ProPublica: “… Agents had been following leads from an anti-trafficking organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that in 2015 had uncovered the abuses of harvesters at an onion farm near Vidalia. That collaboration enabled the agents to expand their investigation.”

Fox News (Savannah): “The USDA called [Blooming Onion] the biggest sting operation of labor trafficking in U.S. history.”

Judge Lisa Godbey Wood, during the sentencing hearing of Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr.: “People think that there’s no slavery anymore…There is, and you were doing it right here in our state.”

Dr. Susan Marquis, professor with Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, to ProPublica: “It’s very clear, supported by the data, that nothing works to end forced labor except the Fair Food Program or some other variation of worker-driven social responsibility,”

In late November, 2021, the US Department of Justice publicly unsealed a sweeping set of criminal indictments of over two dozen individuals suspected of running a massive modern-day slavery ring operating on onion and blueberry farms across the southeastern United States. The 50-page indictment includes horrifying allegations of widespread and systemic abuse of thousands of H-2A workers, many of whom were held against their will, forced to live in squalid housing, and made to work grueling hours for little or no pay. This egregious exploitation was enforced through the use of threats or, on multiple occasions, the use of brutal violence against those who opposed the defendants’ will. The sprawling case, spanning the 6 year period from 2015-2021, was codenamed ‘Operation Blooming Onion’ by law enforcement officials after the multiagency raid to arrest the suspects, gather evidence for the case, and liberate the trafficked workers.

In the words of NBC News at the time:

At least 100 guest workers were freed from conditions “in which at least two died, another was repeatedly raped, and others were kidnapped and threatened with death. Workers were forced to work at gunpoint, earning 20 cents for each bucket of onions they dug up with their hands. Some were sold to farms in other states. The years-long probe brought together multiple federal agencies to investigate a “transnational criminal organization” that engaged in human trafficking, visa fraud, forced labor, mail fraud, money laundering, and other crimes that earned the collaborators more than $200 million.

In sum, ‘Blooming Onion’ amounted to one of the largest, most lucrative, and most brutal modern-day slavery operations in US history. 

Now, nearly four years later, ProPublica, the preeminent investigative news outlet in the US today, has released the first two installments of a multi-part, bombshell exposé that dives deep into the abuses farmworkers trapped in the nightmarish operation were forced to endure — and explores how those abuses could have been prevented altogether, highlighting the CIW’s Fair Food Program as the only proven solution to this stubborn form or modern-day slavery.

The case was uncovered in 2015, when the CIW received a call from a guestworker who had heard of a series of violent incidents while working in onions in southern Georgia. The farmworker believed that the employers were bringing in hundreds of workers every year on guestworker visas and charging them thousands of dollars at the time of recruitment, at least half of which would be worked off through free labor. When workers asked for their confiscated documents, or for their withheld pay, they were often threatened with guns, their families’ lives were threatened back in Mexico, and many were confined to remote trailers for days on end as punishment. The CIW shared the worker’s story, as well as further information on the ring’s operations, with federal authorities, and in 2016 an official federal investigation was launched. The CIW continued to work with agents to expand the government’s investigation to include the full-scope of the ring’s criminal wrongdoing, marking yet another major case in which the CIW helped to uncover — and assist the federal government in combatting — human trafficking in US agriculture.

The first of the two ProPublica pieces hones in on the experience of one farmworker, Sofi, who lived through some of the worst abuses documented in the criminal case. It is a long, and at times disturbing, read, but it is worth taking the time do to so in order to truly understand the horrors farmworkers outside the FFP all too often continue to face. 

The second piece takes a wider look at the H-2A guestworker program as a whole, providing critical insights into how forced labor can fester on farms outside the Fair Food Program’s proven protections, and highlighting the FFP as a singularly effective approach to enforcing the human rights of H-2A workers, backed by the purchasing power of the FFP’s 14 participating retailers, including some of the world’s largest food buyers. Through that wider lens, ProPublica’s lead reporter, Max Blau, reached out to Kroger, Wendy’s, and Publix for comment regarding their years-long refusal to join the FFP, and for their thoughts on corporations’ responsibility to protect workers’ human rights in their supply chains. He received no reply. 

