Futuro Investigatsuro Investila. When Diego and Mario planned their escape, they knew they'd have to do it in the middle of the night.
The city.
Stamenos Bhilao or Los car de la Casa.
When the bosses were less vigilant and when all the other workers were in their rooms sleeping. It was a warm night in May twenty eighteen, in a town near Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina. It was eerily quiet. As they each packed a single bag, they couldn't carry much on their long walk in the dark, so they only took some of the clothes they had brought with them from Mexico.
Na Massa Ramovlo in Dispensalle, but Noya mar La Tenion de Tolos.
Diego and Mario had only walked the dirt road out of the camp once before, and it was during the day. It could be risk getting out to the main road at night. Two guys alone who were not from there, they could seem suspicious.
They were terrified.
Salimo Como poquel Espuru Campo.
Caminas assisting lamp.
They walked in the dark, using their cell phones to light up the way. Scraggly brambles with thorns lined their path, taking every step with trepidation, knowing that the snakes they'd seen before could be nearby.
Jack Uando.
Esperan moment position Timosella.
Once they were close to the main road, they spotted the getaway car. The people who had promised to help them escape were actually there. Diego and Mario were overcome with relief. They were finally safe.
For in Salimos Cilos.
They had walked away from the nightmare they experienced working in a US farm as part of a government program from Futuro Investigates and Latino USA in collaboration with PRISM, am Fernando echavarri in for our host Marie Jjosa. For the next two episodes, I, along with Tina Vasquez, editor at Large at PRISM, will tell you about the increasing and systematic abuse of temporary migrant laborers who are critical to the US economy.
We're talking about the hundreds of thousands of farm workers who come to work our fields every year with work visas under the US government's H two a program, a program where Diego and Mariosa expectations don't match reality.
That is a NASA.
It's the back own of our agricultural industry, and yet these workers we desperately rely on are constantly mistreated.
In a recent and very extreme case of abuse, an official from the Department of Justice called what happened to workers quote modern day slavery. The structure is certainly akin to indenture servitude.
There's a pretty glaring disparity between the program on paper and what happens in practice.
Are we going to just keep on this path because farmers are saying they need the labor.
You're literally buying people to come do terrible work.
Terrible work.
In the simplest of terms, Here's how the HTA program works us farmers. And this can be a mom and pop citrus orchard or a massive corporation harvesting tons of cherries. They go to the Department of Labor and they say, hey, I can't get you as workers to do this very physically demanding jobs, so I need permission to I don't know,
one hundred foreign workers. Then the Department of Labor says, okay, if you promise to pay them what the DL and what your state require, and you give them a place to live, you can have those visas.
The employer hires a recruiting company or a labor contractor, or they just reach out to folks they've worked with in the past to hire the workers they need. The employer files some paperwork with US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and then things move pretty fast.
The number of H to A workers has more than tripled in the last decade. Just last year, more than three hundred thousand workers came to the US in this way. About ninety percent of them are from Mexico, and the workers, mostly men, get their visas in Mexico right before they get on a packed bus that takes them north. The trip can take days, and their employer in the US should reimburse them for that travel. The job usually lasts six to nine months, no longer than a year.
There's something about the employers that I want you to keep in mind. As a work visa, the HTWOA visas tie workers to their employer. So if their employer isn't paying them or is offering them inadequate housing or no food, the worker can't go find a better job because quitting means not only losing their visa, but their ability to legally remain in the United States. In the case of the HTOA program, losing The visa also strips workers from housing, meals,
basic stuff. A worker can pretty much end up in the streets.
For years now, this program has intrigued TENA and I because of its complexity. On one hand, it is beneficial for entire families in Mexico. Workers can make double or triple what they would make on a Mexican farm, and they don't have to risk crossing into the US own lawfully. But on the other hand, the program is exploitative and full of dangerous power dynamics. Employers have pretty much all the control.
Once the visa expires, the laborers are required to return home.
At least one hundred immigrant workers were freed from conditions in which two people died.
In theory, workers have some protections against retaliation, but in practice, if they complain, they can easily get fired. There's this unspoken expectation of the workers, put your head down, do the work, don't complain.
Over the years, we've spoken with workers on both sides of the border.
And Lakaye there spoils that can ascore.
You know, travel to Mexico to see where it all begins.
Investigated in Washington State and North Carolina.
We're headed to I guess it's near North Carolina and.
Spoke to government officials about exploitation of the program.
They are stuck, absolutely stuck.
We uncovered crucial documents. I just wanted to let you know, but I got some records.
