Georgia Officials Tied to $200M Human Trafficking Scheme
Brett Donovan Bussey and Jorge Gomez, who worked for the Georgia Department of Labor, have been linked to one of the largest U.S. human trafficking cases ever prosecuted involving foreign agricultural laborers brought here on seasonal visas.
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Brett Donovan Bussey and Jorge Gomez, who worked for the Georgia Department of Labor, have been linked to one of the largest U.S. human trafficking cases ever prosecuted involving foreign agricultural laborers brought here on seasonal visas, reports Yahoo! News via USA Today.
Bussey, who left government service in 2018, has been indicted along with 23 others for conspiring to engage in forced labor and other related crimes, while the sister and nephew of Gomez, who remains on the job and hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, are among those indicted.
Bussey and Gomez both were directly involved in the Georgia Department of Labor’s responsibility to report, resolve or refer suspicions of labor violations and help workers resolve or file complaints against their employers and inspect housing that employers of foreign guest workers on seasonal H-2A visas must provide.
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.
Court records say five workers were kidnapped and one of them was raped, while the indictment claims that two other workers died in the heat. Members of the alleged conspiracy profited more than $200 million with their scheme. Farmworkers’ lawyers and advocates have long denounced labor abuses suffered by seasonal guest farmworkers, including by Georgia contractors or farmers.
Additional Reading: Can Technology Stop Human Trafficking? The Crime Report, Nov 1, 2021.
