By Tina Vásquez
Copyright truthout
It took more than 12 hours for Isabella to travel across her native Mexico from the coastal community she called home to the consulate in Monterrey, an industrial epicenter in the northeastern state of Nuevo León. Like millions of Mexican workers who came before her, Isabella’s consulate visit in 2020 was the final hurdle before the U.S. government granted what felt like a small miracle: a coveted H-2A visa that allows workers, the vast majority of whom are from Mexico, to traverse the border for lawful employment in the U.S. as seasonal agricultural workers. Prior to President Donald Trump’s second term, American employers could request workers from 86 eligible countries as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program. However, from 2018 to 2023, 92% of workers were from Mexico, where more H-2A visas are processed in Monterrey than anywhere else in the world.
“I thought, I’ll migrate too, for the American dream and to have something better,” explained Isabella, who is using a pseudonym for fear of retribution.
Isabella understood that she didn’t come from the kind of life circumstances where opportunities would simply fall into her lap; she had to make things happen for herself. In Mexico, an estimated 35.9% of women live in “labor poverty,” meaning they earn too little to cover basic food needs. Women in Mexico are also chronically underemployed, with just 45.4% of women considered “economically active” in the labor market, Mexico Business News reported. These conditions could worsen due to Trump’s tariffs, which are expected to jeopardize over 4.1 million jobs in Mexico, hitting manufacturing, agriculture, and mining the hardest.
While the majority of new workers in the H-2A program are recruited — often through illegal, costly recruitment practices that put workers thousands of dollars in debt before they even set foot in the U.S. — Isabella had to seek out a recruiter in her community who she heard successfully got people jobs with American companies.
There was something else that made Isabella a major outlier in the H-2A program: her gender.
Between 2018 and 2023, only 3% of H-2A workers were women, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Just 41,550 women were in the program, compared to more than 1.4 million men. More broadly, women represent 28% of the nation’s farmworkers, making them a minority on many American farms. Most are immigrants from Latin America, and about 40% are undocumented.
Before working in the U.S., Isabella told Prism that she knew almost nothing about the H-2A program or the discrimination and gender-based violence that women can experience if they’re granted the visa.
“At that time, I didn’t understand that there were different types of visas,” Isabella told with the assistance of an interpreter. “I didn’t know what an agricultural visa was, or even that I was getting one.”
In part, this is why Isabella didn’t think much of it when associates of the Mexican American farm labor contractor who would serve as her joint employer told her in Monterrey that she would not be working in the fields of the rural South. Instead, she was funneled into the more traditionally gendered labor of a cook at the labor camp, where she and a small group of women prepared breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day for hundreds of agricultural workers who the labor contractor secured to work from spring to fall 2020.
Isabella alleged in an interview that she was instructed by the labor contractor to lie to a U.S. consulate official and say she would indeed perform agricultural work in the U.S. It was the first among many red flags, she said. Upon her arrival in the South in June 2020 she said the labor contractor confiscated her passport, Mexican identification card, and her I-94 immigration form, a clear-cut indication of labor trafficking.
Still, Isabella said the labor contractor “seemed nice,” and because she went into debt traveling to the U.S., turning back didn’t feel like a feasible option. But as the days went by, Isabella observed how the labor contractor and his employees treated H-2A workers in disposable ways — and as she also began to experience the crushing and unsustainable reality of her own work. Fear settled in.
Her panic was confirmed early on when news spread at the labor camp that an H-2A worker had been bitten by a poisonous snake and left alone in a field by their employer.
“I could see he was really sick, but nobody was there to take care of him,” Isabella recalled. “After that, I never saw him again. There was never a conversation about what happened to him. There were other cases of workers getting sick and being sent back to Mexico because they weren’t useful anymore. This is when I started to see things weren’t right.”
Indeed, the labor contractor was not a “nice” man. Since he began operations decades ago, allegations of abuse and serious violations have followed in his wake — everything from wage theft and inhumane housing conditions to a worker’s death that he initially failed to report. The labor contractor’s history in the H-2A program spans multiple states and businesses in the South, a trail of lawsuits illustrating the broader scope of the employer’s harm. Isabella is one of many workers who have filed legal complaints against the farm labor contractor. Her case was eventually settled, but unrelated investigations against the employer are ongoing.
