In December of 2016, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), based out of Immokalee, Florida, received a phone call from two men who had just escaped captivity near the town of Pahokee by hiding in the trunk of a car. The two men were migrant farmworkers, working on H-2A visas, who had been harvesting watermelons for Bladimir Moreno, owner of the farm labor contracting business Los Villatoros Harvesting LLC — a business that, in reality, was little more than a modern-day slave camp. “They told of being held against their will on a labor camp surrounded by barbed wire,” the CIW notes, “working and living under constant surveillance, and earning extremely low pay.”

On Dec. 29, 2022, after a lengthy investigation and subsequent trial, a US District Court judge sentenced Moreno to 118 months in prison for leading a federal racketeering and forced labor conspiracy between 2015–2017, spanning multiple states. “According to court documents,” Kristin Leigh Lore reports, Moreno owned, operated and managed LVH — a farm labor contracting company that brought large numbers of temporary, seasonal Mexican workers into the U.S. on H-2A agricultural visas — as a criminal enterprise. According to the Justice Department, Moreno compelled victims to work in Florida, Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia and North Carolina, and he also engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity that included visa fraud and fraud in foreign labor contracting. . . .  Once the immigrants arrived in the U.S., Moreno and his co-conspirators coerced over a dozen of them into providing long hours of physically demanding agricultural labor, six to seven days a week, for unreasonably little pay, according to the Justice Department, which said Moreno and his co-conspirators used various forms of coercion, including tactics such as:

• Imposing debts on the workers.

• Confiscating their passports.

• Subjecting them to crowded, unsanitary and degrading living conditions.

• Harboring them in the U.S. after their visas had expired.

• Threatening them with arrest and deportation if they failed to comply with demands.

The horrors uncovered at Moreno’s operation — horrors that involved the enslavement, abuse, and exploitation of flesh-and-blood human beings right here, in the United States, all around us — are not some remnant of a grim, bygone past. They are a stark reminder of the dual realities that exist side by side across the landscape of American labor: one world where working people are at least recognized as human beings with the bare minimum of rights, and another world, a submerged world, where workers who are no less human are treated as cattle, or worse.