Florida woman abused H-2A visa workers in multiple states. She’s started a new company
An Avon Park woman helped abuse H-2A visa workers in Florida, Georgia and Indiana. She admitted it and was allowed to work for someone else in Florida with a history as an an abusive employer. And court documents and state records say has started a new company employing immigrant workers.
Christina Gamez, 43, was sentenced to three years and one month after pleaded guilty in Tampa federal court to one count of a RICO conspiracy charge. The same day, Mexican citizen Efrain Cabrera, 32, got three years, five months for his one count of racketeering. And 45-year-old Guadalupe Mendes got eight months house arrest and a $5,500 fine for conspiracy to defraud the United States.
All three worked for Los Villatoros Harvesting (LVH), a Bartow company that state records say was started and run by Bladimir Moreno. Moreno’s awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to one count of racketeering and one count of forfeiture.
READ MORE: Court lets Florida woman who abused H-2A employees work for Florida man who did the same
Between her guilty plea and her sentencing, Christina Gamez got permission from the court to work supervising H-2A visa workers for Gracia & Sons, the latest company by Frostproof’s Jose Gracia. An administrative law judge ordered Gracia’s first company, Jose M. Garcia Harvesting, to pay $69,372 in back wages to 152 workers and $180,000 in civil money penalties after a U.S. Department of Labor investigation.
That investigation also found that Jose M. Gracia Harvesting didn’t provide meals or kitchen facilities as required by the H-2A visa program and housing in which too many people shared the space with too many flies and too many rodents.
The H-2A visa program
The H-2A guest worker visa program allows companies to use non-immigrant foreign workers for seasonal work if the company anticipates a shortage of U.S. workers. The work often involves agricultural tasks, such as harvesting produce. Employers must:
▪ Try to fill the jobs with United States-based workers first
▪ Pay special rates for H-2A workers
▪ Provide housing and transportation to the job site
▪ Provide meals if the housing doesn’t have kitchens or kitchenettes
▪ Provide H-2A workers work that’s at least 75% of the work specified in the job contract
Some companies employ H-2A workers directly. Others hire a farm labor contracting company, such as LVH, or Gracia & Sons and Jose M. Gracia Harvesting.
What Gamez knew and what she did
Gamez’s guilty plea said she tried to deceive the Department of Labor Wage and Hour investigators with false statements about how much LVH paid two workers in Hardee County, Florida; that LVH reiumbursed H-2A workers for their travel to the Hardee County farm and to Indiana farms near Vincennes and Oaktown.
She also took H-2A workers passports when they first got to the Georgia worksite, then turned them over to Alexander Moreno knowing he “held onto the passports for the purpose of discouraging workers from fleeing LVH so that the workers would be coerced to continue laboring for LVH” through economic enslavement and overcrowded housing.
Gamez knew LVH charged workers fees to work and that Moreno and others “used the debts that LVH’s recruiters had imposed on LVH’s H-2A workers to coerce the workers into continuing to work for the company.”
Gamez saw workers commonly housed six to a single room. She saw them taken to work in states where they weren’t authorized to work. She saw them paid in cash, but for “only a small fraction of the money LVH owed them under their contracts for the many hours of physically demanding work they had done.”
She saw Moreno’s relatives and friends sell food to workers while Moreno told federal agencies that restaurants or caterers were providing the food. Also, Moreno “falsified documents to cover-up the actual amounts of money” workers were paying to eat.
This runs a bit counter to the court documents description of Moreno by his attorney, Anthony Suarez, as “an unsophisticated and uneducated individual who surrounded himself with persons who managed various aspects of LVH Harvesting while he himself would work the fields.”
But, Suarez noted, “several of the co-defendants in this case are already setting up new harvesting companies, notably, Guadalupe Mendes and Christina Gamez, which are already providing immigrant workers for farmers in the Southern United States.”
State records say Mendes and Gamez registered JM Citrus in 2020 with Mendes as president and Gamez as vice president. Gamez is president of G3 Sisters — vice president Pamela Gamez and treasurer Melissa Gamez — which was registered with the state at the start of 2020.