According to her complaint, a year before Isabella arrived in 2019, one labor camp cook the contractor unlawfully brought to the South, fled on foot just days after arriving. The remaining women cooks were then allegedly confined to the labor camp by the contractor and his employees. They also reported that they were denied food and health care and subject to name-calling, sexual harassment, and physical abuse. According to the complaint, one worker alleged that she was raped by one of the labor contractor’s employees.
While Isabella’s allegations are detailed in public records, Prism has chosen not to name the farm labor contractor in order to protect the safety of sources. Attorneys and farmworker advocates who have aided former farmworkers with filing complaints and lawsuits against the labor contractor allege that some of these workers subsequently experienced physical violence and threats against their families in Mexico from cartel members associated with the contractor.
Even if Isabella had known about her employer’s history, there was very little she could have done to work elsewhere.
Mexican citizens who perform “unskilled labor” only have two real options for lawful employment in the U.S.: an H-2A visa to work in agriculture or an H-2B visa to work in landscaping, hospitality, or construction. Both visa categories are known for exploiting workers. In the H-2A program, workers have no control over where they are sent to work or for whom, and their visas are tied to a single employer. Also, due to government bureaucracy and a lack of interagency communication, it is not unusual for American employers’ histories of abuse to be buried or otherwise hidden from the people who need this information the most: the H-2A workers who sign up to spend months of their lives essentially under the complete control of their employer, who is responsible for transportation, housing, and food.
These power imbalances that have long made the H-2A program ripe for worker exploitation are likely to worsen under the second Trump administration.
In June, the House Appropriations Committee quietly backed an amendment to the Department of Homeland Security funding bill that dramatically expands guest worker programs by increasing the number of workers allowed to enter the U.S. without implementing any reforms. Also in June, the Department of Labor (DOL), which oversees the H-2A program, halted enforcement of newly expanded labor protections for H-2A workers. When coupled together, these actions could mean even more migrant workers navigating increasingly dangerous workplace conditions in already deadly American fields.
These conditions are only compounded for new H-2A workers, who often arrive in the U.S. unaware of their rights and unsure of what’s normal or lawful in a program where labor trafficking and forced labor remain persistent and overlooked. Women in the H-2A program are arguably some of the most vulnerable workers in the nation. The gender-based discrimination and violence they experience is often ignored or put on the back burner, as farmworkers and advocates organize to address the many other urgent issues that plague the H-2A program, such as the lack of state and federal heat protections that inevitably lead to the deaths of farmworkers each summer. In North Carolina, two previously unreported farmworker deaths since June were confirmed by the state’s DOL. However, Communications Director Andy Lancester told Prism in July that North Carolina’s DOL had not determined “whether these two deaths are work-related or not.”
Early on at Isabella’s job, as she looked out across the expansive Southern landscape, she thought about how much she could endure for the $12.67 an hour she was promised by her employer. She did not know yet that she was already deep in the gaping maw of the American agricultural machine, where she would be chewed up and spit out like countless others.
“Cultural Brokers”
Caitlin Berberich, an attorney with Southern Migrant Legal Services who represents H-2A and other migrant workers, told Prism that the design of the H-2A program — in which workers’ visas are beholden to one employer — makes the program “readily conducive to forced labor and trafficking.” Berberich is not affiliated with Isabella’s case.
The rise of labor contractors in the H-2A program has only made these abuses and crimes more prevalent.
Farm labor contractors are the fastest-growing segment of farm employment, and they account for one-fourth of all federal wage and hour violations in the agricultural sector, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. Because farm labor contractors do not have their own fixed-site agricultural operations, they often obtain large numbers of H-2A workers on behalf of farms. Seven of the nation’s 10 largest H-2A employers are farm labor contractors, according to the Wilson Center, and farm labor contractors now account for about 45% of the hundreds of thousands of H-2A jobs certified by the DOL each year.
According to Berberich, the H-2A program is a “great setup” for farms, which can enter into agreements with labor contractors as a way to avoid responsibility for migrant workers and liability for violations. This business setup exists across industries. For example, fast fashion companies, as part of their supply chain, contract with third-party manufacturers to produce their clothing in overseas factories. When violations and abuses are exposed in these factories, the companies can distance themselves by claiming they have no knowledge or oversight of factory working conditions.
In the H-2A program, Berberich told Prism, agreements between land owners and farm labor contractors provide “a level of separation” that rarely benefits the contractors.
