Thai workers describe being lured into slavery in the United States

The L.A. Times’ Teresa Watanabe reports on the more than two dozen immigrants, covering their faces and continuing to fear for their safety, who spoke out about what authorities call the largest labor-trafficking case in U.S. history:

In remarks at the news conference Wednesday, Jorge Guzman of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement urged the public to report any suspicions about human trafficking to law enforcement and praised the Thai Community Development Center for raising awareness about the problem.

“Awareness is crucial to making this shameful practice a thing of the past,” he said.

Chanchanit Martorell, executive director of the center, uncovered the case in 2003 when the first farmworker to escape from the Hawaii pineapple farm came to her center. Since then, she and her staff have interviewed more than 200 farmworkers, obtained more than 100 temporary visas for them and filed civil charges against Global Horizons with the federal labor department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.