The H-2A Visa Trap
by Max Blau, ProPublica, and Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica, illustrations by Dadu Shin for ProPublica This story contains descriptions of sexual assaults. In the darkness before dawn, Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr. took the last drag of a cigarette and looked out from the staircase of a run-down motel. Underneath the stark floodlights streamed a procession of weary travelers in T-shirts and jeans, reaching into the bottom of a white coach bus for their oversize duffel bags. Mendoza had arranged for them to come on this 1,200-mile journey from northeastern Mexico to a rural stretch of Georgias blueberry country. Each of them had a work permit, which Mendoza had helped secure through a visa program called H-2A. More foreigners than ever before were using the decades-old program, which lets them work for months or even several years on U.S. farms. Farmers and politicians have touted H-2A as an easy answer to a persistent labor problem: Americans are abandoning agriculture jobs and U.S. immigration policies are restricting access to undocumented workers. As recently as last month, President Donald Trump has floated the idea that if undocumented farmworkers returned home, they could come back to the U.S. with a pass to legally re-enter the country. But over the years, the promises of H-2A such as humane working conditions, free housing and far better wages than back home have been undermined by the relative ease of exploiting workers due to scant oversight of the program.The busload of men and women who arrived that day in September 2018, like the others before and after, came with hopes of creating better lives for themselves and their families. Mendoza, through a network of recruiters in Mexico, had sold them on that hope. The recruiters touted the promises of a visa that, for many of them, would allow them to make more in a day than what they earned for a week of work in Mexico. From his perch on the staircase, Mendoza was surveying a scene that held great promise for him, too. The arrival of this batch of workers marked the beginning of his first big job as a labor broker and the end of any lingering thoughts that hed end up like his own mother and father, whod brought him as a toddler from Mexico. Theyd scraped together a living baling pine straw and packing blueberries. Mendoza, now 21, also had spent some time working in the fields. But he went on to attend college, dropping out so that he could focus on what he calculated to be a more lucrative prospect. Around the time Mendoza was ramping up his business of bringing people over from Mexico, Georgia was more reliant on H-2A workers than any other state. He served as a gatekeeper, choosing which Mexican workers desperate for better pay would go to Georgia farms desperate for more laborers. Beyond that, though, he had other ambitions related to this work. And he had plans for one worker in particular among this early batch. Sofi was 24 and a single mother. She had experience working in the fields, having grown up in a close-knit farming family in a small town flanked by rows of corn and squash. But she came across more as a city girl, with her stylish clothes and penchant for pink lipstick. One of Mendozas recruiters in Mexico was a neighbor of Sofis family and assured him that she was a good worker. That part hardly mattered. The photo attached to her H-2A visa application drew him in.Mendoza began sending her flirtatious text messages. She brushed them off. He pressed on, telling her hed waive most of the fee he charged people to apply for the visa.Sofi thought about it some more. Her father, who she trusted more than any man, had picked up seasonal farm work in the U.S. when she was a child, and she was aware of how much he appreciated the stable housing and steady pay. Though she worried about leaving her toddler son, she began to worry more about what would happen to him if she didnt leave. The wages Mendoza offered could change her sons future, or at the very least secure it the way her father had done for her. She owed her boy that much, she told herself. She would go. About the SourcingThe description of Sofis experience in the H-2A program is detailed in police records, court documents and testimony in federal court. Her name is redacted in federal filings to maintain her anonymity. We are identifying her by a first name she formerly used on social media. Mendoza declined multiple requests for an interview and did not provide comments in response to ProPublicas letters detailing the case. But not long after she and the other workers arrived in Monterrey, Mexico, to board one of the buses Mendoza sent for them, she began to have doubts. One of Mendozas associates was waiting for them. The associate handed each worker a stack of cash. The way he explained it, the U.S. would question any large wire transfers from Mexico, so they would need to bring the money to their new boss. He told them not to