“If there is a violation, it’s not the farm [who’s] responsible, but the fly-by-night farm labor contractor who has no assets,” Berberich explained. “If you run the math, you would see that the margin of profit is zero for the farm labor contractor, who is paid by the farm and then has to turn around and pay the workers. If they’re not making a profit, what is the incentive? They either underpay the workers to make profit, or they search for other avenues to make money. It basically incentivizes abuse.”
Some farm labor contractors new to the H-2A program claim ignorance when in violation of the law. Under the Biden administration, DOL hosted online educational seminars about the federal requirements that govern agricultural employment that were aimed at farm labor contractors and other American employers.
Broadly speaking, as part of the H-2A program, nothing prevents a contractor from bringing a worker like Isabella to the U.S. as a labor camp cook. According to Carol Brooke, a senior attorney with the North Carolina Justice Center’s Workers’ Rights Project, the issue of what constitutes “agricultural work” under U.S. law is actually quite nuanced.
“In order for this kind of setup to be lawful, the labor camp where the cooking takes place would have to be located on a farm, or the cooks would have to be employed by the farmer, not a labor contractor,” Brooke explained, also noting that the workers would have to be designated as cooks in the paperwork submitted to the DOL.
This is not what happened in Isabella’s case. It’s also not the first time the farm labor contractor who employed her used the H-2A program to bring workers to the U.S. who were then assigned non-agricultural jobs. According to Isabella’s complaint, the contractor previously unlawfully employed H-2A workers as supervisors, cooks, and drivers.
Given his history of labor violations, Isabella’s contractor would not be able to credibly feign ignorance as someone deeply familiar with the ins and outs of the H-2A program. But there is another component of his background that might help explain why workers like Isabella initially miss the red flags.
Like Isabella’s employer, many farm labor contractors are Latino, immigrants, or the children of immigrants who speak Spanish and maintain close connections to Mexico that aid in a sense of familiarity and connection with the H-2A workers they exploit.
This dynamic is at play anywhere there are large numbers of migrant workers, including the poultry industry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill anthropology professor Angela Stuesse, who wrote the book “Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South,” told Prism.
In anthropological research, these players are often referred to as “cultural brokers.” In the context of Stuesse’s work, they are Latinos with a bit more status — maybe they are citizens or otherwise have work authorization. “They often speak English. This allows them to comfortably work in the immigrant community, hiring and recruiting or employing migrant workers,” Stuesse explained. “It’s not uncommon for them to own multiple businesses related to cultural brokering with new immigrant communities, though sometimes that’s just a nice way of describing financial predation.”
While labor contractors are often cultural brokers, not all cultural brokers circumvent labor and employment law to exploit people in their community. Labor contractors who operate as cultural brokers usually want as little attention as possible, whether as a staffing agency to send undocumented workers to poultry plants or as farm labor contractors to provide farms with H-2A workers. In part, this is because the American employment system is set up to allow for the exploitation of migrant workers — including those legally working in the U.S. on H-2A visas. “So these guys are the shadowy figures who step in and provide a cushion for American employers,” Stuesse said.
The H-2A program also appears to give farm labor contractors cover for bad behavior.
The DOL can debar, or temporarily ban, an American employer from obtaining guest workers due to repeated violations, though in practice, debarment is typically tied to an employer failing to pay fees associated with the violations. Due to his extensive history of substantial violations of program rules, the farm labor contractor who brought Isabella to the U.S. could be debarred from the H-2A program. But as an investigation from Investigate Midwest found, “bans rarely occur and are easy to evade.” The DOL maintains a public list of debarred employers; while the agricultural industry ranks among the highest for serious workplace violations, only 89 employers have been debarred from the H-2A program since fiscal year 2020. Some of these employers are likely still obtaining H-2A workers despite their ban.
Investigate Midwest also found multiple instances in which employers with the same address, owner, or phone number as banned companies were still approved to employ H-2A workers. Prism identified a farm labor contractor who did not employ Isabella but who was debarred from the H-2A program. Attorneys now representing his new workers said he continues to operate in the program by enlisting the help of family members.
Brooke, of North Carolina Justice Center, said debarment should “theoretically stop” farm labor contractors and other employers from operating entirely. “The problem is that they often pop up as someone else, perhaps a brother, an uncle, a wife who’s in name operating the business, but the real operator is the debarred contractor,” Brooke told Prism. “That happens frequently.”
The labor contractor in Isabella’s case once operated under a different company name. Now, with his new company name and corporate entity, Brooke said the contractor has the cover he needs to obtain new workers.
