Harvest of pain A pistol-packing contractor lured workers from Mexico to labor in farms across the U.S. Beaten, poisoned and nearly killed, Juan Jimenez Luna escaped and tried to fight back.

Harvest of pain A pistol-packing contractor lured workers from Mexico to labor in farms across the U.S. Beaten, poisoned and nearly killed, Juan Jimenez Luna escaped and tried to fight back.

Juan Jimenez Luna crossed the Rio Grande on an inner tube, drawn by the promise of a $600-a-week job driving a tractor. Instead, he found himself picking vegetables for less than $30 a day and worked to the limits of endurance.

His boss, a man named Salvador Hernandez, oversaw a crew of migrant workers. He hired them in Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley. Then he drove them across the country and shuffled them from farm to farm and state to state: Mississippi, Florida and up the Eastern Seaboard. They traveled in old school buses so crowded that some of the workers sat on the floor.

Lunch breaks were rare, as were days off. Those who defied Hernandez were sometimes beaten. The injured were often left to suffer. Yet no one fled.

At night, the crew shared floor space in cramped quarters infested with rats and cockroaches. By day, Hernandez pushed them ruthlessly beneath the summer sun, brandishing a pistol at those who slowed down, according to workers' accounts and court records.

Hernandez kept a gun in plain view in his lap when workers came to collect their pay, according to the court case and worker interviews. He often withheld their wages, and he threatened to call immigration authorities if any dared to complain.

Ripped Off: About the series The San Antonio Express-News analyzed more than two decades of federal and state data on labor investigations of various industries, including agriculture. Among the findings: Laws protecting farmworker labor rights are rarely enforced. In Texas, only 10% of the agricultural industry investigations resulted in recovery of back wages, and some companies have been investigated more than a hundred times. Part 1: Immigrant who sued, won back pay – now in hiding for his life

It took Jimenez Luna three years to muster the courage to escape. By then, he was picking sweet corn in central New York. With help from a grassroots labor organization, he fled to San Antonio, where he had relatives.

He and three other laborers filed a civil complaint in federal court and, in 2013, won a $2.45 million judgment for back wages against Hernandez, the labor boss’ wife and his brother.

A judge found that Hernandez and his relatives had failed to pay the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, violated federal protections for migrant farmworkers, and engaged in forced labor and human trafficking. In a separate criminal case, Hernandez pleaded guilty to employing unauthorized immigrants and spent a year in federal prison.

The criminal case: USA vs Salvador Hernandez Hernandez pleaded guilty to charges of employing unauthorized aliens. He spent one year and one day in prison.

Six years later, Jimenez Luna said he hasn’t seen a penny from the civil judgment. Hernandez said he has no ability to pay because lawyers took all of his money and assets.

The case illustrates how migrant farmworkers are routinely abused and denied minimum wages and overtime pay in an industry that operates with little federal and state oversight.

Hernandez, in an interview, said he did not know Jimenez Luna and the other workers were undocumented. He denied committing any of the physical abuse and other wrongdoing described in the civil lawsuit.

He said it was his employer, Sunrise Labor Corp., that neglected to pay Jimenez Luna and the other laborers.

“I have always worked under a company, and the company is the one that pays,” said Hernandez, 57, who now lives in Belle Glade, Fla., and continues to employ migrant farmworkers. He recruits many of them in Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley.

Florida-based Sunrise Labor is one of several companies established by Thomas C. Holt Jr. to serve as middlemen between farmers and farm labor contractors. Sunrise Labor, originally a defendant in the civil case, reached an out-of-court settlement with Jimenez Luna and the other workers for an undisclosed sum.

Since 1995, Holt and his partners, Russell Reaves and James Shannon McNeill, have founded or managed at least 10 farm labor contracting corporations, Florida records show.

Hernandez and his brother still run their business and renew their farm labor contractor licenses annually with the U.S. Department of Labor. They still work for Holt and McNeill.

The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division has conducted more than 18,000 investigations of the industry, with South Texas as a primary focus. Six of the 10 U.S. ZIP codes with the most investigations over the last 20 years are in Hidalgo County, a national nexus for farm labor contractors, including Hernandez.

But enforcement largely stops there. More than half — 58.6 percent — of investigations across all industries in Texas from 2002 to 2017 succeeded in recovering back wages. But only 7.5 percent of the farm labor investigations in Texas recovered back pay. In Florida, just 14 percent did.

