Perez told me that when she asked the owner about the pay situation, they said she had to figure it out with Tapia-Ortiz, who was a contractor hired to recruit laborers, and when she brought it up with him again he became angry. He told her she had no rights and no papers, so she shouldn’t complain.

Undocumented workers without papers and workers on temporary visas are extremely vulnerable to exploitation in the workplace. This exploitation takes many forms, including unfair labor practices, working without fair pay, and sexual harassment and assault. The agricultural industry in the United States is full of workers who are undocumented or on temporary work visas, people who are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. A report by Polaris, an anti-trafficking organization that runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline and the BeFree Textline, on the typology of modern slavery, found that 91 percent of the cases involving modern-day slavery in agriculture involved foreign nationals. The organization, which used data from the hotline and textline to generate the report, defines modern-day slavery as human-trafficking situations where workers are coerced, forced, or victims of fraud. Many of these workers are on “guest-worker” visas, or temporary work visas associated with an employment role, as is common with agriculture workers, who come on a visa called the H-2A. In another report, Polaris identified nearly 300 H-2A visa holders who had been potential victims of labor trafficking and exploitation in a 12-month period. Eighty-five percent of the victims worked in agriculture, with Florida being the state where the most cases were reported.

Perez kept pushing for what she believed she was owed. As the situation escalated, Tapia-Ortiz sexually harassed Perez, according to the lawsuit. In 2011, she says, he promised to pay her more if she had sex with him, grabbed her from behind, and fondled her breasts. In August, according to the lawsuit, she says when she rejected his advances and threatened to call the police, he threatened to get her deported. In the fall of 2011, according to the lawsuit, he made sexual advances while she was working in a secluded area among tall tomato plants. After she rejected him, he showed her his pistol in his waistband, she says. He would often wave a rifle or show the pistol to the workers to threaten them, according to the complaint. “Truly I did feel very intimidated and very fearful. I just arrived and I didn’t know anything about the laws or who to call or what I could say or how to say it,” Perez said to me.

One thing she did know: The money was not enough. According to the case, she was making on average $35 a day. (The gender pay gap exists even at the very bottom of the labor market—the men on the farm were making an average of $45, according to the lawsuit.) What she wasn’t spending on food or rent she was sending back home. “My family was really desperately in need of financial support and I was worried about them,” she said. She felt it was hard to bring it up with other workers because the crew manager was always lurking, and when she did ask about it the others repeated the same refrain: He has papers and you don’t, so there’s nothing you can do. She threatened to quit; he threatened to kill her if she did, she says. “I was really scared and felt like I couldn’t leave,” she said.