A group of Chinese immigrant workers is suing over forced labor and human trafficking claims that stem from an illegal marijuana growing operation in northwestern New Mexico.
FILE - Dineh Benally poses for a photograph before a Navajo Nation presidential forum at a tribal casino outside Flagstaff, Ariz., Tuesday, June 21, 2022. Chinese workers allege they were lured to northern New Mexico under false pretenses and forced to work 14 hours a day trimming marijuana on the Navajo Nation where cultivating the plant is illegal, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023, in state court.
“Ending forced labor requires that the perpetrators of forced labor and those who seek to benefit from such schemes face serious consequences," attorney Aaron Halegua said."We hope that this lawsuit will demonstrate that such abusive practices do not pay.”and Irving Lin, a Taiwanese entrepreneur based in Los Angeles.
The Navajo Nation Department of Justice sued Benally, leading to a court order halting the operation that the lawsuit says Benally and his associates ignored. But in a March 2021 affidavit detailed in the lawsuit, Lin stated there was “no violence and human trafficking" and no “human rights" violated by the farming operation.Benally, a former Navajo Nation presidential candidate who campaigned on growing hemp to boost the economy, is accused in the lawsuit of turning a blind eye to federal and tribal laws that make it illegal to grow marijuana on the reservation.
Navajo residents described seeing the workers sleeping in the fields and ditches, “shivering through the night,” the lawsuit states. One worker said he slept on the floors of greenhouses and was never paid any of the roughly $12,000 in wages he was promised. Workers did not get adequate rest, or enough food and water throughout the day, according to the lawsuit.
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