Back, records that show, oh, how the US government holds millions, yes, millions of dollars in wages owed to h to A workers and yet has no clear plans or timeline for how to pay them back. And despite all of the issues with the H two A visas, the Biden administration is in talks to expand the program. We'll get into it in our two parts special head Down.
Oh.
We met Diego and Mario last summer. These are not their real names. They've asked us to protect their identities because even though they're no longer h to A workers, they still fear retaliation from people associated with the program. So if we sound a little vague on certain parts of the story, that's why Madio is thirty six and Diego is twenty nine. They have been close friends for over a decade. They met working at a bakery in Sea othern Mexico.
Join us Intestava and Prepa.
Diego says he was still in high school when he learned how to bake bread from Mario. They're more than friends at this point, they're like brothers really. Diego is an extrovert who loves electronic music and dressing like famous soccer players with flashy tennis shoes and skinny jeans. He also has a remarkable memory, a detail that would be key to their escape. Mario is more serious and shy one of the two, but when he opens up, he
gets easily emotional. They come from indigenous communities and they're both the eldest of three siblings.
Only news.
Mario comes from a remote area where Spanish is not the predominant language in his hometown. The nearest school was a two hour walk away from his home, so instead of getting an education, he had to start working as a child.
Estuyadio dos est Mario wanted his kids to have a different life, so he moved with his wife and their two children to a bigger city.
That's where he met Diego at the bakery. Mario wasn't earning much, just enough to build a small house out of sheet metals. One night in early twenty eighteen, Mario and his wife had a very serious conversation. They were frustrated because heavy rains flooded their home and their kids kept getting sick in.
The cold Lady me and sposas, so.
He asked his wife, could we ever live in a better house? The only option they can think of at the time was to seek work in the United States. Mario knew a guy in a nearby town who recruited men to legally work in the fields. He thought it sounded like a good idea, so he tried to get Diego interested.
Oh yeah, mera tengos.
The plan is kiro ji yai formase the ira combisa contra talos.
Diego had never really thought about leaving Mexico. He had a wife and a five year old daughter, but he only made sixty dollars a week.
Although he really liked his job at the bakery.
Like Mario, Diego also dreamed of building his own house one day and maybe even owning a bakery, so he got on board with the idea the.
Campo.
The recruiter told them that men from rural areas did well because they knew how to work the land. Both Diego and Mario grew up harvesting coffee and corn, so they checked that box, and like most HTAY workers, Diego and Mario were also in the prime of their lives, young, fit, healthy. They now just needed to get a Mexican passport, which they had never done before.
Josovia Kenrato kJ Tempo de Travajo the ins almost para Mexico.
What appealed to them about this plan was that they could come back home to Mexico. It was a six month job, so they figured why not. But there was one problem. Mario needed twenty five hundred dollars or thirty thousand pesos, because the recruiter claimed these funds would quote save their seats and put their name on a list. And if twenty five hundred dollars sounds like a lot of money to you, it's an inconceivable amount for someone
in rural Mexico. By the way, this fee is completely illegal and not how the program is supposed to work at all. But this I need money to save your seat thing, it happens all the time. Diego and Mario didn't know that what the recruiter was demanding was illegal.
Diebemana buscano aken' in pel.
So.
Mario spent a week trying to borrow twenty five hundred dollars. Finally, some relatives loaned him the cash with interest.
Of course, same with Diego.
They both figured, once we get paid US dollars, we'll quickly pay back the loans. They were set to leave for a place they'd never even heard of before, North Carolina.
Is que.
Es.
This is Valaria, Diego's wife. That's not her real name. We're also protecting her identity. She's petite and wears her black hair pulled back in a pony tail.
She's almost always smiling.
She says that just days before Diego was about to leave for the US, the month she started feeling sick. So she goes to the doctor.
Nick Amasa, you go.
And the doctor tells her that she's pregnant.
Always guess they were conflicted.
Diego is headed to North Carolina to finally make good money, the kind of money he needed more than ever now that his family was expanding. But he didn't want to leave Valeria pregnant and alone with their.
Daughter in Lelo per Puis contract.
Valeria told Diego they couldn't pass in on opportunity like this. They were just going to have to push through the next six months apart.
Around that time. In twenty eighteen, when Diego and Mattio first entered the h to A program, there was a historic growth taking place. Data shows that from twenty sixteen to twenty nineteen, during the Trump presidency, the number of h TOA visas spiked by forty five percent. This may be in part because of Trump's immigration crackdown and workplace rates that targeted undocumented workers. Employers turned to the h to A program out of fear that their farms could
be raided. At a rally in twenty eighteen, Trump spoke about protecting American jobs, and then he said that farmers were going to get workers.
