Immigrants on the line

Haitians moved to Colorado to work for the world's largest meatpacker on the promise of good jobs and a place to stay—only to be mistreated. Now, Trump may deport them.

• Ted Genoways

In late 2023, JBS, the Brazilian-owned conglomerate that is the world’s largest producer of meat, needed workers at its plant in Greeley, Colorado, and was struggling to find them. Meanwhile, Haiti was unraveling amid escalating violence, and many Haitians were fleeing to the United States, taking advantage of the Temporary Protected Status granted them on humanitarian grounds by the Biden administration. A viral TikTok video, produced by a Haitian immigrant who had recently relocated to Colorado from Boston, promised his fellow countrymen jobs at the JBS plant and affordable lodging nearby. FERN senior editor Ted Genoways tells the story of the people who made their way to Colorado, in a new podcast produced in collaboration with Reveal.

There were sixty openings at the plant, and more than a thousand Haitians ultimately showed up. The free lodging, paid for by JBS, turned out to be five or more to a room, with no kitchen, in a rundown motor lodge. That, coupled with the brutal and dangerous work on the packing line, left many of the migrants—who had been told only to expect “hard work”—feeling duped. They told the union representing workers at the plant that they felt trapped. One told Ted Genoways, who reported this piece in Greeley, that he was treated “like a slave.”

The man who orchestrated the recruitment scheme—a former line worker from Benin, West Africa, who had risen to HR supervisor at JBS—and the man who made the video, as well as the higher-ups at the plant, have been accused of exploitation and human trafficking by many of the migrants they recruited, and by the local union in formal complaints to the Department of Labor and the EEOC. But now those workers face a new threat: deportation.

As the new Trump administration vows to rescind the Temporary Protected Status of a million people who entered the United States legally under the Biden administration—including more than 200,000 Haitians—the story of what happened to the workers in Greeley takes on a new urgency and raises pressing questions. What does this country owe to the people it has admitted on humanitarian grounds? What will we do without the people who are responsible for making the lion’s share of our food?