She illustrates her rationale by referring to lawful permanent residents of the United States, also known as green card holders. If the “is present” rule barred these noncitizens from representation by LSC–funded attorneys traveling to a client’s home country, they “would have to forfeit their representation if, during the pendency of their case, they returned temporarily to their home country to care for an ailing parent or attend a family member’s funeral or wedding, or just to visit.”
In any event, when videotape emerged of Mary Lee speaking with workers in Mexico, it was a gift to people like Stan Eury, then the director of the NCGA who added his voice to demands that LSNC be shut down.[2] Eury had been a foe of the organization for some time already. There was a banner up in the orientation center of the NCGA (it’s no longer there) warning arriving workers to be wary of his nemesis: “Servicios Legales Quieren Destruir El Programa H-2A,” it read. “Legal Services Wants to Destroy the H-2A Program.”
An investigation ensued, culminating in the dissolution of the farmworker unit of LSNC. Mary Lee and her colleagues were out of a job. Fortunately, she was hired back into LSNC and its new farmworker unit, now with stricter rules in place as to what it could do. The NCJC then beefed up its farmworker programs. Hence, between the two operations, farmworkers alleging wrongdoing by their employer still have attorneys ready to help. In 2002, LSNC became Legal Aid of North Carolina, with Mary Lee Hall as managing attorney of its farmworker unit.
Mary Lee seems to acknowledge that things have changed for the better at the NCGA, but not so much with the FLCs. Working with them, farmworkers might face issues such as illegal recruitment fees, wage theft, holding of passports, charging for housing, and overcharging for food.
“They just cheat,” says Mary Lee, referring to the contractors and not—she is careful to note—to H-2A employers who hire workers directly. In her experience, virtually all FLCs break the rules, and most in North Carolina engage in forced labor trafficking. Why? They must cut corners to earn a grower’s business and still make a profit. They do that, according to Mary Lee, by doing things like requiring workers to pay illegal fees and keeping their overhead low by keeping workers captive.
Mary Lee envisions a simple solution. In her view, “the United States could greatly reduce forced labor trafficking and improve compliance with legal requirements [of the H-2A program] if the law could be changed to eliminate farm labor contractors as eligible H-2A employers.”
Upon reviewing a list of recent cases handled by LANC and NCJC, and actions by the US Department of Labor, the mistreatment of farmworkers at the hands of FLCs seems to be growing—while federal enforcement is waning. Over recent years, the number of reported cases the DOL can investigate has fallen from 2.5 percent to a 1 percent. With 99 percent of contractors like Los Panchos potentially getting away with their misdeeds, it’s little wonder there is little incentive to change their ways.
The federal courts weren’t the only branch of the US government to get wind of Los Panchos. In March 2021, the Wage and Hour Division of the US Department of Labor issued an order barring Francisco Valadez Jr. from applying for H-2A certifications for two years. It also assessed a $17,892 civil penalty. Two years later, they fined him again, for a separate incident, this time along with the grower who hired him.
In April 2022, the NCJC and LANC announced a settlement in which Valadez and other defendants would pay $120,000 to the named plaintiffs—as well as forty other workers allowed to opt in if they too had suffered under the thumb of Los Panchos. The settlement also called for reimbursement of plaintiffs’ attorney fees and extensive changes to how the defendants did business. For example, they could no longer lock the gate to their labor camps when workers were inside.
The nine worker plaintiffs named in the Valadez case, and the forty others who joined it, are most certainly not the only victims of human trafficking in the crop fields of North Carolina. But they were among the lucky ones who got the attorneys at LANC and NCJC to bring their case to light and to secure for them some compensation.
At our house, we’re lucky too. Hopefully, or maybe just wishfully, the produce buyers at Harris Teeter and the other places we go to stock our fridge will think about the men and women picking those berries, and what things are like for them, before deciding which growers to buy from. I’d sure like to think so but am not holding my breath. But for sure, the next time I drop a pint of blueberries into our shopping cart, I will pay attention to the name on the box. And if there’s a choice between one of the brands from the Valadez case and any other, I’ll go with the other.
[1] So named for him and his father, Francisco Valadez Sr., as Pancho is a common nickname for Francisco
[2] Stan Eury is no longer associated with the NCGA.