They're going to be guest workers.
They're going to come in, they're going to work on your farms. We're gonna have a lot of things happening.
But then they have to go out. Then they have to go out.
The crowd only cheered when they heard that the workers would have to leave. It's kind of like, hey, we want workers. We don't want families or parents or students. We don't want them in our communities. We just want workers. This disposable way of talking about migrant workers was not just a Trump thing. It's kind of baked into how
the h TOA program has and continues to operate. According to h TOA workers advocates and decades of data addressing stolen wages, horrible living quarters, and dangerous working conditions, it's just not a priority for the program. The real focus is getting employers the workers they need, no matter the cost. To illustrate just how much we rely on these temporary workers.
Thousands of people are self quarantining at home after they may have come in contact with the coronaviruce.
Across the country, health officials are rapidly trying to ramp up their testing and contain the spread.
When the pandemic hit in early twenty twenty, when the United States closed its borders, there was one major exception. The US not only continued issuing h TOWA visas, it made the process of getting them easier.
They're going to come in and they're going to be given a certain pass, and we're going to check them very very closely, especially over the next month. I've given the commitment to the farmers they're going to continue to come.
We couldn't eat without them. We still can't. It's been like that for decades, Ever since the US needed to address labor shortages during World War Two.
It isn't easy to find men willing to take on such undesirable kinds of work. Understandably, then the American farm labor supply falls short and is supplemented by Mexican citizens.
This has become the way of farming in the United States. We've spoken with farmers, growers, and leaders in the agriculture industry who say this is the only legal means they have to secure the labor they need to harvest their fields.
I speak with growers around the country. They have had to leave apples on the trees to rot because they couldn't get enough workers to harvest them.
That's Jim Blair, president of the US Apple Association.
Using the h toa program. Even it's cumbersome and expensive and difficult to navigate, they're willing to do it just because of the certainty of knowing that their labor supply is legal and it's not going to put the grower in any kind of legal jeopardy.
Well, we know that there are many instances in which workers and agricultural employers both benefit from these temporary visas. Diego and Mario faced terrible conditions that are not that uncommon. They were supposed to fall in line with those that came before them. Keep your head down, do the work, don't complain, but they didn't. After the break, we traveled to the epicenter of this temporary visa program in Mexico and learn about one of the most nefarious players in
the program. That's coming up next on Latino USA. Stay with us. Hey, we're back. I'm Fernando Chavarri in for Marino Josa. It was twenty eighteen when Diego and Mario left their small town in Mexico to go to North Carolina with their new guest worker visas. That year, there
were a record number of h TWA visas issued. This is the only category of temporary work visas without a limit, and there were hints of just how this program was exploding when I was in Monterrey, also in the spring of twenty eighteen, about a month before Theegu and Madio were instructed by their recruiter to travel there. Monterrey is about three hours south of the US border in the state of New Boleons, which has the third largest economy in Mexico. It is the hub for h to A visas.
The epicenter of the program. That's where workers usually go to their appointments at the US consulate and then head north.
Those are workers.
We're just driving through this not very busy street, and there are dozens and dozens and dozens of men, some with suitcases, yes, just kind of hanging out outside of a hotel and then on the street. Even though I knew that every year thousands and thousands of temporary agricultural workers traveled to the US, it was still shocking to
see it like this. That April in twenty eighteen, according to the State Department, more than thirty two thousand, h TWA visas were issued in Mexico, and most of them were granted right here in Monterrey. That's about an average of seven hundred and fifty workers getting a visa each day during that month, and since then the program has only gotten bigger. In April of last year, more than forty two thousand of these visas were issued in Mexico.
That's about a thirty two percent increase from when I was there four years prior. I walked to the plaza where many of the workers gather after doing their morning interviews with consulate officials. This is where they get their prized visas.
From their recruiters.
The recruiters show up with these big plastic bins like where you would store Christmas decorations, and they are just packed with passports. They start pulling them out and calling Kose Juan Luis, and the men just come up, have their passports with the rolling suitcase in hand, and they walk straight to one of the greyhound like buses that are about to take them to the US. It happens that quickly. Some of the first timers that I talked to, I didn't even know where in the US they were going.
When I asked them where they were headache. They had to pull out their passport and flip it over just so they could read this text on this little white sticker that said Oklahoma or Florida. Some of them were clearly nebies because they were wearing skin tight jeans to be on a bus ride for days. And while twenty eighteen seems like a lifetime ago, some things remain the same today. Monterrey is still the world's hub for H two A workers, and the large majority of those workers
are still men from Mexico. But the pandemic did change a few things.
