At least three potato-packing workers in Colorado’s San Luis Valley were trafficked from Mexico into a forced-labor scheme, compelled to work for less than minimum wage, given little food and water, and housed in substandard conditions, the laborers allege in a federal lawsuit filed this month.
Armando Rubio Flores, Alfonso Angeles Hernandez and Israin Hernandez Jacobo filed the 50-page complaint Oct. 15 in U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado against J&T Harvesting LLC, a farm labor contractor from Texas. The lawsuit also names MountainKing Potatoes Inc. and Alpine Potato Company, which operate potato-packing warehouses in the San Luis Valley.
J&T Harvesting representatives could not be reached for comment. MountainKing Potatoes and Alpine Potato Company declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The three laborers were among a large group of agricultural workers who came to the United States in 2022 through the H-2A visa program, a federal work arrangement that allows American employers to hire seasonal foreign workers when they cannot find domestic laborers to do the job. H-2A visas only allow workers to work at a certain farm; they cannot be outsourced to another employer.
The workers’ job order stated they would be picking and planting crops at six different farms in and around Uvalde, Texas. Instead, J&T Harvesting instructed some 58 workers — including Flores, Hernandez and Jacobo — to board a bus to Colorado, where they would be working at potato-packing warehouses in the San Luis Valley, the complaint alleges.
Once in Colorado, the workers were packed eight people to a motel room — with just one mattress and box spring, the lawsuit states. Some workers were forced to sleep in the shuttered restaurant attached to the motel, according to the lawsuit.
Federal law requires H-2A employers to provide nearly everything for their workers, including food, housing and transportation to and from their countries of origin.
But J&T Harvesting did not provide food, water or money to these workers for more than three weeks after they arrived in the U.S., the complaint alleges. Many workers went into debt paying recruitment fees, travel expenses, visa costs and other expenses necessary to obtain their work permits, the lawsuit states.
Workers were forced to pool their money to buy cheap canned food that did not need to be cooked from the nearby Dollar Store. They ate only one meal a day in order to make their money and food last longer, the lawsuit claims.
At one point, a J&T employee offered $100 loans to the workers to buy food — money the contractor later deducted from the workers’ first paycheck, according to the lawsuit.
J&T later moved 30 workers into a five-bedroom house in the town of Center. The house had no beds or furniture and suffered from serious disrepair, the complaint states. All the workers had to provide their own bedding, and they were charged $100 a week to live there.
The workers — who were not authorized to work at the Colorado facilities — were tasked with sorting potatoes for MountainKing Potatoes and Alpine Potato Company. The companies, however, did not pay the federal or Colorado minimum wage, the workers allege.
Throughout their tenure, the companies used “manipulation, threats, intimidation and isolation to create a climate of fear” among the workers, the lawsuit alleges.
J&T confiscated workers’ passports when they arrived in the U.S., the workers allege, and threatened to deport laborers or report them to immigration authorities.
As bad as the situation was, continuing participation in the H-2A program was the utmost priority due to a lack of work opportunities back in Mexico, the workers said in the lawsuit.
On Nov. 17, 2022, the three workers secretly gathered their belongings and fled to a safe location. The potato companies continued to employ workers from J&T 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 states.
“They didn’t know where to turn,” said Jenifer Rodriguez, managing attorney of 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 with the H-2A workers tied to their employers through their H-2A visas without the option to find work elsewhere in the U.S. The added debt they were forced to incur and the restriction of their movements created a hopeless situation, making it seem impossible to find a way out.”
The Denver Post in September published a three-part investigation that found H-2A visa employers in Colorado routinely violate federal labor laws but hardly any are barred from bringing workers again the following season. Workers commonly suffer from wage theft, threats and substandard living conditions, The Post found. Yet many keep their mouths shut and return to Colorado year after year because they lack sufficient opportunity back home.
State regulators, meanwhile, have rarely used a mechanism in their disposal to boot abusive employers from bringing migrant workers.
Colorado’s agricultural workforce has, over the past two decades, increasingly come from abroad as local farmers say they cannot find American workers to toil the fields.
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