The owner of a labor company has been sentenced by a federal judge for using the H-2A visa program to traffic foreign workers into United States farm jobs — imposing debts, stealing their wages, confiscating their passports, and forcing them to work grueling hours, among other things.
This week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a nearly 10-year prison sentence against 55-year-old Bladimir Moreno, who owned Los Villatoros Harvesting (LVH) — a labor contracting company — after his pleading guilty earlier this year to racketeering charges and conspiracy to commit forced labor.
Moreno’s co-defendants also pleaded guilty to racketeering charges and were sentenced.
“Forcing individuals to work against their will using abusive and coercive tactics is not only unconscionable but illegal,” U.S. Attorney Roger Handberg said in a statement.
Moreno enticed Mexican nationals into the trafficking scheme with H-2A visas, the program that allows agricultural companies to import thousands of foreign workers to work on farms in Florida, Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia, and North Carolina.
As part of the scheme, Moreno fraudulently obtained H-2A visas and charged inflated prices to the Mexican nationals for the visas. After the Mexican nationals arrived in the U.S., Moreno and his co-conspirators forced them to work grueling hours six to seven days a week for minimal pay.
Moreno imposed debts on the Mexican nationals while also confiscating their passports, forcing them to live in squalor conditions, harboring them after their H-2A visas expired, and threatening to report them to immigration authorities if they did not comply with the terms of the scheme.
“This defendant abused his power as a business owner to capitalize on the victims’ vulnerabilities and immigration status, luring those seeking a better quality of life with false promises of lawful work paying a fair wage,” the DOJ’s Kristen Clarke said in a statement.
As part of the sentence, Moreno must pay over $175,000 in restitution to his victims.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.