There's a really.
Stark contrast between the scene in Monterey prean post.
COVID works with the biinational nonprofits Centro the Los re Jos Miante or CDM, which in English would be centered for migrants rights. She says that it's become a lot harder to reach workers now.
Workers are no longer getting their fingerprints taken or their photos taken up the government office.
For years, CDM had done know your Rights presentations to workers near the plaza while they waited outside the US government office where they got their photographs and fingerprints taken. But now the workers don't have to go there because the US has waived that requirement.
That means that we.
Needed to go to hotels to reach out to them.
And the US government didn't just stop requesting fingerprints and photos. They also waived the in person interviews at consulates abroad. Evi says that while this made sense at the start of the pandemic three years ago, it makes no sense to not have face to face interviews with consulate officials today.
Costular officers would awesome if they had paid fees or face of the recruitment abuse. This means that there are hundreds of thousands of workers who are traveling to the US, many of them for the first time, don't know what their rights are.
According to CDM, fewer than ten percent of the workers are doing in person visa interviews right now, something that's incredibly unusual for the US immigration system. And this void of information from government officials leaves room for recruiters to take advantage of workers.
The US government's EASTOP requirements to make it easier for employers and recruiters to hire workers, but they didn't increase protections or workers. They did it at the expense of workers were putting their lives on the line.
We asked a State Department official at the consulate in Monterey for the percentage of workers who are getting in person interviews, but he wouldn't tell us. He would only say that the workers are quote coming in every day for interviews based on quote certain criteria. Mexico and Central America, like in the US, the pandemic brought massive unemployment, so an already desperate population of workers became even more so, and that resulted in recruiters charging even higher fees.
So let's talk about those recruiters.
Recruiters are a critical part of the system because they hold so much power, they basically get to say who gets to apply for a visa and who does it. I remember in twenty eighteen, my sources warned me to be careful when I went to Monterrey because recruiters don't like to see anyone asking their workers' questions. I mean, are from Minos's visas, even without a presid or any of my recording equipment. When I, a five foot tall Mexican woman, casually approached a group of workers, they didn't
want to talk to me. When some of them did, they told me everything was great and that they didn't pay a recruiter for anything. Essentially that mentality I was talking about, of put your head down, do the work and don't complain. It starts here in Mexico, far from US farms and away from US government's oversight. And Diego and Mario, the best friends from rural Mexico, they saw this firsthand.
Diego said that back in twenty eighteen, they were in a hotel in Monterey with the recruiter and about three hundred other workers.
Uno de los patrone jego a ya Monterrey Esperanos in a hotel Paraos casi.
They said, nosbro copeno.
S S. S.
Diego calls him the boss. He was Mexican American, about thirty years old and had sort of a makeshift office set up in the hotel. He called all the men to a meeting and told them not to worry, that he was going to make sure that they got a work contract with a US farm. But the recruiter also said something that was unsettling to.
Diego, Miss Monosier.
As they prepare to go to their.
Interviews at the US Consulate, the recruiter instructs the group not to tell US officials that they had given him any money, to say that.
They hadn't paid him a fee.
Que.
Diego says that's when the real fear kicked in. He was nervous, so he did what the recruiter told him.
He lavisa.
During the interview at the US Consulate, Diego was asked if it was his first time coming to the US. He answered yes. He was then asked if he had ever crossed the border without authorization. He answered no, both true. Finally, he was asked if he paid for the H two A visa as instructed.
He answered no.
Later that day, Diego and Mario got their visa. Says they felt a huge sense of relief.
Know them those gen.
Canzilmentar, kipps Algusta Aman.
Everything seemed legit.
Diego says he was about to start legally working in the US as part of a government program. It would have never occurred to him to even think that things would be so bad that he and Mario would have to escape.
A core issue with the H two A program is the lack of oversight in general, but especially when it comes to recruiters. There is no public database of recruiters, and recruiters don't have to register with any government agency, not in Mexico and not.
In the US.
This is how it usually goes. Farmers in the US get labor contractors, often Mexican nationals, who hire recruiters in Mexico. Advocates warned that this process ends up preventing farmers from facing direct liability in case of wrongdoing during the recruitment process in Mexico, because the employers here in the US can say, well, I hired a third party to get me the workers. I didn't do anything wrong. So on
the recruitment side, it all seems very informal. Even though all US employers are required to sign a statement from the US Department of Labor acknowledging that recruiter fees are prohibited. This lack of transparency and accountability leaves workers extremely vulnerable
to abuse. In twenty eighteen, Diego and Madiu's recruitment fees of twenty five hundred dollars were considered outrageous, but we discovered that there are recent cases in which workers have paid up to six thousand dollars in illegal recruitment fees.
