‘Beyond troubling’: Current, former government officials tied to human trafficking probe in Georgia
Two Georgia labor officials whose jobs involved protecting or advocating for farmworkers have links to one of the largest U.S. human trafficking cases ever prosecuted involving foreign agricultural laborers brought here on seasonal visas.
One individual indicted in the case, Brett Donovan Bussey, left government service in 2018. The other, Jorge Gomez, remains on the job and hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, but officers searched his home in connection with the case and his sister and nephew are among those indicted.
In October, a grand jury indicted Bussey and 23 others for conspiring to engage in forced labor and other related crimes. Federal prosecutors say the defendants required guest farmworkers to pay illegal fees to obtain jobs, withheld their IDs so they could not leave, made them work for little or no pay, housed them in unsanitary conditions and threatened them with deportation and violence.
Two workers died in the heat, according to the indictment. Court records say five workers were kidnapped and one of them was raped.
All defendants who have entered pleas so far have pleaded not guilty in the case, named “Operation Blooming Onion.” Some of the workers harvested onions, the state’s official vegetable.
The indictment doesn’t mention the links to the Georgia government, information USA TODAY, the Savannah Morning News and the Augusta Chronicle pieced together from public records and a review of social media posts.
Labor advocates have questioned how the trafficking scheme described in the indictment could have continued so long – at least since 2015. The government connections raise additional questions about potential conflicts of interest and who is put in charge of protecting vulnerable workers.
“It’s beyond troubling,” said Shelly Anand, a former U.S. Department of Labor lawyer and co-founder of Sur Legal Collaborative, an Atlanta-area nonprofit that educates workers about their labor rights and helps them file labor complaints.
In Georgia, the federal labor department has primary responsibility for enforcing migrant farmworker labor regulations. But the Georgia Department of Labor still can play a significant role in protecting farmworkers.
The state agency is supposed to report, resolve or refer suspicions of labor violations and help workers resolve or file complaints against their employers – farm labor contractors and farmers. The state also inspects housing that employers of foreign guest workers on seasonal H-2A visas must provide, a key hurdle to obtaining federal authorization to hire guest workers.
Bussey and Gomez both were directly involved in those tasks.
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