Under the new company, Isabella’s labor contractor has hired hundreds of H-2A workers for jobs across multiple states as recently as this summer. Job listings viewed by Prism note that no prior agricultural experience is required, potentially leading hundreds of new, unsuspecting H-2A workers to the U.S. where, according to previous workers’ experiences, they could likely experience wage theft, inhumane housing conditions, or even labor trafficking.
“In my experience, generally speaking, it’s very unlikely and very uncommon for labor contractors who have been involved in the program for a long time to change their ways entirely,” Brooke said.
DOL does not seem to prioritize disseminating information about abusive employers to H-2A workers. Some organizations, such as the binational migrant worker organization Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, have tried to fill the gap. With the help of migrant worker leaders across Mexico and the U.S., the organization co-created Contratados.org, a digital platform that features Yelp-like reviews of employers written and shared by migrant workers. However, these efforts don’t begin to chip away at the limitations of DOL, which is horrendously underfunded, understaffed, and under-resourced — especially when it comes to agricultural investigations. The Trump administration’s recent cut of 20% of DOL staff and its anti-worker picks for key DOL positions will likely significantly worsen already dangerous conditions for H-2A workers.
Equally troubling, Brooke said, is that there typically isn’t a line of formal communication or any kind of notification process between state agencies and federal agencies like DOL. This means that if a Georgia state agency is investigating a labor contractor, for example, federal DOL is likely to be unaware and might continue granting the contractor H-2A workers.
DOL did not respond to Prism’s multiple requests for comment about this story.
Berberich, the attorney with Southern Migrant Legal Services, noted that those unfamiliar with the agricultural industry may find it confusing to learn that one arm of DOL is essentially tasked with investigating the employers that another arm of DOL allowed to bring H-2A workers to the U.S. In the context of the H-2A program, the federal DOL’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) approves work orders from labor contractors and other American employers, and its Wage and Hour Division performs investigations into H-2A violations.
Agricultural lobbying groups are often at odds with the DOL, especially under Democratic administrations that attempt to improve farmworkers’ rights. The agricultural lobby in the U.S. is incredibly powerful and funnels millions of dollars to mostly Republican candidates. These lobbying efforts, coupled with agricultural employers’ constant demand for workers, put pressure on the ETA to rubber-stamp H-2A petitions. Further compounding the problem is DOL’s limited employees and resources, which means the agency cannot properly vet each employer and application before workers get to the U.S.
By the time H-2A workers like Isabella arrive, their fates are mostly sealed.
“A Disposable Machine”
While women H-2A workers sometimes experience unique forms of abuse, they also encounter wage theft, unsafe work conditions, and inhumane housing that have become synonymous with the agricultural visa program. H-2A’s origin story helps explain why exploitation is so deeply rooted in how the program operates.
At the beginning of World War II, Mexican workers were tapped to fill the void in agricultural labor after the U.S. government forced Japanese farmworkers into internment camps. In 1942, this led to the formation of the Bracero Program, a bilateral agreement with Mexico that allowed migrant workers to temporarily enter the U.S. to perform agricultural labor for American employers.
The program was only open to men, but as Georgetown University associate history professor Mireya Loza noted in her 2016 book “Defiant Braceros,” women played active roles within Bracero economies by shifting into head of household roles in Mexico, working in informal service industries that developed along the border with the ultimate goal of working in the U.S., and even lobbying to allow women into the program.
Women with and without children attempted to gain entrance into the Bracero Program. In her book, Loza included correspondence from women such as Isidora Botello, who in 1959 wrote to then Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos, believing he could give her permission to access the agricultural work opportunities in the U.S. “I have a lot of family and what I earn here is not enough to support my children,” Botello argued.
Childless women, such as María Consuelo Miranda Luna, also had familial financial responsibilities that fueled their desire to head north. In 1962, just two years before the Bracero Program would come to an end, Miranda Luna formally requested a passport to move to the U.S. to “help support her household that consists of her mother and nine young siblings.”
But as Loza noted, much like today’s H-2A program, the Bracero Program gave preferential treatment to married men with young children whose families resided in Mexico, under the assumption that they would be less likely to overstay their visas and remain in the U.S. as undocumented immigrants. What Botello, Miranda Luna, and other women could not have known at the time was that entrance into the Bracero Program was more likely to bring debt than financial gain.