The State Department official in Monterrey's consulate told us that the illegal recruitment fees they hear about most frequently are about two thousand dollars, but they can go up to five and that there are these other extreme cases of fraud when a recruiter takes money from someone and there's actually no age to a job for them. The State Department said they've heard of people losing as much as
eight thousand dollars as part of these elaborate schemes. And to make matters worse, there's, of course the internet.
SPECIALIFA and RAT.
While I was reporting in Monterey, I came across this video from a Facebook profile called Cervisius Migratorius USA Migratory Services USA a page that advertises visa processing services. It says that they can get people who have been deported a pardon and a temporary worker visa, which is impossible because one of the requirements for people to get h to a visas is to not have been in the US illegally. The woman in this video sounds like a computer generated voice with an accent from Spain.
Books.
The page advertised visa fairs in different cities across Mexico. One of them was in a hotel in the northern city of Durango. So we called the hotel to ask ol I want to.
Start this Estoria mandover in Casalon.
The man at the front desk who answered the phone told us, oh, miss, you're like the sixth person that's called asking about this, but nothing is booked here. We don't even have a conference room in this hotel where
this could happen. He also told us that he had gotten a call from someone inquiring about possibly setting up a table in the lobby, but the hotel told them no. So naturally we sent someone to check out this quote unquote visa fair, and it turns out that it was just two women sitting in the hotel restaurant with a laptop collecting five hundred pisos about twenty five dollars from the people who had made appointments via Facebook, and today
that Facebook page isn't active, but we found others like it. And Ibipena with the Migrant rights group CDM told us that since the pandemic, the amount of scams in fraud taking place online is worse than she's ever seen. Some advocates say that creating a bi national framework for their recruitment process is necessary, otherwise you end up with scams, false promises, labor trafficking threats. Meanwhile, Mexico and the US
keep throwing the hot potato around. Mexico says, oh, it's a US company doing this in Mexico, so Mexico has no responsibility, or the US says, well, this is happening in Mexico, so there's no place for us to investigate. It's important to note that there are big recruitment agencies used by farmers and growers that are legitimate businesses. They're hired by US companies and they don't charge illegal fees to the workers because they make their money from the
US companies that hire them. It's also worth mention that I've met with Mexican officials at a couple of state government agencies who are trying to educate communities about visa fraud so that they don't fall victims and end up in debt. But that's simply not enough. As one official
told me, they're constantly playing catch up. These bad apples are popping up everywhere, and this is especially troubling because the program's rapid growth means that there are more opportunities for fragilent companies to scam.
Workers see quent Taos.
Before I left Monterey, I stopped by a small shelter not far from the main plaza. This was a place where men who ran out of money could go while they waited for their visas. I talked to workers who were doing this for the third or fourth time. They seem to know what they were getting into. Two of them told me that they made thirteen dollars an hour in Louisiana and that it was good money even after taxes,
but leaving their families was extremely painful. Will Then, as I was walking out, a soft spoken man said he wanted to be interviewed.
Garcia.
Omar, like the other two men I talked about the shelter, had gone to his interview at the US Consulate that morning, but they denied his visa because he admitted that he had previously lived in the US without status is to be That's something that disqualifies you from this program. And the recruiter should have known this information, but he still told Omar to travel to Monterey. This is yet another way that recruiters scam people by setting them up to fail and taking their money.
It's the from Castigo.
Okay.
Then Omar was devastated to be stuck in Monterey, far away from home, with the money he had saved, then borrowed gone. But what said in him was not that he didn't get to go to the US. It was that there aren't real opportunities here in such a beautiful country, he says. Coming up on Latino, USA, we continued Diego and Mario's journey as they arrived in the nightmare that was North Carolina.
I mean, if I were Diego Mario, I don't know what I would have done. I think that they had kind of they were pretty desperate.
That's after the break stay with us.
Hey, we're back.
I'm Fernande Chavarri in for Mari, Nojosa and Tina. I'd like for you to take us back to Diego and Mario story.
It's twenty eighteen and Diego and Mario are headed to their first official jobs as h two A workers. Getting there takes almost two days, and they're traveling on a cramped bus that takes them from to North Carolina. All they know at this point is that they've been promised well paying jobs and room and board, But soon after they arrive, things start to fall apart. Before their new employer takes them and other workers to the labor camp, there's this sort of unexpected off site meeting.