put the money in their suitcases. U.S. officials were likely to check those. It would have to be on their bodies. He didnt say much else, just that anyone who got caught would need to claim the cash as their own. So dont get caught. The closer her bus crept to the border, the more nervous Sofi grew. She started tallying just how much money was hidden on the people riding the bus. She figured it was almost a quarter of a million dollars. The Deal With the FarmerIn some regards, the deal Mendoza had struck with a blueberry farmer named Charles King was typical. Mendoza would ensure a steady supply of workers, recruiting them from across Mexico and Guatemala, assisting with their H-2A applications and arranging for their journey to the U.S. The workers could be employed only by King and only for up to 10 months at a time. King would pay a fair wage just under $11 an hour and cover the costs of their housing and transportation to his farm. There was another part of their agreement: Mendoza would oversee Kings workers himself. That meant Mendoza would actually find the housing and pay for it with Kings money. And he would be the one to see that the workers got to and from the fields and the one who handed out their wages. It was a common practice for farm owners to outsource those tasks to labor brokers. It freed farmers like King from the hassles of managing people who dont speak much English. And it granted brokers like Mendoza immense power.Like Mendoza, King was fairly new to this business. The longtime train engineer had decided only a few years earlier, in his mid 40s, that he wanted to start a farm on the nearly 40 acres passed down by his late grandfather. Around the time he met Mendoza, his blueberry bushes were about to yield their first fruit. He estimated he needed 150 people to work in his fields.Mendoza advised King to request twice as many; Mendoza had a plan for the others. King, for his part, stood to get a cut. All King had to do was sign the paperwork. Mendoza would handle much of the rest.King signed off. And Mendoza, who up until then had only brought over a few smaller batches of workers for other farmers, got to work on sourcing 300 of them for King. Sofi was among the first groups of people recruited to work for Kings Berry Farm. She initially felt some relief when she stepped off the bus in the parking lot of the dingy motel, after making it past customs and having spent more than 20 hours on the road. But she was taken aback by how she and the others were treated by the people there to meet them: The workers were unloaded like prisoners, their heads bowed so they couldnt see what was happening. One of the people who received the workers separated Sofi from the rest. She recalled that she was taken to a motel room. She found another female worker waiting there. Guards were assigned to watch them. It was in the motel room that she first saw Mendoza. Short and stout with a shaggy chinstrap beard, he spoke with a strong lisp because of a congenital disorder. It could be hard to understand what he was saying, but that day he had no problem making his message clear. Sofi recalled that the other woman asked Mendoza if she could have her passport back. Mendoza said that if she had it in her mind to leave his operation, shed have to do so without her passport. She wasnt getting it back.He already had Sofis. The ThreatsSofi was not sent out to work in the fields like the others. Mendoza ignored what her contract said. He kept her by his side, and he gave her a different set of responsibilities. One was that she would accept wire transfers on his behalf from Mexico. Another was that she would write the checks to workers. She would not be paid for this work. She would not be paid at all. Mendoza forced her to live at his house. While she was with him, he talked openly about his business and she paid attention. It was easy to begin piecing together how his operation worked. He was charging some applicants thousands of dollars for the chance to get an H-2A visa. She heard him speak with his contacts in Mexico, describing how hed bring in more and more workers that the farmers didnt actually need, just to get those up-front fees. Hed even bring her to meetings with King. It was an effort, she thought, to show off Mendozas power over her.She recalled that Mendoza crammed a couple dozen people workers and their children into a trailer. She noticed that a few didnt have enough money to eat. Sofi believed that the workers were being shorted. She remembered Mendoza occasionally picking up calls in the middle of the night, alerts that people were escaping.Those calls reinforced for Sofi the feeling that she, on the other hand, couldnt even try to flee. She didnt have her passport. She didnt know a single person she could turn to. She didnt speak any English. And she was scared. From the first time he touched her, on her very first day in the U.S., Mendoza made it clear she would have no say. Still, she told him no. It didnt matter. Month after month, closed up in his house with him, he did what he wanted to her.Within a few months, Mendoza took her on a drive to a nearby courthouse. By then, Sofi had come to believe that Mendoza considered her a prize something he had bought. At the courthouse, he told her she needed to sign a piece of paper. If she didnt, he repeated the thing he always said when he was mad, which was often: Ill call immigration, she remembered him saying. Ill have you deported. Only after she signed did he explain what the document was: a marriage license.He started introducing her as his wife and telling her that she should bring her son to Georgia. Hed help her. But she worried that he would treat her child no better than the children of the other workers.One day, she saw a few young Guatemalan children at the field where their parents were picking fruit. They were hungry. Their parents hadnt been paid. Sofi took some of Mendozas money and the keys to his car and drove the children to a gas station to get them some food. Mendoza caught wind of it and tracked her there. He took the car and made her and the children walk back. And he beat her for what he saw as her defiance.If he had no problem hitting her, she told herself, imagine what hed do to her son. After the first four months, she asked if she could go back to Mexico, just for a visit. Her father was sick with cancer. She recalled Mendoza saying that if he were to let her go and she didnt come back to him, hed see that she was never able to return to the U.S., that hed have her blacklisted from the H-2A program. With that warning, he let her go.Once she was home, she thought about staying. Then she looked at her son, who had just turned 3, and realized what shed be giving up: the chance to provide him with a better life. She believed what Mendoza said about blacklisting her was true. And she believed those months of suffering his abuses would be for nothing if she were kicked out of the program. If she could just endure Mendoza for a few more months, until she reached the end of her 10-month contract, she would fulfill her obligations. And then she could apply for another H-2A visa. She would find another labor broker, someone honest and decent, and things would be right. The H-2A program would make good on its promise to her. And she would make good on her promise to lift up her son. Back in Georgia, she knew better than to expect Mendoza to change. But the months ahead wore her down. That summer, after close to a year spent with him, she felt she couldnt take any more. He climbed on top of her one night, smothering her with his weight, the tattoo on his chest of La Santa Muerte, a grim reaper in a black hooded robe, known as the lady of death bearing down on her. He tried to rip her clothes off. She was almost out of breath. She got away. She ran. She found a phone and called the police. But even from jail, Mendoza figured out how to control her. She had found a place to hide, but he was able to reach her. He sent a peace offering a bouquet of yellow flowers and a box of chocolates and also, later, delivered a threat. It wasnt the same old warning about calling immigration. She recalled him telling her over the phone that if she didnt stay with him, he would kill her son. She feared that with all his connections in Mexico, it was possible he could. She arranged with her parents for the child to be hidden far away. Two months after Mendozas arrest, he was released after a grand jury chose not to indict him. Around that time, Sofi reached out to someone shed met only briefly but who she thought could help her. She typed a message into a translation app and texted it to the farmer who she was supposed to be working for. King responded, with concern, that she should go back to Mexico.Before she could, Mendoza caught up with her. The CemeteryOn a brisk and rainy Friday in November 2019, a police investigator named Jeremy Stagner picked up the phone to call a federal prosecutor about a scene he hadnt stopped thinking about for the past four days. Stagner described how hed gotten home from a shift with the Glynn County Police Department when his phone buzzed with an emergency alert from work. A young woman had been watching children play outside the house in Brunswick where she had been staying when a silver truck skidded onto the lawn. A man got out, a purple bandana masking his face. She tried to fight him off, but he forced her into the truck at knifepoint.A neighbor called 911 and helped a police officer find the womans backpack, which had her drivers license inside. The officers colleague was able to track the location of her cellphone, so Stagner followed the lead, speeding 30 miles northwest of the city. After cruising down a dirt road, past some mobile homes, he and other officers spotted a stocky man on his cellphone, smoking a cigarette. As they shined flashlights at the face of the suspected kidnapper, one of them shouted his name: Mendoza!When the man looked up, they knew it was him the hearing aid in his ear matched one in a booking photo. Mendoza turned toward his truck. One of the officers cuffed him. Stagner moved past him and headed inside Mendozas trailer. Stagner had seen a lot of messed-up things in his life, from explosives in Iraq wounding fellow Marines to the gruesome aftermath of shootings in Brunswick. This was one of the most haunting scenes hed encountered. On a small wooden table, objects were arranged in an offering of sorts: fruit, cigarettes, a bottle of tequila, flickering prayer candles. In the middle was a photo, placed upside down, of the woman whod been kidnapped. She was holding a bouquet of yellow roses and a box of chocolates. Looming over the photo was a statue of La Santa Muerte, known among law enforcement as a saint invoked to protect criminal acts. There was blood what he later learned was the victims blood smeared on the statues scythe. First image: A makeshift altar to La Santa Muerte was adorned with prayer candles, cigarettes, alcohol, fruit and flowers. Second image: The white scythe of the La Santa Muerte statue was marked with Sofis blood. (Obtained by ProPublica) Over the next few days, as the investigation continued, Stagner learned that Mendoza had driven the woman from the front yard of the house where she was staying to a remote cemetery. According to evidence police collected, on the way to the cemetery Mendoza sought advice from a colleague in Mexico on what to do, and the colleague said he should kill her, that it wasnt convenient to leave her alive. Once he arrived, he climbed into the back seat of the truck and began beating her so badly that her blood splattered across the cab.He then headed to a nearby trailer where he sometimes stayed. He took out a knife and grabbed Sofis hair, slicing off strands of it for the shrine. He took blood from her nose and wiped it on La Santa Muertes scythe. Then he stepped outside to make a call. Thats when the cops caught up with him. In the doorway, they found Sofi, bloodied but alive. At a nearby hospital, after a doctor examined her wounds and tested her for a concussion, investigators snapped photos of the bruises on her face. Sitting in a bed under the rooms fluorescent lights, she explained through an interpreter that Mendoza had kidnapped her not only because she had left him. It was also because she knew too much about his business. They dont want me to be found, she said. They dont want me to say that he does illegal things. She told the officers exactly where to look for proof of all he was hoping to hide: One of his phones had extensive info about workers who had paid him illegal fees to get their H-2A visas.The lead investigator interviewing her had never heard of H-2A before. But Stagner had, from reading the news. Labor trafficking fell outside Stagners lane as a county investigator. But hed spent time on an FBI task force and had worked with a federal prosecutor on a gang case. So he called to ask if the prosecutor might be interested.As it happened, the prosecutor was working with several federal agents looking to build a case that exposed the trafficking of H-2A workers in Georgia. The agents had been following leads from an anti-trafficking organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that in 2015 had uncovered the abuses of harvesters at an onion farm near Vidalia. That collaboration enabled the agents to expand their investigation. They questioned farmers about their use of the H-2A program and surveilled labor contractors who seemed to have lied on visa applications. Now the agents were poised to get data from phones that belonged to Mendoza. And they had a potential witness, one with firsthand knowledge of his alleged labor trafficking and one who could recount how she was held captive and brutalized for a year.Sofi knew the perils of cooperating with the federal government. Mendoza had already warned her that he was going to have her family killed if she talked to anyone. She wanted to help the other farmworkers, but she was terrified for her son and for herself.Out of fear, she wanted to stay silent. But from that same fear came another realization: Only by exposing Mendozas operation did she have a shot at saving herself. Modern-Day SlaverySofi sat calmly in the courtroom, trying to stay focused. More than two years had passed since she last saw Mendoza. Shed tried to start over, working at a restaurant. Shed met someone new. They had a baby. Now, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him again. She thought about what prosecutors had told her as theyd prepared her for today. Shed be helping others, they assured her. Just tell the truth. While Mendoza was out on bail, federal agents spent nearly a year building the case against him. In that time, according to their investigation, he picked up where he left off, charging workers for the chance to get a visa, holding some against their will and even kidnapping others. Mendoza was indicted in September 2020 for sex trafficking. It was the first big indictment of what was known as Operation Blooming Onion, which exposed widespread abuses of H-2A workers across Georgia. His charge was followed by a flurry of others including forced labor and money laundering against two dozen other participants in what the federal government described as a sprawling, transnational criminal organization. It was one of the largest H-2A trafficking investigations ever. Federal investigators claimed that Mendoza made more than $25,000 a month by charging workers unlawful fees before he would submit their H-2A applications. They also turned up evidence that hed inflated the number of workers he needed so he could collect more of those up-front fees and that hed sold the labor of some of the additional workers to farmers not authorized to participate in the program. The defendants included crew leaders at the onion farm near Vidalia, a well-connected businesswoman who prepared applications for hundreds of visas, and two farmers including King, who would plead guilty to the lesser charge of mail fraud and be sentenced to a year and a day. (King, who declined to comment for this story, apologized at his sentencing hearing, saying his actions were not acceptable.)Altogether, prosecutors alleged that defendants filed petitions seeking more than 71,000 H-2A visas, leading to thousands of applicants getting approved when there was no legitimate job for them. They also estimated that the operation raked in more than $200 million in profits by illegally charging workers thousands of dollars to get a visa and by having them work for other, unauthorized employers, not all of them farms, which violates their H-2A contract. One of those workers died of heat stroke after working on a farm where he wasnt supposed to be. Federal prosecutors entered as evidence photos of the housing that defendants had provided to H-2A workers. (Obtained by ProPublica.) Federal investigators seized a trove of passports that they say had been confiscated from H-2A workers by the defendants. (Obtained by ProPublica) Mendoza himself brought over 565 people, with pending visa applications for hundreds more. He wasnt the biggest player of them all. But a lead investigator testified that he was, unquestionably, the most brutal. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in forced labor in exchange for dropping the sex-trafficking charge. And he faced a longer sentence than any other defendant in the case. Sofi had been surviving on the pay from her restaurant shifts, help from her coworkers and the hope that if she fulfilled her obligation to the government shed be reunited with her son. She had helped agents find Mendozas records and decipher them. She also connected investigators to other labor-trafficking victims, ones whod been afraid to speak up. And her sworn statements corroborated information that turned up in the investigations of other agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Labor and the FBI. And in March 2022, she would testify at Mendozas sentencing hearing.From the witness stand, Sofi locked her eyes on the prosecutor asking questions. She described the work she was forced to do for free, the ways that Mendoza controlled her, the beatings, the deception. She spoke of the Guatemalan children she was punished for trying to feed and the trip to the courthouse where she was tricked into signing a marriage license. As it turned out, Mendoza never finalized the paperwork. It wasnt until after she escaped that she found out they werent married. She was asked about the first time he touched her, the first time he had sex with her. How many times did he rape you? the prosecutor asked.Many, Sofi said.How long were you with him, do you remember?One year.And during that year, did he rape you on a weekly, monthly or daily basis?Whenever he wanted to.The prosecutor turned to the day of the kidnapping. It was a day that made Sofi fear shed never see her son again or, worse, that shed see her son killed. If the police hadnt arrived, Sofi explained, I probably would be dead. After hours of testimony, there was only one significant point Mendozas lawyer objected to: that Mendoza forced Sofi to be with him. He said it was his clients assertion that he and Sofi had had a consensual relationship. When Mendoza spoke, briefly, he asked the judge for forgiveness. I learned from this, he said. I will turn away from the past.As the hearing drew to a close, Judge Lisa Godbey Wood explained that she had watched Sofis body language and studied the tone of her voice as she testified. And she could see how much Sofi had to lose, especially in the face of threats to her and her son. She couldnt find a single reason not to believe Sofi. I would find by any standard of proof that shes telling the truth, Wood said. As a result I find that the rapes did occur.Wood turned to Mendoza. People think that theres no slavery anymore, she told him, moments before sentencing him to 30 years in prison. There is, and you were doing it right here in our state.But though this case revealed how easy it is to exploit and abuse visaholders, little has changed. Most defendants have pleaded guilty, avoiding the worst charges and ending up suspended from H-2A work for just a few years. The remaining four are expected to go to trial this December. In the years since Mendozas sentencing, as in the years before, only a tiny fraction of farms are investigated for potential H-2A violations. The Biden administration increased protections for H-2A workers, but several lawsuits filed by states including Georgia have prevented them from fully going into effect. This past June, the Trump administration went one step further, suspending any enforcement of the new programs rules until that litigation is resolved.The number of H-2A visas issued has increased every year since Sofi arrived. The escalation of Trumps deportation efforts this year has led to arrests of undocumented farmworkers who account for over 40% of all field laborers and sparked enough fear to convince others to no longer show up to work. If farmers are squeezed further by the shortage of farmworkers, the H-2A program can fulfill that demand. Theres no limit to how many visas can be issued. The ReunionIn October 2023, a year after she wrapped up her efforts to expose the dangers of the H-2A program, Sofi got approval to be reunited with her son. He could come here on the same kind of visa she was about to receive, for victims of severe human trafficking and their families. There would be a path to citizenship for both of them. The life shed fought for was so close and, yet, just out of reach. Her past was still present. She was reminded of it constantly, by flashbacks to her days in captivity, by fear that seized her when an unfamiliar car cruised her street, by migraines she chalked up to those final blows from Mendoza. And it wasnt only the memories that were hard. Even now, she struggled to survive.That winter, she worked at a nursing home. But after she and the father of her toddler split up, she couldnt stretch her $450-per-week paycheck to cover rent, utilities and car insurance let alone send any money to Mexico for her older sons tuition, uniform and shoes. The stress wore her down. She developed facial paralysis, but the nursing home wouldnt give her time off to address it. Then she slipped and broke her ankle. She couldnt walk, much less work, until she recovered from surgery. Without health insurance, the bills piled up, roughly $24,000. The one thing that could help her the more than $16,000 in court-ordered restitution for unpaid H-2A wages had yet to materialize. Even if she could afford to send for her son, she told herself, she couldnt afford to support him. Her mind drifted back to Mexico. The comfort of home. The chance to see her parents again. But she was jolted out of that dream by the fear she still felt from the threat against her sons life. She felt theyd never truly be safe in Mexico, not after her testimony against Mendoza. In the U.S., theyd at least have some protections. It ended up taking more than a year from the time he got his visa, but finally, right around when Trump was elected, Sofis son arrived. She hugged him for the first time in five years and introduced him to his 3-year-old brother. Her excitement was clouded just slightly by the fact that she could only buy her oldest a few sets of clothes. The three of them crammed into a single room in a small blue house full of Spanish-speaking laborers. For a week, she tried to make do on a single pack of soup. She ended up skipping meals.Sofi wants to believe that this country is in fact a land of opportunity. But sometimes her faith wears thin. Not all of us get to be smiled upon by the United States, she said. Sofi hasnt been able to finish her and her sons applications for green cards. After paying $1,000 for the required medical exams, she couldnt come up with the $400 to cover vaccines or a reference letter from an employer. But she still dreams of her son in a military uniform. She can see him as a Marine in the blue pants and dark jacket and white hat.Not long after he started at his new elementary school in January, he asked what would happen if immigration agents came to the school and confused him with someone whos undocumented. From that day forward, Sofi sent him to school with a photocopy of his passport and visa in his backpack. She told him not to worry, that maybe, because of everything shes been through, nothing bad would happen to him. With every passing day of school, every new word of English he picks up, she gains more hope. Hes one more step away from a life of picking fruit. Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research. Abraham Kenmore contributed reporting. Design and development by Zisiga Mukulu of ProPublica. Visual editing and art direction by Shoshana Gordon of ProPublica.
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