On paper, the Bracero Program offered Mexican workers a rare financial opportunity to legally work in the U.S., making decent money before returning to their families. In practice, the program was deeply inhumane. According to Braceros’ testimonies and public records, workers were subject to public strip searches and border processing centers, where they were also fumigated with cancer-causing insecticide. Significantly, many workers’ wages were stolen, with one DOL official characterizing the program as “legalized slavery.” Still, the program existed for 22 years before it was abolished in 1964 due, in large part, to systemic wage theft by the Mexican and American governments.
In 2022, former Bracero Fausto Ríos, 82, decided to publicly tell the Los Angeles Times his story for the first time.
“In my last days,” he said, “I want to share an ‘immigrant worker history class’ in the United States to make our future generations aware that no human being deserves to be treated like a disposable machine.”
The legacy of the Bracero Program lives on in the H-2A program, and while women today can obtain agricultural work visas, it continues to be rare. Women such as Isabella who manage to obtain the coveted work visa are often left wondering if it was worth the gamble.
Gender-Based Discrimination
Upon arriving in the South, Isabella said she was relieved to learn that she and the other women cooks would share their own mobile home, separate from the ones that housed the men who were hired to harvest.
“We at least had privacy,” Isabella told Prism.
Other women have not been so lucky.
According to multiple farmworker attorneys who spoke to Prism, labor camp housing is a source of major distress for women in the H-2A program. Many women workers experience sexual harassment, assault, and other gender-based violence by both their fellow farmworkers as well as their supervisors and employers. In the rural South, it’s common for farm labor contractors to house H-2A workers in motels, which makes the women more vulnerable to abuse.
“In these cases, the employer has access to your motel room key,” Berberich explained. “What can you do if your employer walks in at any time they want? You are very far from home, you are secluded in an unfamiliar rural place. Everything you have is tied to the employer and your visa with them. If they assault you, what can you do? Where do you go for help?”
The 2013 PBS “Frontline” documentary, “Rape in the Fields,” highlighted the longstanding realities of undocumented women farmworkers who experienced sexual violence in the workplace. In some cases, the employer was sued, but the actual perpetrators were never criminally charged.
Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center reported that women farmworkers face sexual harassment at a rate two to three times higher than other work sectors. A 2010 study found that 80% of 150 Mexican immigrant farm-working women surveyed had experienced sexual harassment on the job. This is likely an underestimate, given the many reasons women — and especially women with precarious immigration statuses — do not report abuse. In the American workforce, immigration status only makes migrant workers more vulnerable to abuse, with fewer avenues for justice. In part, this is because American employers are empowered to weaponize the immigration system against workers.
In 2019, under the first Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out one of the largest workplace raids in American history, targeting 680 Indigenous, Latino, and immigrant workers across multiple Koch Foods poultry plants in Mississippi. Attorneys for the workers said it was no coincidence that before the raids, workers at these plants had won a major lawsuit over rampant sexual harassment and racial discrimination.
Historically, allegations of workplace discrimination and gender-based violence have been investigated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). However, under Trump, the EEOC is one of many agencies shifting its priorities to better align with the administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, leading many advocates to fear that immigrant workers who file complaints will only have their immigration status used against them.
The EEOC declined to comment.
Under President Joe Biden, ICE claimed that it ended workplace raids because the threat of arrest and deportation had “long been used by exploitative employers to suppress and retaliate against workers’ assertion of labor laws,” according to an archive of the agency’s site. ICE said it was shifting its focus to unscrupulous employers “who exploit noncitizens, based on their lack of lawful immigration status, through dangerous work conditions, underpayment, and using those noncitizens as a ‘business model’ to maximize profits.” Border Patrol did carry out raids on farmworkers in Kern County, California, during the final days of the Biden administration. Still, ICE’s messaging under Biden is a far cry from Trump’s ICE, which targets immigrants in every sphere of American life — especially workplaces — in order to meet the president’s quota for mass deportations.
There was also a time when the EEOC blazed a trail to protect immigrants from gender-based discrimination.
Prior to 1995, the agency had never before sued an agricultural company over sexual harassment of a farmworker, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. Then, in 1999, Tanimura & Antle, one of the nation’s largest lettuce growers, settled a case with the EEOC involving a woman from El Salvador who alleged that a hiring official forced her to have sex in order to get a seasonal job picking crops. Since then, the EEOC has brought dozens of agricultural companies to court over similar allegations.
A number of cases in recent years illustrate the pernicious nature of this abuse and how often women farmworkers who report sexual violence are retaliated against.