In No.
Si Ali and uh kias caparse kera imposile.
The bosses very clearly threatened Diego, Mario and the hundreds of other workers there. If you dare leave this job, we will inform immigration authorities and they will come to get you wherever you are.
Thenmos marel talondo the substam rambozostamos.
Right then and there, workers were required to sign a document falsely confirming that the employer reimbursed them the money they spent for their visa and travel expenses from Monterrey to North Carolina. This is illegal, of course, the H two A program's rules are very clear. The employer pays for all costs, including travel, visas and housing in the US. Later that day, when Diego and Mario arrived at the labor camp, things got even worse.
They said, well, come see nice to Nakasa. Nice in Nagasa.
Diego still remembers the house they were going to live in, abandoned and filthy with dirty mattresses. His first impulse was to take pictures with his.
Cell phone.
Personas and.
The house was already occupied by forty other workers. When Diego and Mario arrived. There was no hot water, the bathrooms didn't have any doors, and there was a bucket in the shower. The fridge was the only working aplacellance in the house, just one fridge for forty men. If the awful labor camp wasn't enough for Diego and Mario, there was also the issue of food. Someone from the farm took the workers to the grocery store, but it only happened twice in eight days. Diego and Mario bought
ingredients to make ham and cheese, sandwiches. But after that they were basically out of money that they borrowed in Mexico.
And Mexico, and they weren't alone.
Some workers at the camp pulled their money together to buy food they were starving. Others walked the main road near the camp, stopping cars and offering to work in exchange for food. And there was even this one time when food vendors arrived in the labor camp with freshly made towards us. Diego and Mario thought they were finally going to eat a warm meal, but the food was for sale and they had no money, And then they realized that there was not a lot of work to do.
The whole point of being in North Carolina was to work. But Diego and Mario heard from men who arrived before them that they hadn't even worked.
In two weeks.
Dijonas Manos, manas Ajos, p.
Ian and Masi, the recruiter in Mexico, had assured Diego and Mario that they would receive an hourly wage.
This was another lie.
Once at the farm in North Carolina, they were told they'd be paid by the volume of blueberries they picked. A full bucket of fruit was worth two dollars and fifty cents illegal, but who's counting.
Adding to all of this chaos.
The blueberries they were there to pick weren't even ready to be harvested, so it was impossible to make money.
Ye go on.
After a long day of work that started at five am, Diego earned ten dollars. In four days, he made around forty five dollars less than what he made at the bakery at.
Home if there was time.
The workers spent standing around waiting for work that was supposed to be compensable time. They were supposed to get paid for that, but that didn't happen. And remember, Diego and Mario went into debt for this job. When Mario told his wife about all of this, she said there wasn't much that they.
Could Doosa loke sam obibian.
She basically resigned herself to the idea that Mario had to endure all of this because they were poor.
Book is almost Both Diego and.
Mario were furious, and they were also starting to get desperate, so they called the recruit were back in Mexico to ask what was going on. The recruiter explained that they were promised hourly wages because that was the only way the US Consulate would approve their visas. Reality was really starting to set in. Now they had thousands of dollars to pay back, and it was clear that they weren't going to make the wages they were promised.
They started to regret everything.
Do you guys say, come on?
Diego says that even though they never had much in Mexico, this this was the first time they were going hungry.
And i'll, i'll.
They felt like prisoners and.
If they didn't do what they were told to do, the bosses threatened to take away their passports to keep them from running away like other workers in other camps.
Lo this is most Dama.
Five years later, it's still hard for Diego and Mario to bring up these memories. How could this have happened to them under a US government program?
Okay, so we got gash, I gave you the receipt right.
Yes.
It's October fifth, twenty twenty two, and I'm an Aaron Jacobson's car about to leave Raleigh. Aaron Jacobson is a supervising attorney for Legal Aid of North Carolina's farm Worker Unit, and he's also one of Diego and Mario's lawyers.
There's there's some camps down like in far southeast.
That are like, probably he's driving us to get as close as we can to the labor camp where Diego and Mario escaped. Aaron doesn't really fit the stereotype of what an attorney looks like. He has a long beard and long gray hair that he ties back. He was a farm worker organizer before becoming a lawyer. Aaron was instrumental in Diego on Mario's escape. He still remembers the day he first learned what was going on at the labor camp. In May of twenty eighteen.
