Immigrant workers were cheated, tricked into deportation

Gerardo Santiago-Hernandez once was a worker at Four Star Greenhouse in Carleton, Michigan. A lawsuit filed in June 2020, on behalf of him and other migrant workers from Mexico alleges he was cheated of his wages and tricked into being detained by federal immigrant agents and removed to Mexico. (Photo: Centro de los Derechos del Migrante)

The migrant worker had come to the United States legally to work at Four Star Greenhouse in Carleton through a temporary agricultural visa known as H-2A.

But he said his dreams were crushed after he and other workers were cheated out of their pay despite working long hours.After they complained, he said that they were lured and tricked by their employer into being detained by federal immigration agents in a Walmart parking lot, and eventually sent back to Mexico.

"It's not fair," Reyes-Trujillo, 32, told the Free Press through a translator during a phone interview from Puebla, a state in Mexico where he lives. "It's not fair for us to work so hard, but instead were delivered to immigration. ... They didn't want to pay us."

In a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Detroit, seven migrant workers from Mexico, including Reyes-Trujillo, allege that Four Star Greenhouse and the agent it used to hire them violated labor, wage and trafficking laws in 2017 and 2018.

Source: Detroit Free Press

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Source: Detroit Free Press