Feds: Missouri Farm Imported Foreign Workers to Cut Labor Costs, Housed Them in Former Jail

A Florida-based company operating a Missouri farm imported foreign H-2A visa workers to cut labor costs, deny them pay, and housed them in an old jail, federal investigators say.

This month, the Department of Labor announced a settlement with Marin J. Corp, which operates a watermelon farm in southeast Missouri that includes paying nearly $166,000 in back wages to 85 foreign H-2A visa workers and a $75,000 fine for violating the Immigration and Naturalization Act.

In July 2018, Marin J. Corp was hit with a preliminary injunction for violating labor standards via the H-2A visa program that allows United States farms to import an endless number of foreign farmworkers.

As Breitbart News has reported, Americans are often replaced by imported, foreign H-2A visa workers. Black Americans in Mississippi are currently suing after their employers fired and replaced them with foreign H-2A visa workers from South Africa.

Federal investigators accused Marin J. Corp of housing foreign H-2A visa workers in an old jail that did not have a kitchen, had no access to water aside from bathroom sinks, and barely had any windows for light.

Other foreign H-2A visa workers employed by Marin J. Corp were put up in a motel and two homes, each of which had limited beds, leaking toilets, and broken refrigerators.

Likewise, investigators found that foreign H-2A visa workers were being deprived of wages and were subjected to intense working conditions where employees were forced to share a bottle of water, and many passed out under the extreme heat.

Some of the foreign H-2A visa workers said they only got two checks, one for $340 and another for $120, after working nearly a month for Marin J. Corp. In one case, the workers said they were made to cash the $120 check and return the money to the company.

“Investigators found Marin J. Corp provided these workers with living quarters that were woefully inadequate and violated basic human decency, and violated specific guidelines of the H-2A program, including charging workers to obtain employment,” Labor Department official Michael Lazzeri said in a statement.

In a recent case, a federal indictment detailed allegations that accused a transnational criminal network of operating a “modern-day slavery” scheme that used the H-2A visa program to traffic foreign nationals into U.S. farm jobs — raping, kidnapping, and threatening them in the process.

In 1997, a little more than 16,000 foreign H-2A visa workers were imported to take American agriculture jobs. By 2021, that number had exploded to more than 258,000. About 93 percent of all H-2A visas are awarded to Mexican nationals.

At the same time, as Breitbart News exclusively reported last month, Reps. Scott Franklin (R-FL) and Salud Carbajal (D-CA) have sought to garner Republican and Democrat support for making foreign H-2A visa workers even cheaper for U.S. farms to hire.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.