by Max Blau, ProPublica, and Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica, illustrations by Dadu Shin for ProPublica

This story contains descriptions of sexual assaults.

In the darkness before dawn, Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr. took the last drag of a cigarette and looked out from the staircase of a run-down motel. Underneath the stark floodlights streamed a procession of weary travelers in T-shirts and jeans, reaching into the bottom of a white coach bus for their oversize duffel bags. Mendoza had arranged for them to come on this 1,200-mile journey from northeastern Mexico to a rural stretch of Georgia’s blueberry country. Each of them had a work permit, which Mendoza had helped secure through a visa program called H-2A.

More foreigners than ever before were using the decades-old program, which lets them work for months or even several years on U.S. farms. Farmers and politicians have touted H-2A as an easy answer to a persistent labor problem: Americans are abandoning agriculture jobs and U.S. immigration policies are restricting access to undocumented workers. As recently as last month, President Donald Trump has floated the idea that if undocumented farmworkers returned home, they could come back to the U.S. “with a pass” to “legally” re-enter the country. But over the years, the promises of H-2A — such as humane working conditions, free housing and far better wages than back home — have been undermined by the relative ease of exploiting workers due to scant oversight of the program.

The busload of men and women who arrived that day in September 2018, like the others before and after, came with hopes of creating better lives for themselves and their families. Mendoza, through a network of recruiters in Mexico, had sold them on that hope. The recruiters touted the promises of a visa that, for many of them, would allow them to make more in a day than what they earned for a week of work in Mexico.

From his perch on the staircase, Mendoza was surveying a scene that held great promise for him, too. The arrival of this batch of workers marked the beginning of his first big job as a labor broker and the end of any lingering thoughts that he’d end up like his own mother and father, who’d brought him as a toddler from Mexico. They’d scraped together a living baling pine straw and packing blueberries. Mendoza, now 21, also had spent some time working in the fields. But he went on to attend college, dropping out so that he could focus on what he calculated to be a more lucrative prospect.

Around the time Mendoza was ramping up his business of bringing people over from Mexico, Georgia was more reliant on H-2A workers than any other state. He served as a gatekeeper, choosing which Mexican workers desperate for better pay would go to Georgia farms desperate for more laborers.

Beyond that, though, he had other ambitions related to this work. And he had plans for one worker in particular among this early batch.

Sofi was 24 and a single mother. She had experience working in the fields, having grown up in a close-knit farming family in a small town flanked by rows of corn and squash. But she came across more as a city girl, with her stylish clothes and penchant for pink lipstick. One of Mendoza’s recruiters in Mexico was a neighbor of Sofi’s family and assured him that she was a good worker. That part hardly mattered. The photo attached to her H-2A visa application drew him in.

Mendoza began sending her flirtatious text messages. She brushed them off. He pressed on, telling her he’d waive most of the fee he charged people to apply for the visa.

Sofi thought about it some more. Her father, who she trusted more than any man, had picked up seasonal farm work in the U.S. when she was a child, and she was aware of how much he appreciated the stable housing and steady pay. Though she worried about leaving her toddler son, she began to worry more about what would happen to him if she didn’t leave. The wages Mendoza offered could change her son’s future, or at the very least secure it the way her father had done for her. She owed her boy that much, she told herself. She would go.

The description of Sofi’s experience in the H-2A program is detailed in police records, court documents and testimony in federal court. Her name is redacted in federal filings to maintain her anonymity. We are identifying her by a first name she formerly used on social media. Mendoza declined multiple requests for an interview and did not provide comments in response to ProPublica’s letters detailing the case.

But not long after she and the other workers arrived in Monterrey, Mexico, to board one of the buses Mendoza sent for them, she began to have doubts. One of Mendoza’s associates was waiting for them. The associate handed each worker a stack of cash.

The way he explained it, the U.S. would question any large wire transfers from Mexico, so they would need to bring the money to their new boss. He told them not to put the money in their suitcases. U.S. officials were likely to check those. It would have to be on their bodies. He didn’t say much else, just that anyone who got caught would need to claim the cash as their own. So don’t get caught.

The closer her bus crept to the border, the more nervous Sofi grew. She started tallying just how much money was hidden on the people riding the bus. She figured it was almost a quarter of a million dollars.

In some regards, the deal Mendoza had struck with a blueberry farmer named Charles King was typical. Mendoza would ensure a steady supply of workers, recruiting them from across Mexico and Guatemala, assisting with their H-2A applications and arranging for their journey to the U.S. The workers could be employed only by King and only for up to 10 months at a time. King would pay a fair wage — just under $11 an hour — and cover the costs of their housing and transportation to his farm.

There was another part of their agreement: Mendoza would oversee King’s workers himself. That meant Mendoza would actually find the housing and pay for it with King’s money. And he would be the one to see that the workers got to and from the fields and the one who handed out their wages. It was a common practice for farm owners to outsource those tasks to labor brokers. It freed farmers like King from the hassles of managing people who don’t speak much English. And it granted brokers like Mendoza immense power.

Like Mendoza, King was fairly new to this business. The longtime train engineer had decided only a few years earlier, in his mid 40s, that he wanted to start a farm on the nearly 40 acres passed down by his late grandfather. Around the time he met Mendoza, his blueberry bushes were about to yield their first fruit. He estimated he needed 150 people to work in his fields.

Mendoza advised King to request twice as many; Mendoza had a plan for the others. King, for his part, stood to get a cut. All King had to do was sign the paperwork. Mendoza would handle much of the rest.

King signed off. And Mendoza, who up until then had only brought over a few smaller batches of workers for other farmers, got to work on sourcing 300 of them for King.

Sofi was among the first groups of people recruited to work for Kings Berry Farm. She initially felt some relief when she stepped off the bus in the parking lot of the dingy motel, after making it past customs and having spent more than 20 hours on the road. But she was taken aback by how she and the others were treated by the people there to........

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