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How the Government’s Obligation to Keep Foreign Workers Safe Collided With Its Efforts to Keep Farms Afloat

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A laborer picks tomatoes on one of the few farms that participates in a voluntary initiative to protect workers from exploitation. Audra Melton for ProPublica It’s been nearly two years since I started reporting on abuses of foreign farmworkers in Georgia. Some of the workers I tracked down had come to the U.S. legally through the H-2A visa program and were harmed and exploited by labor contractors — despite protections that were supposed to be guaranteed by the federal government.  During those two years, I’ve thought a lot about how the government’s obligation to keep foreign workers safe has collided with another priority: to help U.S. farmers stay in business.  Farmers have long pushed for fewer H-2A regulations. That’s in part because of the skyrocketing costs of the program, which sets minimum hourly wages and requires that farmers pay for workers’ housing and transportation. As one Georgia farmer wrote last year in a letter to the U.S. Department of Lab...
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My Maddening Quest to Find Out if Blueberries Come From Farms Where Workers Were Harmed

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Illustration by Andrew B. Myers for ProPublica Over the past year, I’ve reported at length about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America.  I haven’t stopped thinking about how they suffered. Their wages were stolen, guns were pointed in their faces, and one woman I met was held captive, raped and nearly killed. As I wrote those stories, there was something else I couldn’t stop thinking about — something I keep thinking about: Whenever I go to the grocery store, I have no easy way of knowing if the fruits and vegetables I put in my cart are part of the problem I’ve documented. Footage from labor contractor Javier Sanchez Mendoza in 2018 on a blueberry farm. Mendoza was charged in a federal indictment and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in forced labor. via Facebook I eat a lot of blueberries, which happen to be the fruit grown most in the state where I live, Georgia, and the state where I tracked th...
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Children in This Church Were Sexually Abused. Then They Began Abusing Other Kids. Some Continued as Adults.

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Growing up in the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, Lynn and Katherine — ProPublica is using only their middles names to protect their identities — said they were victims of sexual abuse from family members who may also have been abused. Now adults, the two women worry they played a part in perpetuating the cycle of abuse.  Jenn Ackerman and ProPublica For two sisters raised in a family of 11 children that moved back and forth between Washington state and South Dakota, danger didn’t come from outsiders like they’d been warned by their church. It came from their brothers in the next bedroom. Lynn said she was still in diapers when her abuse began. Two older sisters told her how they caught one of their brothers touching her. The sisters told their mother, but Lynn said her parents did nothing; the abuse continued until he was 16 and she was 10. Years later, Lynn’s sisters offered a devastating explanation for their brother’s behavior: They believed he had been sexually a...
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On This Nearly Deserted Alaska Island, You Pay to Keep Hundreds of Empty Buildings Wired for Internet

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Very few homes in Adak, Alaska, are occupied, yet many, like these in the town’s Sandy Cove neighborhood, are the subject of federal subsidies that provide outdated internet service. Marc Lester/ADN On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.   The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use.  The money being wasted is yours.  It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program in...
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