We will be sharing more of ProPublica’s reports as they are published, including further reflections on this case. For now, we are including excerpts of the first two pieces below. If you’d like to read the first piece in its entirety, click here. To read the rest of the second piece, click here. Together, both pieces form an introduction to the sprawling Blooming Onion case, and amount to a five-alarm fire alert concerning the often deplorable conditions of farmworkers outside the industry-leading — and life-saving — protections of the FFP.

The H-2A Visa Trap

IN THE DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN, Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr. took the last drag of a cigarette and looked out from the staircase of a run-down motel. Underneath the stark floodlights streamed a procession of weary travelers in T-shirts and jeans, reaching into the bottom of a white coach bus for their oversize duffel bags. Mendoza had arranged for them to come on this 1,200-mile journey from northeastern Mexico to a rural stretch of Georgia’s blueberry country. Each of them had a work permit, which Mendoza had helped secure through a visa program called H-2A.

More foreigners than ever before were using the decades-old program, which lets them work for months or even several years on U.S. farms. Farmers and politicians have touted H-2A as an easy answer to a persistent labor problem: Americans are abandoning agriculture jobs and U.S. immigration policies are restricting access to undocumented workers. As recently as last month, President Donald Trump has floated the idea that if undocumented farmworkers returned home, they could come back to the U.S. “with a pass” to “legally” re-enter the country. But over the years, the promises of H-2A — such as humane working conditions, free housing and far better wages than back home — have been undermined by the relative ease of exploiting workers due to scant oversight of the program.

The busload of men and women who arrived that day in September 2018, like the others before and after, came with hopes of creating better lives for themselves and their families. Mendoza, through a network of recruiters in Mexico, had sold them on that hope. The recruiters touted the promises of a visa that, for many of them, would allow them to make more in a day than what they earned for a week of work in Mexico.

From his perch on the staircase, Mendoza was surveying a scene that held great promise for him, too. The arrival of this batch of workers marked the beginning of his first big job as a labor broker and the end of any lingering thoughts that he’d end up like his own mother and father, who’d brought him as a toddler from Mexico. They’d scraped together a living baling pine straw and packing blueberries. Mendoza, now 21, also had spent some time working in the fields. But he went on to attend college, dropping out so that he could focus on what he calculated to be a more lucrative prospect.

Around the time Mendoza was ramping up his business of bringing people over from Mexico, Georgia was more reliant on H-2A workers than any other state. He served as a gatekeeper, choosing which Mexican workers desperate for better pay would go to Georgia farms desperate for more laborers.

Beyond that, though, he had other ambitions related to this work. And he had plans for one worker in particular among this early batch…

Soft was not sent out to work in the fields like the others. Mendoza ignored what her contract said. He kept her by his side, and he gave her a different set of responsibilities. One was that she would accept wire transfers on his behalf from Mexico. Another was that she would write the checks to workers. She would not be paid for this work. She would not be paid at all.

Mendoza forced her to live at his house. While she was with him, he talked openly about his business and she paid attention. It was easy to begin piecing together how his operation worked. He was charging some applicants thousands of dollars for the chance to get an H-2A visa. She heard him speak with his contacts in Mexico, describing how he’d bring in more and more workers that the farmers didn’t actually need, just to get those up-front fees. He’d even bring her to meetings with King. It was an effort, she thought, to show off Mendoza’s power over her.

She recalled that Mendoza crammed a couple dozen people — workers and their children — into a trailer. She noticed that a few didn’t have enough money to eat. Sofi believed that the workers were being shorted. She remembered Mendoza occasionally picking up calls in the middle of the night, alerts that people were escaping.

Those calls reinforced for Sofi the feeling that she, on the other hand, couldn’t even try to flee. She didn’t have her passport. She didn’t know a single person she could turn to. She didn’t speak any English. And she was scared.

