In the summer of 2019, a crew leader tasked with overseeing farm laborers sent them to harvest corn in a field where they weren’t authorized to work — and where there wasn’t adequate protection from the sweltering sun. One of them died of symptoms of heatstroke.

Five months later, a crew leader for another Georgia farm kidnapped and brutally assaulted one of his workers who had escaped.

Two years after that, a third crew leader confined workers to housing surrounded by an electric fence so they couldn’t try to flee.

These and other recently documented abuses were carried out by third-party middlemen, or farm labor contractors, who were hired by farm owners to recruit and supervise foreign workers. Those contractors had found ways to wield power with near impunity over hundreds of workers at a time. Federal prosecutors spent years revealing the scope of the problem in Georgia, in a giant labor-trafficking case that launched in 2016 and is now nearing its conclusion.

The evidence in that case led prosecutors to liken the abuse to a form of modern-day slavery. 

But despite prosecutors’ efforts to crack down on the exploitation of workers by labor contractors, there has been little to no movement at the state or federal level to make the changes that can stop it. There are laws and regulations that could curb exploitation, but reports from farmworker advocates and labor experts have shown that enforcement has long been lax. A number of elected officials have pushed for years for the government to do more to ensure workers receive those protections. Some advocates now say the only solution is for the government to require that farm owners cut out the middleman and assume ultimate responsibility for their workers.

Experts told ProPublica there aren’t enough state and federal inspectors to adequately vet whether the contractors are following the rules. Nor is there broad political support to invest more resources to protect foreign workers, who themselves have little incentive for reporting abuse given the fear of retribution. 

“Regardless of the administration — even ones that are sympathetic to labor — regulators are handicapped,” said Cesar Escalante, a University of Georgia professor of agricultural and applied economics. “They know what’s happening, but they’re incapable of enforcing the regulations.”

As American farmers continue to rely on the decades-old H-2A visa program to fill the seasonal farmworker jobs, they’ve grown more reliant on contractors to find and oversee those workers. Contractors often are fluent in the languages spoken by workers, familiar with the Mexican towns where they’re plentiful and well-versed in the process of securing their temporary work visas. Many farmers also end up hiring contractors to manage the laborers’ work, pay and housing. 

Federal regulators have long known about contractors abusing and exploiting these workers — including stealing their wages, charging them illegal fees, forcing them to live in substandard housing, and even physically and sexually abusing them. Government watchdogs have published reports about those regulators’ failures to do more to prevent abuses in the fields — inaction that, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s inspector general’s office, has increased the odds of employers getting away with serious H-2A violations. 

The number of H-2A seasonal worker visas requested by contractors has nearly tripled over the past decade, with roughly 2 out of every 5 H-2A workers now directly overseen by a labor contractor. The Government Accountability Office found that more than half of the employers banned from the H-2A visa program between 2020 and 2023 were labor contractors, even though they submitted just 15% of the visa applications during that same period. 

One of the key ways to uncover abuses by labor contractors is for regulators to inspect the farms where their workers pick crops. Daniel Costa, an attorney and director of immigration with the think tank the Economic Policy Institute, said federal regulators have become so strapped for resources that they’re only inspecting a tiny fraction of farms each year.

“When less than 1% of farm employers are investigated every year, they can act with impunity, knowing that there is a very low likelihood that they will ever be investigated,” Costa said. 

Every year, hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers are drawn to America by the promise of steady, seasonal farmwork through the H-2A program. One of them, Agustin Chavez Santiago, traveled more than 1,500 miles from Oaxaca, Mexico, for his chance to pick crops on a Georgia farm. Once he arrived in the spring of 2019, one of the labor contractors he’d worked with failed to pay him the $11 an hour his contract had promised. Soon after, Chavez was sent to work on a farm where he wasn’t authorized to do so. 

As Chavez harvested corn one sweltering afternoon, his body temperature spiked to over 105 degrees. He walked off the field to sip water and rest. Before he cooled down, Chavez collapsed. He was taken to a nearby hospital and died from symptoms of heatstroke. He was 34 years old.

Federal prosecutors charged two contractors involved in recruiting and overseeing Chavez on trafficking charges. Those contractors each pleaded guilty to a lesser crime; one admitted to money laundering and the other admitted to concealing knowledge of a felony. Lawyers for those contractors declined ProPublica’s requests for comment. 

In addition, workplace safety inspectors determined that Chavez died because of the negligence of another labor contractor who oversaw his work in the fields. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration concluded that the labor contractor did not provide a worksite free from “hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” The contractor’s company paid OSHA a fine of $16,433. He was able to keep supervising workers. 

“The fact that OSHA fined him $16,000 is a slap in the face to the victims,” said Teresa Romero, the president of the United Farm Workers, one of the country’s largest farmworker advocacy organizations. “This person should have been behind bars.”

The contractor didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. He told OSHA in 2019 that he provided water to his employees and allowed them to take breaks in the shade as needed.

