With President Donald Trump back in office, the porous borders are once again being fortified. Perhaps now attention can finally be turned to American employers who deliberately court illegal aliens to serve as modern-day indentured servants. A civil has begun in Michigan that may shed some light on how big farms in the US treat their cheap, foreign labor.
MLive reported on May 25: “Five Guatemalan workers claim Purpose Point Harvesting LLC coerced them into working long hours in Michigan fields by confiscating their passports, underpaying them and threatening them with retaliation from 2017 to 2019.”
That Will Disclose What Everybody Knows
The charges go to the heart of the thriving illegal alien shadow world that advocates of the “undocumented” fully realize is only made possible by mass migration. “We know that this is the tip of the iceberg that we’re dealing with right here,” said Kenya Davis, an attorney with prestigious law firm Boies Schiller Flexner who is representing the migrants involved in conjunction with the pro-illegal alien Migrant Legal Aid organization.
They know it. Yet they still consider efforts to remove illegal aliens – the essential component to keeping this sinister racket humming – from America to be an act of “hate.”
“For over 45 years, Migrant Legal Aid has built trust with migrant workers through outreach and counsel,” a Defending Against Hate page on the Migrant Legal Aid website states. “Now more than ever, workers tell us about their fears – of physical violence, of their children’s safety, of losing their rights, and of [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement].”
The big farms are certainly happy to have them in the country.
Purpose Point Harvesting is a “contractor that staffs farms with H-2A workers,” MLive notes. That means it uses a special federal visa program to bring “temporary agriculture workers” into the US. This is the same program that opponents of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation plead must be expanded lest America starve for lack of farm hands to pick the vegetables.
“[T[]he H-2A program has rapidly expanded,” the news site observes. “The number of workers quadrupled within the last decade as farms increasingly lean on foreign labor. In Michigan, federal data shows that the number of workers jumped from 8,800 to 13,418 in the past five years.”
The charges made against Purpose Point may provide fresh insight on how ugly this vast importation of cheap labor can be. The company denies all wrongdoing, and there has been no settlement. Which means it goes to a federal courtroom, “a rare case of alleged labor trafficking to go before a jury,” MLive points out.
“According to court documents [in the case], the workers were charged $2,500 each in illegal recruitment fees before leaving Guatemala, a debt that tied them to their employer,” Detroit Metro Times reports.
If true, that is the literal definition of indentured servitude. The migrants also claim they were overworked and ripped off.
“Some days, the plaintiffs say they worked 20 hours a day, from 2 am to 10 pm, harvesting fruits and vegetables. They had to buy headlamps so that they could work in the dark, the lawsuit claims,” MLive writes. “Even with 100-hour work weeks, the workers were allegedly only paid for 60 hours at most. This meant workers earned $8.10 an hour – much lower than the legal wage rate for the H-2A program.”
Regardless of how the trial plays out, the dirty little secret everyone is aware of is that the H-2A program is incredibly easy to abuse.
Illegal Aliens Dying on the Onion Farm
In November 2021, ICE announced a series of indictments in “Operation Blooming Onion,” a crackdown on the exploitation of illegal alien labor at onion farms. The same MO alleged in Michigan was on display here.
“According to the indictment, the conspirators required the workers to pay unlawful fees for transportation, food, and housing while illegally withholding their travel and identification documents and subjected the workers ‘to perform physically demanding work for little or no pay, housing them in crowded, unsanitary, and degrading living conditions, and by threatening them with deportation and violence,’” ICE stated.
This is the true face of “the jobs Americans won’t do”: Sexual assault, human bondage, and death.
“The conspirators are accused of raping, kidnapping and threatening or attempting to kill some of the workers or their families, and in many cases sold or traded the workers to other conspirators. At least two of the workers died as a result of workplace conditions,” an ICE statement continued.
Where did this happen?
“These activities took place within Georgia, Florida, Texas, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and elsewhere,” ICE details. There is your pipeline to America’s industrial-scale farms.
How was it able to flourish?
“The indictment alleges that the conspirators and their associates ‘engaged in mail fraud, international forced labor trafficking, and money laundering, among other crimes,’ fraudulently using the H-2A work visa program to smuggle foreign nationals from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras into the United States under the pretext of serving as agricultural workers,” the ICE release read.
Four people were eventually convicted and sentenced to actual prison time, with one man, Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr., 24, of Jesup, Georgia, receiving a term of 30 years in a federal penitentiary after pleading guilty to Conspiracy to Engage in Forced Labor.
The key question today is why isn’t this illegal labor pipeline being ruthlessly targeted as a core function of the Trump mass deportation operation? Lawyers for the Michigan migrants say federal officials routinely tip off the big farms before they arrive.
“The Department of Labor investigators could be more aggressive with this,” Migrant Legal Aid attorney Teresa Hendricks told Detroit Metro Times. “But in my experience, they pre-announce when they are going to inspect a place. In western Michigan, that has been the case each time with Purpose Point. Each time they were alerted with a lot of advance notice.”
Step one in ending this 21st-century Dickensian nightmare is taking back control of America’s porous borders. Step two is the arrest, conviction, and incarceration of the employers of illegal aliens.
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