The lead investigator interviewing her had never heard of H-2A before. But Stagner had, from reading the news. Labor trafficking fell outside Stagner’s lane as a county investigator. But he’d spent time on an FBI task force and had worked with a federal prosecutor on a gang case. So he called to ask if the prosecutor might be interested.

As it happened, the prosecutor was working with several federal agents looking to build a case that exposed the trafficking of H-2A workers in Georgia. The agents had been following leads from an anti-trafficking organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that in 2015 had uncovered the abuses of harvesters at an onion farm near Vidalia. That collaboration enabled the agents to expand their investigation. They questioned farmers about their use of the H-2A program and surveilled labor contractors who seemed to have lied on visa applications.

Now the agents were poised to get data from phones that belonged to Mendoza. And they had a potential witness, one with firsthand knowledge of his alleged labor trafficking and one who could recount how she was held captive and brutalized for a year…

Read more from the first piece here.

Here is an excerpt from the second piece, which focuses on solutions to the entrenched human rights crisis outlined by the first: 

Employers Have Exploited and Abused H-2A Farmworkers for Years. It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way.

The H-2A visa program has long been touted as a way to ensure that farmers can access enough workers without hiring people who are undocumented. But for some migrant farmworkers seeking better-paying jobs in America, their seasonal gigs have morphed into a nightmare.

As a recent ProPublica story revealed, the promises of the H-2A visa program can be undermined by extreme abuses the workers suffer, mostly by labor contractors. Some workers have had their wages stolen and been threatened with deportation if they complain about unsafe work conditions, a federal investigation found. In the worst instances, others have been assaulted or raped or have even died. It’s gotten so bad that, in one of the largest H-2A criminal cases ever, a federal judge described the abuse of these workers as a form of modern-day slavery. And without further changes to the H-2A program, experts told ProPublica, foreign farmworkers may continue to be harmed…

Experts, lawyers and advocates told ProPublica that, unless more is done to protect workers, the instances of abuse and exploitation are likely to increase as well. They suggested a variety of ways to make the H-2A program safer and more humane…

… Get corporations on board with stopping abuse

There’s a growing movement centered on the idea that the power of consumers can be leveraged to end agricultural abuses.

After years of demanding better pay and protections from individual farmers and buyers, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers — the anti-trafficking organization that uncovered the first examples of abuse in the massive federal case — launched the Fair Food Program in 2010. Under the program, corporate buyers such as supermarkets and fast-food chains sign legally binding agreements to buy ethically sourced crops.

Participating buyers agree to purchase produce from farms that adhere to the program’s stringent set of protections for workers, let workers be informed about their rights by the CIW and allow independent auditors to investigate complaints from their fields. The buyers also agree to pay those growers a small premium that is passed down to their workers. If extreme abuses like forced labor are found on those farms, the buyers commit to suspending produce orders until the issues are addressed.

Some of America’s largest supermarkets (Walmart, Whole Foods) and fast-food chains (McDonald’s, Burger King) participate in the Fair Food Program. The corporations’ participation was originally limited to a select set of crops, such as tomatoes. Some of their commitments since have grown to include more crops. Other big buyers, like Kroger, Publix and Wendy’s, have not participated in the program. Spokespeople for the companies did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. Buyers who have not participated in the program have stated that it is the responsibility of their suppliers to ensure that workers are treated fairly.

The Fair Food Program has protected the rights of thousands of H-2A workers each year, according to the independent auditors, but that’s still less than a tenth of the more than 300,000 H-2A workers in the U.S. According to the CIW, the more buyers and growers embrace the program, the more likely it is that abuses of H-2A workers can be prevented.

Susan Marquis, a professor with Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, said the other ideas proposed by experts can help reduce the harms faced in the fields. But they don’t go as far as the Fair Food Program in stopping the kinds of violations that routinely happen in the H-2A program.

“It’s very clear, supported by the data, that nothing works to end forced labor except the Fair Food Program or some other variation of worker-driven social responsibility,” Marquis said…

Read more of the second piece here.

These are just the first pieces in the ongoing series from ProPublica. Stay tuned for more updates on ProPublica’s series!