We can get a call for a worker. We got a call from a sister organization that said you need to get out of his labor camp, like and soon. The report we got from them was that there were farm workers walking the streets begging to work for food. And we were like, like, what.
Those were Diego and Mario's co workers who had begged for food. So Aaron and his team drove out there. Employers don't allow farm worker advocates like him to talk to workers in the fields, so he goes to their housing and so.
A lot of times we'll learn about abuses, but very often, workers still will not want to take any action because I think they're just doing like a call benefit analysis in their heads, and like, you know, I could report this, but then I could get fired. I get fired. That's going to be a hardship.
And this is where the power imbalance between employer and worker gets even worse. If you get fired and don't leave the country immediately, you would become undocumented. So what's to stop an employer from retaliating against you by calling ice. Aaron is used to farm workers not wanting to speak up, and that's how it was at the blueberry farm. As he told the workers how the program was supposed to work, no response. Mario remembers, no one wanted to say anything.
So then Mario's got up in the middle of the room. He said, I'm probably getting in trouble for saying this, but that's not what's going on here, and that's kind of like almost unheard of, and so I remember, I leave it. I bet we're going to get a call from him.
Diego and Mario scheduled an in person meeting with Aaron, but it was going to be difficult to pull off because they were always being watched. So They said they were going to go out and buy some food, and that's when they met up with Aaron. They were still a little unsure about him, could they really trust him. It was only when they were sitting with Aaron in a truck stop by the side of the road that Diego and Mario began to fully understand this massive illegal
scheme they'd been funneled into. In reality, Mario and Diego had been trafficked. They were brought to the US through deception. The fees were illegal, They were lied to about their contracts. They were forced to as sign documents that falsely stated the employer had reimbursed them for fees, hotel, transportation, and food. The conditions they were housed in were legal. Being paid a severely low wage by the buck instead of hourly
also illegal. Aaron explained that they had a strong case and that they could sue their employer for labor trafficking, but first they had to escape.
I said, look, right now, she might be eligible for immigration remedy based on the labor trafficking you've survived. However, if you want to pursue that remedy, you have to stay in the country, So it takes you know more than a year.
That's the real crux of the problem with this program. Even though they were fling starvation, labor trafficking and everything else, it was Mario and Diego who had the most to lose, not the employer, not the recruiter, the victims. They could apply for a visa for victims of trafficking, but they'd have to wait in the US without any legal status. So forget about working and providing for their families back home,
forget about meeting your newborn. Despite the risks and the heartbreak, they decided to do it.
I mean, if I were Diego Mario, I don't know what I would have done. I think that they had kind of they were pretty desperate.
Aaron knew that if Diego and Mario stayed around for another day and waited until payday, that they could prove wage theft on top of everything else that happened, and that they'd have a stronger case.
So the evening after payday.
Diego was like, what's happened to me? Like at eleven pm Saturday night. He was kind of like the evidence collector of the group, So he had got everyone's pay stubs and took photos.
That night Diego and Mario walked down the dirt path out to the main road. An advocate who worked with Aaron picked them up. They'd only been in the US for eight days and their lives were totally derailed. Being there now, all these years later, I tried to imagine what it was like for them. I feel like anxiety in my chest, Like I'm really worried that somebody is going to come out of one of these trailers and be.
Like, what are you doing kind of thing.
I mean, this is the South, after all, a lot of people have guns and they don't really take kindly to strangers trespassing on their property.
After two weeks at.
The Blueberry farm, Mario and Diego escaped the labor camp around midnight in May of twenty eighteen, and they didn't even know the name of the North Carolina town that they were in. We're getting close to the labor camp where Diego and Mario were kept.
I think this is okay.
This is busier than I thought.
Like there's stuff closer than I thought there would be.
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of little houses. Yeah, I guess there's no like stores really nearby.
This is the road that workers were walking on asking for food.
I think that's great.
Damn. The main road is very busy.
Cars whiz by constantly, and right around where we stop we can see a church and an elementary school in the distance. But Diego and Mario were housed in a remote area off this main road. Standing there, I knew that I would never think of labor trafficking the same Again, this was all happening right in our backyards. Aaron advised us not to get much closer to the labor camp. We couldn't even access it by car, so we decided to leave.
Diego and Mario are just two of the thousands of workers who fall victim to abuse and fraud in the H twoa program every year. Remember just last year, more than a quarter million workers came here this way, expected to put their heads down, do the work, and not.
Complain the Formacon Coles Public.