The U.S. Labor Department can fine or suspend contractors for violating the rules of the H-2A program. But it’s doing fewer agricultural investigations than at any point since the turn of the millennium. In the latest year of available data, including parts of 2024 and 2025, the department completed 649 of those investigations, fining farm employers $8.3 million across the country. That is less than half of the investigations done just a decade earlier, even though the H-2A program more than doubled in size during that time.

Experts say the decline in investigations reflects the limited capacity of federal regulators, not that conditions have improved for H-2A workers. Alexis Guild, vice president of strategy and programs with the advocacy group Farmworker Justice, told ProPublica that regulators now rely on workers to report potential violations against themselves. But she said many workers are too scared to speak out because it may lead to retribution and the loss of future work. “It creates an environment that’s ripe for abuse,” she said.

The U.S. Labor Department is responsible for vetting H-2A visa applications that the contractors submit to get foreign workers cleared to come to America. Those regulators routinely audit the contractors’ applications to verify information about the number of workers needed and the terms of their employment. If contractors submit false information, they may be criminally charged, as happened in the federal case in Georgia. 

But a surge in those requests has meant that large piles of applications haven’t been vetted as closely for red flags. Regulators went from conducting over 500 audits in the fiscal year ending in 2018 to doing less than 50 five years later. The U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General has warned that the way that its regulators audit “increases the risk of fraud and noncompliance going undetected.” That warning followed another OIG report that said the way that the department had conducted those audits created an “unnecessarily elevated risk of foreign labor program abuse.” 

Federal labor regulators have acknowledged to the Government Accountability Office that they have had “widespread concern” about farmworkers being exploited by contractors. They have also told the GAO that the department has “limited resources” to carry out some of its work, including the audits. 

In recent years, the U.S. Labor Department has been pressed to take greater action to fix these problems. After the Georgia case was publicly unveiled in 2021, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia called for more “rigorous oversight” of the contractors. United Farm Workers has also pushed for workers to have “stronger and more effective” protections from their contractors. 

In response, the Biden administration finalized a rule in 2024 that sought to increase protections for H-2A workers and hold their employers more accountable. But after numerous states filed lawsuits challenging the rule, the Trump administration decided to suspend all enforcement of those strengthened protections until the litigation is resolved. 

The U.S. Labor Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. 

With fewer federal investigations of farmworker abuses, some states that heavily depend on H-2A workers have tried to address rampant contractor abuses. 

Florida regulators require labor contractors to get a state license — a move intended to help ensure greater compliance with the rules of the H-2A program. Washington posts all of its housing inspection and enforcement records in an online database, allowing workers to look at those records before they accept a job. California lawmakers last year passed a new law that will give greater power to its regulators to crack down on the abuses of foreign farmworkers by labor contractors. 

But even amid a period of extra scrutiny, Georgia hasn’t made those or any other major changes that could prevent the kind of abuses uncovered in the massive federal probe. 

Labor experts say that one of the most important actions that states can take to protect H-2A workers is to devote sufficient resources to the inspection of their housing conditions. In the last full year of available data, Georgia had one H-2A housing inspector for roughly every 7,100 H-2A workers. Other states with high numbers of H-2A workers had hired more inspectors relative to the number of workers. In recent years, Michigan has had one housing inspector for every 2,000 or so H-2A workers; North Carolina has had one inspector for roughly every 4,000 workers. (Other states, including California, have had worse inspector-to-worker ratios.)

At the same time that Georgia’s Labor Department failed to expand its oversight of farmworker housing, one of its top officials called for an internal investigation into alleged problems within the department. 

In 2018, as federal investigators were building their case, Georgia’s Labor Department received a complaint alleging that one of its regulators had been approving inspections of H-2A worker housing in exchange for cash. Four years later, a federal agent testified in court that employees of Georgia’s Labor Department had accepted bribes to approve inspections of H-2A worker housing. The employee accused in the 2018 complaint, who was not indicted and retired three months after that agent testified, told ProPublica that he denied any wrongdoing.

Around the time of his retirement, labor advocates published a report that called for the “rebuilding” of the state’s Labor Department. They demanded more stringent inspections of H-2A worker housing, better monitoring for potential violations and increased funding so regulators could more effectively do their jobs. 

Instead of having Georgia’s Labor Department adopt those recommendations, Gov. Brian Kemp signed an executive order that stripped the beleaguered department of its oversight powers. 

Georgia’s Labor Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for Kemp said the decision was made to “improve alignment with workforce training programs.”

Kemp transferred H-2A oversight to the Technical College System of Georgia. A Technical College System spokesperson said its officials have “strengthened its monitoring processes to ensure thorough oversight of potential H-2A violations.” 

She also noted that the agency has increased the number of employees who conduct housing inspections from three to six — with plans to add a seventh soon. In a statement, the spokesperson wrote that the Technical College System has taken steps that “have enhanced our ability to monitor, document, and respond to issues more effectively than before.”

Yet, even after doubling the number of inspectors, Georgia still has fewer inspectors per H-2A worker than some of the other states that heavily rely on the visa program.

States like Georgia that have too few inspectors for H-2A workers all but guarantee that violations of the program’s rules will increase, according to Diane Charlton, an associate professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University. “We need to invest more in actually monitoring labor conditions,” Charlton said. “This has to be a major priority.”