According to a 2017 lawsuit, a farmworker in Florida reported that her supervisor at Favorite Farms Inc. raped her. The company took no action against the man and ultimately fired the woman, according to the EEOC. In December 2018, the company was eventually ordered to pay the woman $850,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. However, the following year, Favorite Farms filed for bankruptcy.
In another case, a supervisor with Great Columbia Berry Farms in eastern Washington state had previously fired a woman farmworker for rebuffing his advances; when she regained employment, the man repeatedly raped her in 2018, according to reporting from The Seattle Times.
Also in Washington state, last year, Greenridge Farms and Baker Produce entered into a consent decree, agreeing to pay $470,000 to four women farmworkers who said over the span of several years, they were raped or otherwise sexually harassed by a supervisor. The women who reported the harassment and abuse, threatened to report it, or denied the supervisor’s advances were given reduced hours, negative performance reviews, and some were even terminated, according to a press release from the state attorney general.
The abuse that Isabella experienced as an H-2A worker was at first more subtle, and it came from both men and women.
Circular Hell
From Monday to Saturday, Isabella began work around 4 a.m., when she would rise alongside the other labor camp cooks to begin prepping breakfast and making hundreds of tortillas for the workers they were in charge of feeding each day.
“Our day always started making tortillas by hand for many groups of workers,” Isabella told Prism. “We’d make the masa to feed as many as 480 workers, and there were only four or five of us women cooking.”
After breakfast cleanup, the process started over again for lunch. By 10 a.m., the women packed up and traveled out to the fields to sell lunch to the workers.
According to the agreement the labor contractor entered into with DOL, he was responsible for furnishing free and convenient cooking and kitchen facilities for workers to prepare their own meals, and he declared under penalty of perjury that he would provide transportation on a weekly basis for workers to purchase groceries.
Instead, the labor contractor charged the workers $14 each day for lunch and dinner, according to the complaint. Known as a forced meal plan, garnishing workers’ wages for the food employers are responsible for providing is among the ways H-2A employers turn a profit.
After the lunch plates were sold, the women returned to the kitchen around 4 p.m. Though exhausted, they had to begin prepping for dinner. Given the late hours of H-2A workers, who often work in fields hours away from their labor camp, Isabella and the other cooks had to keep similar hours. The earliest workers trickled in for dinner was 10 p.m. The latest was around midnight.
Isabella told Prism that during this time, she only slept two to three hours a night. Sundays provided no relief.
“We very, very rarely had a Sunday off because we’d have to make breakfast and lunch on Sundays,” Isabella said.
Isabella and the other cooks routinely worked more than 100 hours each week, according to the complaint, though the labor contractor vastly undercounted their work hours and never paid overtime. Each week, the women each made just $550.
Wage theft and grueling hours were only some of the women’s problems.
According to the complaint, their supervisor, who was a woman, did not allow them to take breaks or eat and drink while working. Isabella and the other cooks were often hungry and dehydrated. When the cooks complained to other supervisors, the supervisors told them that the labor contractor could report them to the police and that he had many contacts in Mexico and U.S. immigration enforcement, Isabella alleged in an interview. The threats led some of the cooks to believe that it would be a crime to stop working for the labor contractor before their contracts ended.
The cook, who alleged that she was raped by the contractor’s employee the year before Isabella arrived, eventually fled the camp in the middle of the night, running through the rain and hiding under a tree until she was picked up by a local anti-trafficking group, according to the complaint. She was so afraid of the labor contractor’s powerful binational connections that she instructed her family in Mexico to move her children to another city.
The woman supervisor aided in the abuse of the cook who escaped, according to the complaint, and Isabella told Prism that the supervisor spent the following year terrorizing her and the new crop of cooks.
“She was a very, very bad person, is the nicest way I can describe her,” said Isabella, explaining that she has only recently been able to talk about the abuse without feeling like she was on the verge of tears. “She would demand the impossible, and everything we did was bad and wrong.”
The supervisor often verbally abused the cooks. According to the complaint, she sometimes hit them or otherwise threatened physical violence. Isabella and the other cooks were also not permitted to leave the labor camp on their own, adding to the feeling that the abuse was inescapable. Isabella’s husband was an H-2A worker at the same time, and she was certain that if she left her job or filed a complaint, they would both be deported.
“I assume that abuse in this program is very common for women,” Isabella said. “But many of us don’t speak up because of fear, because of the threats they make against us. Many of us also don’t understand the laws.”
