In June, a farm worker from Mexico, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, was transported through a trafficking network from Monterey to work on farms in Georgia.
They paid the traffickers 20,000 pesos, about $950, loaned from their mother, taking frequent trips back and forth to Monterey, before being told it was safe to leave. Then they were finally transported across the border.
Initially, the worker was told they would be working on a blueberry farm, but was sent to a corn farming operation instead.
“We arrived at the house where we would live, and had to clean the rooms ourselves. There were roaches, spiders, mosquitoes, and the mattresses were covered in lice,” the worker said. “The bathrooms and showers were dirty and clogged. The kitchen was horrible. We had no air conditioning in hot weather.”
The worker began work daily at 3 or 4 am and worked until 3 or 4pm with just one 15-minute lunch break, making just $225 for 15 days of work. They heard rumors that several workers had died. The worker claimed that Haitian immigrants were also brought into the same network.
After 20 days at the corn farm, the worker was sent to a cucumber warehouse where they weren’t paid anything for their work, and then transferred to Texas before escaping the operation and returning to Mexico in July.
“There was a lot of abuse for little pay,” the worker added. “It was a total fraud.”
The contractor the worker said he worked under, JC Longoria Castro, was one of two dozen defendants indicted on federal conspiracy charges in October, based on findings from a multi-year investigation into a massive human smuggling and labor trafficking operation based in southern Georgia that extended to Florida and Texas.
The indictments characterized the operation as “modern-day slavery”, a longstanding problem in the US agricultural industry where workers were smuggled from Central American countries to the US and imprisoned as contracted farm workers.