Dico says there's a need for government officials in both countries to use social media, the radio, TV, any means necessary to educate folks about their rights. If they did that, he says, maybe there'd be less abuse. While there are government officials who oversee the program, and there are avenues to report abuses. It is far from enough, and we're going to get to all of that in the next episode.
There's a pretty glaring disparity between the program on paper and what happens in practice.
Aaron says recently he's gotten more calls about stories like Diego and Mario's.
It's kind of alarming. We're hearing more accounts that are very similar to that, involving password confiscation, threats of deportation.
Threats like the ones Diego and Mario received from the recruiter even after they escaped.
Then Darle mazin Neto in tempos Perian been tissing Camil Pesos mass but Nilo.
They were threatened twice. First, right after they escaped, the recruiter demanded that they pay thirteen hundred dollars as a quote penalty fee. Diego and Mario refused, and then months later the recruiter popped back up again, this time threatening to hurt Mario's wife. In part, that's why we're not revealing more details about their identities and why we're not saying the name of the recruiter. It's been almost five years since Mario and Diego escaped from North Carolina, Mario
says he'd rather not think about it. It's best to put the bad memories of what happened behind.
Himlo Algo Tristeno, Algo Triste is Sally Mosasi Coriendo is Capando.
Diego and Mario, with help from Aaron, brought a lawsuit against their former employers and the recruiter, which was settled last year. As a result, they each got paid a little over ten thousand dollars. Of course, they used part of this money to pay back their loans. They're still in the US and they still work together now it's at a restaurant.
All the evidence Diego collected helped the workers win their case. He says he knew that those pictures would come in handy in Diego and Marius case. Both the recruiter and
the employer were included in the lawsuit. In twenty twenty one, the h to a labor contractor was debarred for two years from participating in the program, but Aaron says that the contractor was active in the program during that time and in our reporting we found another lawsuit against the same labor contractor, and it was filed a month before Diego and Marius.
Allah heloila. Thank cousin. M Le Miko, let Miko.
It's a hot and humid afternoon in the summer of twenty twenty two. Diego sitting on a park bench surrounded by luscious trees. He's on a video call with his wife and young child, No No Sali. No, Diego's son was born in late twenty eighteen, about six months after he escaped from the labor camp.
They've never met.
They've had to bond over the phone.
Mayako the ghetto, Bye, Mayaka, Mucho mu Mucho.
My my.
Diego and Mario have been granted special immigrant visas for victims of trafficking. That means that they should now be able to legally bring their families to the US. Diego can finally meet his little.
Boy, hug him for the first time.
Coming up on episode two of head Down, we bring you the results of our investigation into how millions of dollars in stolen wages owed to farm workers end up in the hands of a US federal agency.
When starts.
An announcement that the US promises to pay back that money with the help from Mexican authorities, they.
Come up Rotejimos alos Achos travadors.
A big promise, especially in a program known for its inefficiency and wage theft. You'll also meet two brothers who protested in Washington State after a fellow H two A farm worker died. We'll look back at the racist history behind temporary foreign.
Labor, Why bring in foreigners to work on our farms makes no sense?
And ask how can the H two A program be fixed? Head Down is an original production by Fututo Investigates in collaboration with Latino USA and Prism. I'm Fernande Chavarri in for our host and executive producer Marin j Josa. This episode was reported and produced by Patricia Suvaran, Tina Basquez, and Me, with assistance from Rosanna Aguire. It was edited by Andrea Lopez Cruzado and Ni Penilee Ramirez is the executive producer of Futuro Investigates. Music and scoring by Jacob Rossadi,
fact checking by Amy Tardiff. This episode was mixed by Julia Caruso and gabriel A Bias. Nancy Rujillo and Raoul Perez are Futuro Investigates project managers. Reporting was made possible with support from the w K. Kellogg Foundation, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, the TAO Foundation, and Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden. Early support for this
reporting came from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Special thanks to Avram Basquez, Sophia Sanchez, Elizabeth Lowenthal, Torres, Nina Alvarez, Diane Silvester, and the farm workers.
Who shared their stories with us.
The Ratino USA team also includes Deacy Contreras, Mike Sargent, Marta Martinez, Victoria Strada, and Renaldo Lanos Junior. Our editorial director is Fernande Santos. Our engineering team also includes Stephanie Leveau and JJ Carubin. Our marketing manager is Luis Luna. Our theme music was composed by Senia Rubinos. For more, visit Futuro Investigates dot org and Prison Reports dot org. Join us again next time, and in the meantime, you can find us on social media.
Shao Latino USA is made possible in part by W. K. Kellogg Foundation, a partner with Communities where Children Come First, the TAU Foundation, and Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden.