A Farmworkers Visa Promised Her a Better Life. It Was a Trap.

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 Georgia’s 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 he’d end up like his own mother and father, who’d brought him as a toddler from Mexico. They’d 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 Mendoza’s recruiters in Mexico was a neighbor of Sofi’s 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 he’d 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 didn’t leave. The wages Mendoza offered could change her son’s 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.

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 Mendoza’s 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 didn’t say much else, just that anyone who got caught would need to claim the cash as their own. So don’t 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 Farmer

In 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 King’s workers himself. That meant Mendoza would actually find the housing and pay for it with King’s 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 don’t 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 couldn’t 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, she’d have to do so without her passport. She wasn’t getting it back.

He already had Sofi’s.

The Threats

Sofi 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 he’d bring in more and more workers that the farmers didn’t actually need, just to get those up-front fees. He’d even bring her to meetings with King. It was an effort, she thought, to show off Mendoza’s power over her.

She recalled that Mendoza crammed a couple dozen people — workers and their children — into a trailer. She noticed that a few didn’t 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, couldn’t even try to flee. She didn’t have her passport. She didn’t know a single person she could turn to. She didn’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t, he repeated the thing he always said when he was mad, which was often: I’ll call immigration, she remembered him saying. I’ll 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. He’d 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 hadn’t been paid.

Sofi took some of Mendoza’s 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 he’d 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 didn’t come back to him, he’d see that she was never able to return to the U.S., that he’d 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 she’d 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 couldn’t 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 wasn’t the same old warning about calling immigration. She recalled him telling her over the phone that if she didn’t 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 Mendoza’s arrest, he was released after a grand jury chose not to indict him. Around that time, Sofi reached out to someone she’d 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 Cemetery

On 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 hadn’t stopped thinking about for the past four days.

Stagner described how he’d 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 woman’s backpack, which had her driver’s license inside. The officer’s 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 Mendoza’s 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 he’d 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 who’d 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 victim’s blood — smeared on the statue’s scythe.

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 wasn’t 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 Sofi’s hair, slicing off strands of it for the shrine. He took blood from her nose and wiped it on La Santa Muerte’s scythe. Then he stepped outside to make a call. That’s 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 room’s 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 don’t want me to be found,” she said. “They don’t 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 Stagner’s lane as a county investigator. But he’d 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 Mendoza’s operation did she have a shot at saving herself.

Modern-Day Slavery

Sofi sat calmly in the courtroom, trying to stay focused. More than two years had passed since she last saw Mendoza. She’d tried to start over, working at a restaurant. She’d 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 they’d prepared her for today. She’d 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 he’d inflated the number of workers he needed so he could collect more of those up-front fees and that he’d 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 wasn’t supposed to be.