“When it comes to recovering back wages for workers, it’s not happening at all,” said Roman Ramos, a former migrant farmworker and veteran paralegal with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid. “I primarily deal with foreign workers; and, when we’ve been lucky, the DOL has gone in and investigated. But when it comes to recovering back wages, nothing happens. It is a black hole.”

Farmworkers who harvest the crops and endure substandard living conditions as they are trucked to fields around the country are shortchanged in an industry that was valued at $61 billion in 2016.

That same year, the National Agricultural Workers Survey found that more than half of all migrant farmworker families were living below the poverty line — with a poverty rate almost four times the national average.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a nationally recognized farmworker rights organization in Florida, estimates that a farmworker would need to pick 2½ tons of tomatoes in a 10-hour workday to make minimum wage. It said the average salary for a migrant farmworker in 2012 was between $10,000 and $12,499 a year, well below the minimum wage of about $15,000 a year.

Making matters worse, workers are frequently idled by injuries. They are paid only when they work in the fields and only rarely receive workers' compensation.

The rate of on-the-job deaths for migrant farmworkers is six times the national average, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Many of these workers are recruited in South Texas by farm labor contractors like Hernandez. Produce growers — often large companies that control the crop production from seed planting to supermarket delivery — outsource seasonal harvesting to the contractors. The workers are usually Hispanic and often undocumented. They typically migrate from farm to farm and pick crops by hand.

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act requiring a minimum wage applies to all workers, including undocumented immigrants.

Growers and supermarkets set the price per basket. Contractors typically cut corners to increase their profits.

“I think that, generally speaking, the agricultural industry is built off of sub-minimum wages,” said Daniela Dwyer, managing attorney for the Farmworker Program at Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid. “Especially in the places where you are very near the border and have a constant influx of immigrant labor who, for various, compelling reasons are not in a position to really argue.”

“It’s the fear,” said Mario Galvan, a recently retired outreach worker with the Texas Workforce Commission. “Workers are afraid to speak out against an employer for fear of retaliation.”

Hidalgo County has the most farm labor contractors of any county in the U.S. outside California’s Central Valley, according to Department of Labor records. More than 81 percent of all registered farm labor contractors recruit out of Texas, Florida or California.

“Growers work with Texas farm labor contractors because historically that’s where the labor force has been,” said Dwyer. Nearly all the contractors in Florida, he said, are run by families who “one or two generations back were Texans that migrated over to Florida.”

Dwyer said growers who hire farm labor contractors could require them to pay minimum wage. But she said that rarely happens.

“The ethical grower is not going to stay in business for very long.”

Like most farm labor contractors, Hernandez entered the industry as a farmworker and worked his way up.

Born in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Hernandez made his way to Texas in his teens and started working as a migrant farmworker, harvesting crops on the circuit from Florida to Illinois.

In the early 1990s, he moved to Belle Glade, and after a few years was working as a farm labor contractor, recruiting workers for Holt.

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“He worked for one of Tommy Holt’s companies,” said McNeill, who identified himself as a silent partner in Sunrise Labor. “(Holt) had several companies. I’m not sure which one it was.”

Along the way, Hernandez compiled a record of citations and crimes. In 1989, he was cited for a DUI in Texas. In 1994, he was charged with assault in Iowa. In 1995, he pleaded no contest to two counts of battery in Belle Glade. In 2007, operating as a farm labor contractor, he pleaded guilty to pulling a handgun and threatening an employee and his son who had come to his home to collect a paycheck.

Hernandez recruited Jimenez Luna in 2006 in Tamaulipas, Mexico, making promises about high-paying easy work. He promised to pay the smuggling fees and said Jimenez Luna could pay him back on his own schedule.

Hernandez connected Jimenez Luna with a coyote, who handed him and 14 other migrants over to an associate to get them across the Rio Grande. They were taken to a hotel in Harlingen, where they waited until arrangements could be made to bring them through a Border Patrol checkpoint in a van headed for Florida.

Jimenez Luna, who was 24 at the time, worked on a crew of 35 to 40. Some were from Texas and Florida, but the majority were undocumented Mexicans, indebted to Hernandez for the coyote fees and banned from working off their debt with anyone else, according to civil and criminal court records in cases filed against Hernandez by the U.S. government, Jimenez Luna, and three other farmworkers.

LISTEN: Data reporter Luke Whyte breaks down his data-driven investigation into the systemic exploitation of migrant workers on U.S. farms. on the EN-Depth podcast.