Migrant women workers who do understand the laws and choose to pursue legal action against powerful agricultural employers often have the cards stacked against them. In 2002, one woman H-2A worker filed a class-action lawsuit against the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA), alleging that the employer deliberately steered women H-2A workers into lower-paying jobs with fewer benefits, discriminating against thousands of migrant women throughout the country. The case was dismissed. Still, NCGA remains the largest H-2A employer in the country.
For many migrant women workers, working in a rural area in an unfamiliar country with no support system and or fluency in the local language, even in the best conditions, is not for the faint of heart. Compounded by workplace abuse, these conditions take a physical and emotional toll.
Isabella said the lack of food, water, and work breaks routinely made her feel dizzy and lightheaded. Sometimes she would see flashing lights. The stress of working in such close quarters with a supervisor who seemed to hate her only exacerbated Isabella’s stress and anxiety.
“The kitchen became hell for me,” Isabella said. “I would get headaches. I became forgetful. I felt like I was losing mental control in a really uncomfortable way — and I think it’s because of the way that woman pressured us. My head started to fail. I felt like I wasn’t really there, like I was walking in a daze.”
Farmworkers have gone on the record for years to give the American public insight into just how widespread wage theft, inhumane housing, and labor trafficking are within the H-2A program. However, there is a dearth of data on the unique forms of injustice women in the program experience. According to the complaint, the same labor contractor brought Isabella and several other women to the U.S. under the guise of doing agricultural work in the H-2A program. The lack of data makes it hard to know just how common the particularities of Isabella’s trafficking experience are among women hired by other labor contractors.
However, Prism found a similar, unrelated case in Georgia.
According to a 2020 lawsuit filed in Georgia, in 2015, 2017, and 2018, a labor contractor brought Mexican H-2A workers to the U.S. to perform labor for his growing family enterprise. Many of the workers were made to pay illegal recruitment fees to work for the contractor harvesting blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and pine straw. However, the contractor funneled women into non-agricultural work, cooking, cleaning, and waiting tables at a taqueria co-owned by the contractor and managed by his wife and daughter. During 2017, the plaintiff in the case alleged that she worked over 40 hours a week, with no lunch breaks, rest days, or holidays. Sometimes she wasn’t paid at all, and when she was, her weekly earnings fell below the federal minimum wage.
By 2018, the taqueria expanded to include a store and a money-wiring service. The plaintiff alleged that her responsibilities at the taqueria grew to include opening and closing the premises, managing inventory, managing the cash register, and processing wire transactions for customers. Again, she was not allowed any breaks — that is, until a member of the local community observed her working conditions and complained to her employer on her behalf.
Despite working overtime seven days a week, there were times when the labor contractor only paid the woman $50 for three weeks’ labor. Wage theft creates a pit many workers can’t climb out of. In the plaintiff’s case, her lawsuit details how she took out high-interest loans in order to pay for travel to Georgia — travel the contractor was supposed to reimburse her for as part of H-2A regulations. The loans also helped pay the illegal recruitment fees she was charged every time she returned to the U.S. through the H-2A program.
Working in the U.S. became a circular hell in which the woman had to keep laboring for the family to pay off her debt, and that required acquiring more debt while working for irregular, subpar wages.
During her time working in Georgia, she said in the complaint that she had no choice but to stay in the housing provided by the labor contractor. Located next to his office, it was a small two-bedroom house she shared with five other women. The windows were sealed shut, and the house had no air conditioning. There was no escaping the oppressive environment because the labor contractor confiscated her passport and visa, and women workers were under the watchful eye of the contractor’s daughter, who reprimanded them if they asked to leave the premises for health care or to attend church.
The plaintiff finally worked up the courage to file a complaint with DOL, which ultimately led to her escape. In 2021, the labor contractor settled the case, agreeing to pay the woman more than $125,000 in back wages and liquidated damages.
It appears the large settlement agreement was only a minor setback for the labor contractor, who maintains a growing empire in rural Georgia that now includes a company selling handmade boots from Mexico. In public photos for the company, the labor contractor is pictured alongside his smiling, multigenerational Mexican family, their many businesses attributed to their “entrepreneurial spirit.” They were also behind what the H-2A worker’s lawsuit describes as a “human trafficking scheme.”
“What Can We Do About That?”
