PBS to air film investigating labor trafficking ring in Marion County

MARION — A new PBS Frontline documentary airing Tuesday focuses on the labor trafficking scheme that unfolded on a Marion County-area egg farm.

The documentary, titled "Trafficked in America," traces the story of the Central American teenagers who were smuggled into the United States and forced to work at Trillium Farms for long hours and low pay and, in some cases, under threat of violence against them or their families.

"In our years of reporting on the exploitation of immigrant workers, we'd come across cases of labor trafficking, but nothing quite like this one," journalist Daffodil Altan says at the beginning of the documentary, which opens on aerial shots of the New Bloomington trailer park where the teens were forced to live.

Previously: Enslaved in Marion County

Made in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, the documentary takes viewers to the highlands of Guatemala where some of the teens are from, to the trailer park in Marion County where the teens were made to live and to places in the United States where human trafficking continues, according to a preview of the documentary provided to the Star.

Seven people have been indicted in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio in connection with the forced labor ring uncovered in Marion County, three of whom have been convicted of forced labor charges and been sentenced to time in federal prison. Three others were convicted of immigration offenses.

Federal prosecutors identified eight minors and two adults who were forced into virtual slavery and ordered to work at Trillium's egg farms, cleaning coops and moving, vaccinating and debeaking chickens, according to court records.

More: Fourth person charged in egg farm migrant trafficking scheme

Court papers allege they were made to work up to 12 hours per day, six or seven days per week for little pay, with the traffickers taking a large cut of their paychecks to put toward smuggling debts. If they complained, they or their families were threatened, court papers allege. The workers were forced to live in trailers, at least one of which had no heat, no working toilet and no hot water, according to court records.

The documentary goes to a Guatemalan village, where the filmmakers talked with the parents of one of the smuggled teens and with the mother of the smuggler — Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, one of the people convicted of forced labor charges — who lived just down the street.

The film also describes the checkered history of the Marion County-area egg farm now operated by Trillium Farms, which as the Frontline documentary details, was formerly owned by egg mogul Austin "Jack" DeCoster, whose facilities racked up millions of dollars in fines for violations of public health and labor standards and who was recently sentenced to prison time in connection with a salmonella outbreak linked to his egg facilities.

The film touches on the worker shortages that operations like egg farms face. John Glessner, a former egg farm executive and former associate of DeCoster, told Frontline that one of the biggest issues was finding people to do the work.

"To get the work done, they turned to immigrants, even though he suspected some of them had false documents," Altan, the journalist, says in the film.

"It's probably one of these things that you just don’t want to know. Do you suspect that this is going on? Probably. But do you really want to try digging into it?" Glessner said.

The vice president of Trillium Farms told Frontline that his company did not know trafficked teenagers were working at their plants.

J.T. Dean, the vice president, was asked how he missed that teenagers were working there.

"We don't supervise those contract service providers, so our managers, our supervisors, they're checking that the work is complete, they're checking that the work gets done adequately, but they're not actually telling this person to go here or that person to go do this. So we're not directly supervising the people doing that work," he said in the film.

Dean told the filmmakers that Trillium Farms has since started working with experts to prevent labor trafficking in their egg facilities.

The filmmakers also interviewed the alleged mastermind of the trafficking scheme, Pablo Duran, Sr., who was recently arrested on forced labor and conspiracy charges and whose case is pending in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.

Duran had a multi-million dollar contract with Trillium Farms to provide workers to the egg farm, according to court records. Federal prosecutors have accused Duran of working with a counterpart in Guatemala, Castillo-Serrano, to recruit minors from the Central American country and smuggle them into the U.S. to work on the egg farm near Marion County.

In his interview with Frontline, Duran denied knowing Castillo-Serrano, claiming he had only spoken with him once on the phone, and denied having any knowledge of minors working on Trillium's egg farms.

The documentary also describes failings of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is in charge of placing unaccompanied border crossers under the age of 18 with a relative or adult sponsor while they await immigration court proceedings.

In the case of the teenage immigrants working at Trillium, HHS released the teens to their traffickers, the documentary says.

The film pointed to other possible cases of trafficked teens, including teens with whom the filmmakers spoke in Clarion, Iowa, who work long hours in food processing plants to pay off debts.

"More than 180,000 unaccompanied minors have been placed in communities across the country but because there’s so little follow-up with them, once they’re out of the government’s care, we have no idea what’s happened to them," Garance Burke, an Associated Press reporter, is quoted as having told Frontline.

The documentary airs on PBS and will be available for streaming on pbs.org/frontline at 10 p.m. Tuesday, April 24.

This story has been updated with a correction. The Trillium egg farm where the Central American teenagers worked is located near Marion County.

svolpenhei@gannett.com

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