Workers who packed potatoes are sold under the forced labor scheme, the lawsuit claims

Sam Tabachnyk
| Denver Post

At least three potato-packing workers in Colorado’s San Luis Valley were taken from Mexico for forced labor, forced to work for less than minimum wage, with little food and water, and were kept in substandard conditions, the workers allege in federal court. . a lawsuit filed this month.

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

Representatives for 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 coming to the United States in 2022 under the H-2A visa program, a federal labor agreement that allows U.S. employers to hire seasonal foreign workers when they cannot find domestic workers to work. . H-2A visas allow workers to work only on a specific farm; they cannot be transferred to another employer.

The work order states that they will harvest and plant crops at six farms in and around Uvalde, Texas. Instead, J&T Harvesting instructed approximately 58 workers, including Flores, Hernandez and Jacobo, to board a bus to Colorado, where they were to work at potato packing warehouses in the San Luis Valley, the complaint said.

At one point in Colorado, the workers were housed eight people in a motel room — with just one mattress and box spring, the lawsuit says. According to the lawsuit, some workers were forced to sleep in a closed restaurant attached to the motel.

Federal law requires H-2A employers to provide their workers with almost everything, including food, housing, and transportation to and from the country of origin.

But J&T Harvesting did not provide those workers with food, water or money for more than three weeks after they arrived in the U.S., the complaint said. Many of the workers are in debt after paying employment fees, transportation costs, visa costs and other expenses required to obtain work permits, the lawsuit says.

Workers were forced to pool their money to buy cheap, no-cook canned goods at a nearby Dollar store. They ate only one meal a day to last longer with money and food, the lawsuit alleges.

A J&T employee once offered workers a $100 loan to buy food — money the contractor later deducted from workers’ first paychecks, according to the lawsuit.

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

Workers who were not authorized to work in the Colorado factories were assigned to sort potatoes for MountainKing Potatoes and the Alpine Potato Company. However, workers say the companies did not pay federal or Colorado minimum wages.

Throughout his tenure, the company used “manipulation, threats, intimidation and isolation to create an atmosphere of fear” among employees, the lawsuit alleges.

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

As bad as the situation was, continuing to participate in the H-2A program was a priority because of the lack of job opportunities in Mexico, the workers said in the lawsuit.

On November 17, 2022, three workers secretly packed their belongings and fled to safety. The potato companies continued to employ J&T workers until at least March 2024, the complaint said.

“For over six weeks, the plaintiffs were subjected to extreme fear, anxiety, stress, humiliation, hunger and emotional distress while working for the defendants,” the lawsuit states.

“They didn’t know where to turn,” said Jennifer Rodriguez, managing attorney for the Farm Workers Rights Division of Colorado Legal Services, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the workers. “There is already a significant power imbalance where H-2A workers are tied to their employers through H-2A visas, unable to find work elsewhere in the US. The additional debt they have been forced to take on and the restrictions on their movement have created a dead end from which it seems impossible to find a way out.”

The Denver Post published a three-part investigation in September that found H-2A employers in Colorado routinely violated federal labor laws, but almost none were barred from hiring again the following season. Workers routinely suffer from wage theft, threats and poor living conditions, The Post found. However, many remain silent and return to Colorado year after year because they lack sufficient opportunity at home.

Meanwhile, state regulators have rarely used the mechanisms at their disposal to prevent criminal employers from recruiting migrant workers.

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