World News | 24 Charged with Forcing Migrants into 'modern-day Slavery'

Waycross (US), Dec 11 (AP) For years, migrant workers who paid for help entering the US ended up forced to perform farm labour for little to no pay, federal authorities say, cowing to threats of deportation and violence by armed overseers while they lived in dirty, cramped trailers with little food or clean water.

Some who had been promised up to USD12 an hour to work on farms in rural South Georgia were instead ordered to dig up onions with their bare hands and got paid only 20 cents per filled bucket as men with guns kept them in check, according to court records. At least two of them died, and another was raped repeatedly.

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In a case, federal prosecutors bluntly likened to modern slavery, a grand jury indicted 24 people in US District Court on dozens of criminal counts including forced labour, mail fraud, witness tampering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Arraignments in the case have been scheduled for December 21 and January 6 at the federal courthouse in Waycross, near the Georgia-Florida state line.

Authorities said an investigation that began three years ago broke up a criminal enterprise that earned USD 200 million by exploiting the H-2A work visa programme to bring workers from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras into the US.

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The labourers were forced to pay illegal fees for transportation, food and housing, according to the indictment, while their travel and identification documents were withheld, preventing them from leaving and seeking help.

US Attorney David Estes of the Southern District of Georgia said in a statement the case had freed "more than 100 individuals from the shackles of modern-day slavery and will hold accountable those who put them in chains.”

A federal grand jury in Waycross indicted the two dozen defendants in October. It was made public only after a judge unsealed the document in late November.

Since at least 2015, the indictment says, the defendants used H-2A visa applications to bring dozens of migrant workers into the US as agricultural workers. The federal program requires that workers be paid a fair wage — often USD10 to USD12 an hour — and reimbursed for expenses involving travel to and from the US, food and lodging.

Instead, prosecutors said, the defendants kept most of the money the workers were owed. They laundered their profits by using cash to buy land, homes and more than a dozen vehicles, as well as purchasing a restaurant and night club. Millions got laundered through casinos, according to the indictment.

Estes credited more than 200 law enforcement officers and federal agents with working on the case, which focused on rural Atkinson, Bacon, Coffee, Tattnall, Toombs and Ware counties. (AP)

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)