Despite the serious nature of the crimes that regularly occur within the H-2A program and the gender-based violence that has become a natural byproduct of the agricultural industry, migrant women are still eager to pursue agricultural work in the U.S. The Center for Global Development has framed the exclusion of women H-2A workers as an issue of gender equality. According to Isabella, the answer is both complex and straightforward: capitalism.
“Of course, there is a lot of corruption in the program,” Isabella told Prism. “But what can we do about that? We need the work. It’s why we go to the U.S. We go out of necessity. It doesn’t matter what the situation is when we get there. We have to go because we need the money.”
Attorney Rachel Micah-Jones has spent the majority of her adult life representing and advocating for H-2A and other farmworkers from Mexico. As the founder and executive director of Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), she is a vocal critic of the H-2A program. But she also understands how many workers see these visas as a lifeline.
Early on in her work with CDM, Micah-Jones said that it was clear women were disproportionately discriminated against in the H-2A program. Those who wanted visas couldn’t access them, and the few who were granted them experienced sexual harassment and unequal treatment in American fields. Some, like Isabella, were funneled into gendered labor. In one case, Micah-Jones came across, women hired to work in the citrus industry were trafficked into sex work.
“These dynamics have always existed,” said Micah-Jones, who started CDM in 2005. “Just a couple of months after we opened our first office in Mexico, a group of women workers at one of our workshops approached us and said, ‘We have a lot of concerns, but we can’t talk about them in these big, public meetings. We have some questions about how we’re being treated as women.’ So it was immediately clear we needed to do direct outreach to migrant women workers.”
This led to the formation of Proyecto de Mujeres Migrantes, CDM’s outreach project focused on sexual assault in the workplace, gender discrimination, pregnancy, and equal pay. In the years since, CDM has published groundbreaking reports about gender inequality in labor migration programs and pursued lawsuits to prohibit gender discrimination in international labor recruitment.
More recently, in 2021, CDM took major steps to address the systemic discrimination women confront in temporary worker programs by filing the first complaint against the U.S. government under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, accusing the U.S. government of failing to enforce its labor laws against gender-based discrimination of women migrant workers on temporary labor migration visas. In 2022, CDM supplemented the complaint with testimonials from women detailing sexual harassment and assault by supervisors and recruiters, job listings open only to male candidates, and the funneling of women into lower-paying jobs.
Micah-Jones told Prism that it’s been an uphill battle to get governments to disclose gender-related data, which would allow organizations like CDM to better understand the issues facing women in temporary worker programs. She said she’s not feeling very confident about what could become of these efforts under the Trump administration.
“There’s some really conflicting views within the Trump administration about these programs,” Micah-Jones said. “Project 2025 called for limiting or otherwise totally terminating temporary worker programs, but the more corporatist arms of the administration — and Trump himself — love guest worker programs. There’s no doubt we’re going to see an expansion of these programs, but I don’t know if there will be any recognition that workers need to be protected. Worker vulnerability is going to be at an all-time high.”
Isabella told Prism that she has never felt more vulnerable than when she was an H-2A worker because she was totally unfamiliar with English, her surroundings, and the regulations governing the program. As her working conditions began to seriously impact her health, she hit her breaking point and decided to quit, immigration consequences be damned.
“I told my husband, ‘I just can’t stand it anymore,’” Isabella said, adding that her husband decided to quit the H-2A program with her. With the help of local organizations, the couple secretly fled the labor camp and returned to Mexico.
“I was very afraid; I was basically traumatized,” Isabella said. “My friend told me that the reason why these employers get away with doing whatever they want to workers is because people like me who are abused just leave, and that allows employers to continue abusing people.”
Her friend’s words inspired Isabella to join the growing chorus of workers speaking out against the farm labor contractor by filing official complaints, pursuing lawsuits, and speaking to the media about their experiences. The human cost of the H-2A program is now very well documented, but American corporations continue to reap the benefits of Mexico’s exploited workforce. As just one example, Isabella’s contractor has brought Mexican workers to the U.S. for one of the oldest and largest produce companies in the country that provides fruit to major grocery chains such as Trader Joe’s, Kroger, Costco, Walmart, and Target.
Despite her ordeal in the U.S., Isabella tried to return to work in the H-2A program the year after she left, hopeful that this time, she could get placed with an employer who compensated her fairly to perform actual agricultural work. She had no luck.
She remains uncertain if her inability to find work again through the program was retaliation for fleeing the U.S. or simply because of her gender.
“I couldn’t find a single company that would take me,” Isabella said. “And the recruiters all told me the same thing: We don’t hire women.”
Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.
