A multimillion-dollar North Carolina farm and its contractors confiscated immigrant workers’ passports and visa documents with the explicit goal of trapping them in their jobs, according to a class action lawsuit filed Friday.

Plaintiff Fernando Javier Rodríguez Luna, a farmworker from Mexico on an H-2A visa, alleged that officials at Jackson Farming Company of Autryville and their contractors also forced him and other workers to pay illegal recruitment fees and other charges, broke contract agreements, created a false payroll record, illegally deducted money from workers’ pay for Social Security cards, failed to provide access to bathrooms and drinking water, and failed to properly care for workers suffering from heatstroke, among other violations. When Rodríguez Luna was injured on the job, he says the company sent him back to Mexico and refused to give him his final paycheck.

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The lawsuit illustrates yet again the abuse within the H-2A agricultural worker visa program, which allows companies to recruit temporary and seasonal workers, mostly from Mexico, after conducting a pro forma process to prove they can’t find anyone in the U.S. to hire. The Trump administration wants to make the program year-round, while at the same time has cut the H-2A minimum wage, two moves that will make it even easier for companies to exploit immigrant workers. In just the last four months, the North Carolina Justice Center, which is representing Rodríguez Luna, settled with two other farms for similar human trafficking and wage theft violations brought by workers on H-2A visas.

“Unfortunately, the economic situation in other countries is such that people will come regardless of how difficult we make it for them while they’re here,” said North Carolina Justice Center senior attorney Carol Brooke. The Trump administration and agricultural bosses are “taking advantage of workers’ economic desperation, essentially,” she said.

Combined with nonexistent law enforcement and the threat of Trump’s mass deportations, farmworkers are even more vulnerable.

The lawsuit also illustrates how farms attempt to insulate themselves from workers’ claims by using middlemen to fill jobs and act as the employer of record, Brooke said. Rodríguez Luna’s lawsuit names contractor Alvino Avilez Castaneda and Avilez & Sons Harvesting as defendants.

“A major structural problem with the H-2A program is farm labor contractors, who bring in workers under the program” though they are not the farm owner, Brooke said. “This creates a layer between the actual farm where the work is taking place … it is a way to shield the farmers from liability and adds to the opportunity for abuse.”

According to the lawsuit, Rodríguez Luna came to the U.S. on a temporary basis in 2024 and 2025 to harvest broccoli, melons, sweet potatoes, and other crops for William Rodney Jackson, the president of Jackson Farming Company. Alvino Avilez and Avilez & Sons Harvesting recruited Rodríguez Luna and others for the job while they were in Mexico. Avilez required workers to pay an illegal fee to be considered hirable, then continued charging them various fees while they traveled to the U.S.

Once they were in North Carolina, the lawsuit says the contractors stole workers’ passports and Social Security cards “with the explicit goal of keeping them from leaving their employment.” No one reimbursed workers for the cost of their visas, travels to and from North Carolina, or any of the other associated costs, as the H-2A program requires. They also did not pay the promised H-2A pay rate.

Workers couldn’t leave without their immigration documents, the lawsuit claims, and Avilez threatened that if they tried to leave early, he’d notify the U.S. consulate so they could never get an H-2A visa again. Rodríguez Luna “understood that, without his passport, he was at risk of being detained and deported by immigration enforcement because he had no proof of his legal immigration status. He also believed he would be unable to leave the United States without his passport.”

Contractors required workers who insisted on leaving to pay $300 to get their passports back. At one point last year, the contractors gave workers back their documents because of an ongoing Department of Labor investigation and “instructed the workers not to tell investigators that their passports had been confiscated.”

Jackson Farming has a history of abusing workers. Jackson’s father is North Carolina state Sen. Brent Jackson (R-9), “the only mega-farmer” in the chamber, whose 2019 political campaign was bankrolled by tobacco goliath Reynolds American despite multiple allegations against him, including abusing workers under the H-2A program. As his son is allegedly doing, he also failed to provide a safe working environment, including failing to provide medical attention to a worker suffering from heatstroke whose injury was “so severe that he is now permanently disabled and in a persistent vegetative state,” according to legal documents.

The violations in the new class action lawsuit “unfortunately are nothing new,” said Julia Solórzano, legal and policy director at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, which is also representing workers in the lawsuit. But under the Trump administration, they are becoming much more common because the threat of mass deportations is making it much harder for workers to speak out about abuses.

“We have seen farms raided by ICE, we have seen farmworker housing and transportation routes targeted, that increases the sense of precarity among workers and the ability of employers to take advantage of the fear to make it difficult for them to leave,” Solórzano said.

Jackson Farming failed to respond to an email seeking comment.

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THE H-2A PROGRAM CREATES a class of indentured servants for the ten months they’re allowed to stay in the U.S. annually, even if employers follow the rules. The Department of Agriculture, in collusion with corporate interests, wants to expand the program to grant year-round visas, which would open the program to dairy and meat companies. At the same time, the Trump administration has cut the minimum wage for H-2A farmworkers, which the Economic Policy Institute estimates will reduce the pay of over 350,000 H-2A farmworkers by between 26 and 32 percent for a total of at least $2 billion.

Combined with nonexistent law enforcement and the threat of Trump’s mass deportations, farmworkers are even more vulnerable. Though mainstream news coverage no longer puts news of violent mass raids on the front pages, federal agents are still rounding up immigrants with impunity and throwing them in concentration camps, where multiple lawsuits and numerous reports allege routine physical and sexual abuse, and where 17 people have died so far in this year alone.

It’s similar to the labor system in Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, where the whole economy depends on a caste of de facto slaves whom employers abuse and control by stealing their passports. Republican policies demonstrate that they are in favor of immigration, so long as immigrants have no legal rights and employers face no consequences for exploiting them.

“When workers come to the U.S. under the H-2A program, they’re coming with a lot of hope and taking a risk that is perhaps larger than they realize,” Brooke said. They’re arriving with debt because of coerced recruitment fees, visa costs, and travel, and frequently find that not only are they not earning as much as they expected but they also must endure poor living conditions.

“We certainly do see workers who have put up with months and months of untenable working conditions because of what they have at stake,” she said. “People have risked more to come, they’re more afraid of retaliation than they were previously.”

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Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07.