Catherwood LibraryILR School

In what may be the first charges brought under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act of 2000, the U.S. attorney for Buffalo, New York indicted six farm contractors on Wednesday of running a forced labor camp outside of Buffalo. The indictment alleges that the contractors charged forty Mexican workers $1,000 each to drive them from Arizona to New York in overcrowded, unventilated vans last summer. Upon arrival the workers were forced into overcrowded rooms, threatened with physical violence, and forced to work to pay off the money the contractors claimed they owed them, until ten of the workers escaped and contacted Farmworker Legal Services of New York.