Potato packers are trafficked under forced labor, the lawsuit alleges

Sam Tabachnik
| Denver Post

At least three potato packers in Colorado’s San Luis Valley were trafficked from Mexico into a forced labor system, forced to work for less than minimum wage, given little food and water, and housed in substandard conditions, workers allege in a federal investigation. lawsuit filed this month.

Armando Rubio Flores, Alfonso Angeles Hernandez and Israin Hernandez Jacobo filed the 50-page complaint on Oct. 15 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado against J&T Harvesting LLC, a Texas agricultural worker. The lawsuit also names MountainKing Potatoes Inc. and Alpine Potato Company, which operates potato packing warehouses in the San Luis Valley.

Representatives of J&T Harvesting could not be reached for comment. MountainKing Potatoes and Alpine Potato Company declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The three workers were among a large group of agricultural workers who came to the United States in 2022 through the H-2A visa program, a federal employment scheme that allows U.S. employers to hire seasonal foreign workers if they can’t find domestic workers to do the work . . H-2A visas only allow workers to work on a specific farm; they cannot be outsourced to another employer.

The workers’ orders stated that they would pick and plant crops on six farms in and around Uvalde, Texas. Instead, J&T Harvesting ordered about 58 employees — including Flores, Hernandez and Jacobo — to board a bus to Colorado, where they would work in potato packing warehouses in the San Luis Valley, the complaint alleges.

Once in Colorado, the workers were taken to a motel room with eight people — with only one mattress and box spring, the lawsuit said. According to the lawsuit, some workers were forced to sleep in the shuttered restaurant next to the motel.

Federal law requires H-2A employers to provide almost everything for their workers, including food, housing, and transportation to and from their home countries.

But J&T Harvesting did not provide these workers with food, water or money for more than three weeks after they arrived in the U.S., the complaint alleges. Many employees fell into debt paying recruitment fees, travel expenses, visa fees and other expenses needed to obtain their work permits, the lawsuit said.

Workers were forced to pool their money to buy cheap canned food that didn’t require cooking at the nearby Dollar Store. They ate just one meal a day to enjoy their money and food longer, the lawsuit alleges.

At one point, a J&T employee offered a $100 loan to the workers to buy food — money that the contractor later deducted from the workers’ first paycheck, the lawsuit alleges.

J&T later moved 30 workers into a five-bedroom house in the town of Center. The home had no beds or furniture and was in serious disrepair, the complaint states. All workers had to provide their own bedding and were charged $100 a week to live there.

The workers – who were not authorized to work in the Colorado factories – were tasked with sorting potatoes for MountainKing Potatoes and Alpine Potato Company. However, the companies did not pay the federal minimum wage or the Colorado minimum wage, the workers allege.

During their tenure, the companies used “manipulation, threats, intimidation and isolation to create a climate of fear” among employees, the lawsuit alleges.

J&T confiscated workers’ passports when they arrived in the U.S., the employees allege, and threatened to deport workers or report them to immigration authorities.

As bad as the situation was, continued participation in the H-2A program was a top priority due to a lack of work options in Mexico, the workers said in the lawsuit.

On November 17, 2022, the three workers secretly gathered their belongings and fled to a safe location. The potato companies continued to hire J&T workers until at least March 2024, the complaint alleges.

“For more than six weeks, Plaintiffs suffered great fear, anxiety, stress, humiliation, hunger and emotional distress while working for Defendants,” the lawsuit said.

“They didn’t know where to turn,” said Jenifer Rodriguez, lead attorney for the Farm Worker Rights Division of Colorado Legal Services, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the workers. “There is already a significant power imbalance among H-2A workers who are tied to their employers through their H-2A visas, without the ability to find work elsewhere in the US. The additional debt they had to incur and the restriction of their movements created a hopeless situation, making it seem impossible to find a way out.”

The Denver Post published a three-part investigation in September that found H-2A visa employers in Colorado routinely violate federal labor laws, but virtually no one is barred from rehiring workers the following season. Workers often suffer from wage theft, threats and substandard living conditions, The Post notes. Yet many keep quiet and return to Colorado year after year because they don’t have enough opportunities at home.

Government regulators, meanwhile, have rarely used any mechanism at their disposal to stop abusive employers from bringing in migrant workers.

Colorado’s agricultural workforce has increasingly come from abroad over the past two decades as local farmers say they can’t find American workers to toil in the fields.