Ryan Murphy is a Gary Marx Journalism Fund intern. 

This story is supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

Joseph Cantu ran Big River Honey with his mother until 2022, when the federal government banned the Florida apiary from hiring guest visa workers for three years because of alleged wage violations. Nine months after the ban started, the government allowed Cantu’s mother to hire the labor force the apiary needed — at the same address.

Cantu was surprised his mother could hire guest workers at the same location. “Well,” he remembered her saying, “they’re not gonna be working for you.” Cantu’s mother declined to comment.

The employees were on H-2A visas, which allow foreign nationals to work in the U.S. for short time periods. Many H-2A workers face mistreatment from some employers, and the federal government can temporarily ban, or debar, employers from hiring H-2A workers. But the bans rarely occur and are easy to evade, according to government reports, experts and Investigate Midwest’s analysis of H-2A data. 

It is unclear how the U.S. Department of Labor determines which employers receive a temporary ban rather than a fine. As of August, 33 businesses are banned in the U.S. In six instances, employers with the same address, owner or phone number as the actively banned companies were approved for H-2A workers. The federal government approved one business for workers despite its name and location written verbatim on the banned list.

“The debarment mechanism really is a joke,” said Gregory Schell, a longtime farmworker advocate and attorney with Southern Migrant Legal Services. “It’s not much of an enforcement system.”

The H-2A visa is the country’s largest temporary work visa program, bringing in just under 300,000 people in 2022.

Employers who bring in H-2A workers have to follow specific rules. Workers must be provided with safe housing, adequate meals and transportation to their worksites.

Despite these legal protections, many workers report problems. According to a 2020 survey by Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, a migrant worker advocacy organization based in Mexico, 100% of respondents said they had experienced at least one major legal violation, including sexual harassment, threats of deportation or seizure of identity documents during their employment.

Housing is also a concern for H-2A workers. In some cases, farmworkers have been forced to live with shattered windows, leaky doorways and broken fridges. Some are crammed into trailers. Bed bugs are a common concern. One person responded to CDM’s survey by saying they lived in an “iron chicken coop” with bunk beds.

Trent Taylor, a staff attorney at Farmworker Justice, said it’s often more cost effective for employers to not fulfill legal requirements.

“The financial gain of non-compliance is much more than the penalty, or the risk of the penalty, that would be imposed if (the violations) were investigated,” he said.

Less than 1% of all U.S. farms are audited for labor law compliance each fiscal year, according to a 2023 Economic Policy Institute report co-authored by Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research. Even though this figure accounts for all U.S. farms — not just those who hire H-2A workers — more than half of investigations uncover H-2A violations. 

“(The wage and hour division of the Department of Labor) is underfunded and understaffed,” Costa said. “Employers can pretty much do whatever they want, and there’s a very low likelihood they’ll ever be investigated.”

There are relatively few workplace investigators, and they focus on all industries. As of 2022, the latest figures available, there were about 800 labor department staffers who investigated allegations of wage theft and workplace crimes. That amounts to about one investigator per every 200,000 U.S. workers. 

The U.S. Department of Labor did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including written questions, over a month.

2015 watchdog report: Debarred employers may ‘reinvent’ themselves

The federal government has known for years that its system to ban H-2A employers has loopholes. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office found enforcing the bans can be difficult.

“Debarred employers may ‘reinvent’ themselves by starting new companies and submitting applications with slightly different information in order to continue hiring workers,” the report states.

The GAO found the labor department was not reviewing all identifying information, such as phone numbers or street addresses, when considering employers’ applications for H-2A farmworkers.

After the labor department certifies a business’s application, the employer applies for their workers’ visas through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. According to the 2015 report, the labor department was not sharing complete information about banned employers with homeland security.

The labor department has since implemented some of the GAO’s recommendations. For example, the labor and homeland security departments agreed to data-sharing protocols in 2017 and 2020 to prevent banned employers from slipping through the cracks.

However, one banned employer stole about $3,600 from workers, investigators found. Investigators found another employer had not paid workers the equivalent of about $340,000. That employer has not been banned.

Feds banned one H-2A employer permanently, but not its owners

Only one employer has ever been permanently banned from the H-2A program.

North Carolina businessman Craig “Stan” Eury owned International Labor Management Corporation, which connected U.S. employers with foreign jobseekers. The company assisted with the visa application process and arranged transportation to the U.S.

ILMC’s clients included agricultural and non-agricultural businesses, whose workers needed H-2A and H-2B visas, respectively. An unlimited number of H-2A agricultural visas are available each year, but there is an annual limit of 66,000 H-2B non-agricultural visas.

ILMC circumvented the annual H-2B cap by applying for H-2A employees and sending them to H-2B sites, according to court records.

In 2014, ILMC pleaded guilty for its misuse of the visa system in exchange for fines, forfeiture and permanent debarment from both H-2A and H-2B programs.

The labor department certified 11 of ILMC’s H-2A applications for more than a week after the company’s plea.

In June 2015, Eury was sentenced to 13 months in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obstruct government functions and one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.

Sarah Farrell, who was in charge of the company’s daily operations, was given two months’ probation after pleading guilty to two misdemeanor charges of referring unauthorized aliens for employment. 

Eury also co-owned another company, ASAP, with Kenneth White and Harry “Lee” Wicker Jr. ASAP collected fees from employer clients to reimburse a Mexico-based visa processing company. Its fees included an undisclosed markup that Eury, White and Wicker profited from.

White and Wicker were sentenced to five and two months, respectively. ASAP was not named in court documents.

Neither Eury, White, Wicker nor Farrell were prohibited from working in the immigration industry in the future.

Wicker was released from prison on Feb. 16, 2016. On Feb. 17, he returned to his job at the North Carolina Growers’ Association.

“I made a mistake,” Wicker, now the association’s executive director, told Investigate Midwest. “I’m glad that the government hasn’t held it against NCGA.”

ILMC was dissolved in 2015.

Eury did not return requests for comment through his attorney. White’s attorney said she no longer had his contact information. Neither Farrell nor her attorney responded to requests for comment.

Previously banned individuals part of human trafficking investigation

In 2021, 24 people were indicted in connection with Operation Blooming Onion, a massive federal human trafficking investigation. Between 2014 and 2021, conspirators facilitated more than 71,000 H-2A visas and made at least $200 million by withholding workers’ wages, renting workers out to farmers, and charging illegal recruitment fees, the indictment alleges.

Five people named in the indictment were already banned from the H-2A program during some of the same years that they are alleged to have participated in human trafficking. Two had been banned for administrative reasons; two had been banned for unspecified labor law violations. Labor department documents do not provide a reason for one person’s ban.

The operation’s alleged ringleader, Maria Leticia Patricio, previously had been banned for one year between 2013 and 2014. Labor department documents do not provide information about the reason for the ban.

Patricio, an H-2A agent, filed fraudulent petitions with the labor department. According to the indictment, the first petition was filed on Nov. 3, 2014, which was six weeks after her debarment ended.

The indictment alleges that members of the trafficking ring held workers at gunpoint as they harvested onions with their bare hands for little or no pay. Victims were housed in “crowded, unsanitary, and degrading living conditions” without drinking water or plumbing. One work camp was surrounded by an electric fence.

Some workers were warned that their families would be harmed, according to court records. Several workers were kidnapped and one was repeatedly raped. Two workers died in the heat.

Charging documents allege that one of the employers who was on the debarment list aided and abetted the sale of 30 human beings for $21,481.

As of August, none of the two dozen people charged in Operation Blooming Onion have been debarred from the H-2A program. 

Johnathan Hettinger and Mónica Cordero contributed to this story.

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