“The labor performed by Mr. Hernandez and other farmworkers involves backbreaking work in often unforgiving weather for low pay,” Hernandez’s lawyer wrote in a court document, “work which few but those with ambition and little alternative — such as undocumented workers — are willing to perform.”

Threats were common.

“Listen, with me there’s no problem,” Hernandez would tell his workers, according to Jimenez Luna. “Any bastard that wants to leave, no big deal, let him go. But I know where all his family live, and if he doesn’t pay me, I know how his people will pay me.”

Jimenez Luna went deeper into debt as Hernandez charged him $150 a month to live in a two-bedroom trailer with 12 other workers and no functioning bathroom. Rats and cockroaches moved through holes in the floor and roof.

“You were sleeping and you could feel them running across you,” he said.

Many workers were never sure how much they owed Hernandez. He would pay them different amounts at different times, sometimes withholding wages when he thought someone was slacking off. According to court records, he always had a handgun in his lap when he paid workers their wages.

A husband and wife team up to harvest onions near Hidalgo. A husband and wife team up to harvest onions near Hidalgo. Photo: Bob Owen /Staff Photogrpaher Photo: Bob Owen /Staff Photogrpaher Image 1 of / 18 Caption Close Tricked and brutalized, farmworkers face a battle for their pay, rights 1 / 18 Back to Gallery

Workers traveled from Florida to Georgia, then to Mississippi and finally to New York. Hernandez would walk the fields while they worked, brandishing his handgun and sometimes shooting birds from the trees.

Workers were not permitted to take breaks, even in extreme heat. On occasion, clean water was unavailable. When workers were tired, Hernandez would threaten to beat them. He once threatened to kill a worker who had stopped, according to court records.

“Hernandez was quiet, but at the same time aggressive,” Jimenez Luna said. If a worker made a mistake, “he’d grab an ear of corn and grab your hand and then beat you. It was very painful.”

In Mississippi, temperatures rose to triple digits in the summer of 2008, Jimenez Luna said. Still Hernandez did not permit breaks. Pesticides were sprayed while the workers picked corn.

“It was there that I fell sick,” said Jimenez Luna. “I began to vomit, and then the cramps began, diarrhea and very strong cramps.”

He lost his hearing, then his vision blurred, he said.

“But they didn’t take me to the hospital,” he said. It wasn’t until around 6 p.m. when they’d gone back to the trailers that one of Hernandez’s supervisors became worried. “‘You’re going to die, you’re going to die,’ he kept saying,” Jimenez Luna recalls.

Jimenez Luna was permitted to drive himself to the hospital. His tongue swelled and he was having trouble breathing. Doctors put him on an IV drip. Hospital records show he was suffering from dehydration and exposure to poisonous chemicals.

The next morning, another migrant worker from Texas who spoke English arrived. She said the doctor told her: “Another hour and (Jimenez Luna) would have been dead.”

Hernandez arrived at the hospital around 9 the next morning. After talking with the doctor, he pulled the IV from Jimenez Luna’s arm and took him back to the farm to work, Jimenez Luna said.

“I leave the hospital and about 2 or 3 days later,” Jimenez Luna said, “I start bleeding from the nose, but a ton of blood. It was as if I opened the tap.”

“My friend said to me, ‘Leave the job, leave it. You are going to die.’”

But Jimenez Luna was afraid they’d kill his mother. He kept working.

In 2008, Holt registered Sunrise Labor at his home address in Wellington, Fla., and hired Hernandez.

Holt and McNeill, his partner in Sunrise Labor, are from respected farming families. In 2014, the McNeills won the Western Palm Beach County Farm Bureau “Farm Family of the Year” award. In 2010, Holt’s mother won Florida Department of Agriculture’s “Woman of the Year in Agriculture” award.

Besides managing farm labor contractors through Sunrise Labor, Holt managed his father’s company, Twin H Farms, which raises crops in Belle Glade and in Georgia.

Twin H Farms is a partner in SM Jones, a company that packages and transports corn for four partner farms in Florida, Ohio and New York. Holt’s father is president of SM Jones, according to Florida records.

Through Sunrise Labor and his other businesses, Holt has repeatedly hired Hernandez to provide labor to harvest crops.

Holt’s third partner in Sunrise Labor was Russell Reaves of Cape Coral. Reaves has set up at least 10 staffing, payroll and cash advance companies catering to farm labor contractors since 1995, according to state records. He handled Sunrise Labor’s payroll and contractor license verification through one of his companies — Your Corporate Office Labor Corp.

McNeill said he was unaware of Hernandez’s history of wage theft and other alleged abuses.

Holt and Reaves did not respond to requests for comment.

In July 2009, still working for Sunrise Labor, Hernandez bused Jimenez Luna and his other workers to Turek Farms, an SM Jones partner farm in central New York. There, they joined a group of 120 workers.

“It was there in New York that they closed the gate,” Jimenez Luna said, locking the workers inside.

He said the contractors told workers: “Anyone who comes to ask you something or anything is looking for information. They are from the government. They are from immigration. They are police. Be careful. They will take you away.”

It was at Turek Farms that Jimenez Luna met a doctoral student from Cornell University in Ithica, N.Y., who was volunteering for a church group.

“I started talking with her and she started to tell me the rights of the worker here in the U.S.,” Jimenez Luna said. “She gave me confidence.”

Jimenez Luna would sneak away from the farm at night to meet with her at a cemetery. They’d hide among the trees and talk.

The Worker’s Center of Central New York got involved and with the group’s help, Jimenez Luna fled. Soon after, two other workers made similar escapes. The workers contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which opened an investigation into Hernandez that led to criminal charges in April 2012.

Three months later, the Worker’s Center’s attorneys filed a civil suit on the workers' behalf in federal court against Sunrise Labor and the Hernandez family.

With the doctoral candidate’s help, Jimenez Luna traveled to San Antonio and started over. He lived in a small apartment off Bandera Road and paid rent by doing landscaping.

He was advised by his attorney to be vigilant. Two men were believed to have been hired to kill him and, one day, a man showed up at his mother’s home in Mexico.

“We’re going to find your son,” Jimenez Luna said the man told his mother. “They’ll put him in a black plastic bag and feed him to the alligators. I’m just waiting for my boss to give me the signal to come kill you.”

It was the first of many threats against her.

For Jimenez Luna, “putting my family in danger” was the worst part. “My mother, every time we spoke, we had to be one or two hours on the phone because she was crying, crying, crying because of the threats.”

In 2012, Hernandez pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to hiring at least 10 people he knew to be unauthorized aliens between 2008 and 2009. He spent one year and a day in prison.

In 2010, before the civil lawsuit was filed, Tommy Holt transferred ownership of Sunrise Labor to Reaves and Your Corporate Office Labor Corp in Cape Coral, Fla. Consequently, his name was never mentioned in the lawsuit, nor was McNeill’s.

Reaves and Sunrise Labor settled the civil lawsuit by paying the four plaintiffs an undisclosed amount. They were not held liable for the $2.45 million judgment owed by the Hernandez family.

Dwyer and Ramos, the Rio Grande Legal Aid officials, said it’s common for agricultural corporations to avoid culpability because of their complex business structures.

“The mentality of the industry has been to try and build these layers of protections,” Ramos said.

It used to be that paychecks came from growers, Ramos said. “In that situation, if the workers didn’t make minimum wage, it’s not going to fall on the farm labor contractor, it is going to fall on the employer. So, more and more the industry says, ‘Well, you know what? This year, we’re going to do it a little different: I’m going to throw in a little more, but you pay the workers. You can even use my accountant.’”

Agricultural corporations have the power to make sure their contractors follow the law, Dwyer said. “Yet the problem remains respective of who the crew leader is. So it’s really their business model.”

Today, Salvador and brother Francisco Hernandez live in Bella Glade and still hold registered farm-labor contractor licenses with the Department of Labor and the state of Florida.

They still work for Holt and McNeill, according to Hernandez, hiring workers and transporting them to harvests up and down the East Coast.

Your Corporate Office Labor Corp. went out of business, as did Your Corporate Office Labor II, according to state documents. A company called Your Corporate Office Labor III is still in operation, with Reaves as president.

Jimenez Luna now lives in the Rio Grande Valley. He hauls produce for a trucking company.

Luke Whyte is a data reporter on the San Antonio Express-News' investigative team. A native of Scotland, he went to high school in Maine and holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Saint Michael's College in Vermont. He has been a data engineer, web developer and freelance writer. He was a data journalism fellow at the Texas Tribune before joining the Express-News in 2017. Read him on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | lwhyte@express-news.net | Twitter: @lukewhyte

Design by Joy-Marie Scott.

A version of this article will appear in print on May 12, 2019, on Page A1 of the San Antonio Express-News. | Today's Paper

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