Immigrants on the line

In early December 2023, through a scrim of swirling flurries, Mackenson Remy steered his minivan past an open gate in the security fence surrounding a gray concrete factory along Highway 85, on the northeastern edge of Greeley, Colorado. Remy was still relatively new to the state, and he’d never been to Greeley before. He didn’t really know anything about the plant either, only the three letters he’d been told to look for—JBS—and what he’d heard: that they had jobs. Lots of jobs.

Remy is originally from Haiti. He’s in his 30s with braided hair and a thin beard. He has a wary way about him but also a restless hustle. About 10 years ago, he moved from Port-au-Prince to Boston, and for a while that was all he knew of the States. But when his wife, who is in the military, was stationed in Colorado Springs in early 2023, he started working at a Marriott there, driving shuttles of pilots to Denver International Airport. Despite constantly retreading the same ground, the view along the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains, with Pikes Peak soaring in the distance, never failed to impress him.

Remy had a TikTok channel, so he started shooting videos with narration in Haitian Creole and sharing them with his few dozen followers back home and those recently arrived in the United States. As Haiti has unraveled over the last few years, hundreds of thousands of migrants have fled the widespread violence and landed in the US in search of a better life. “I just started to show them how Colorado looks,” Remy said later. “ Couple people, they told me, ‘You’re always talking about Colorado is nice, it’s beautiful. How about the jobs over there?’” For those Haitians with temporary visas, having full-time work could help their case to stay.

So Remy, who has a green card, figured he’d ask around. He was always driving by big businesses—warehouses, factories, construction companies—so why not drop in and see if they had any openings? One woman told him her company wasn’t hiring, but she knew a place where they were always looking for new workers: JBS. The company is the world’s largest producer of meat, especially beef. If you’ve recently eaten a burger at McDonald’s—or anywhere, really—there’s a good chance the meat came from JBS.

Remy looked up the address of the company’s plant in Greeley, about two hours from Colorado Springs. It was starting to snow, but he set out anyway. After navigating the icy highway and a long line of cattle trailers idling on the shoulder waiting to be admitted to unload their livestock, Remy inadvertently entered through the facility’s exit. Meatpacking plants usually have security tighter than Fort Knox—it’s illegal in several states, but not Colorado, to photograph or shoot videos near their property—but there Remy was, phone out and already recording, as he circled the parking lot. He looked for anyone he could ask about available jobs. Finally, a security guard stopped him and provided the name and phone number for an HR employee named Edmond Ebah.

Ebah, who had started at the plant after migrating to the United States from Benin in 2017, told Remy that JBS had about 60 positions available slaughtering, butchering, and packaging the meat. Yes, it was hard work, he emphasized. (According to data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, jobs at meatpacking and poultry companies are consistently among the country’s most dangerous.) But Remy’s Haitian followers could make good money. Best of all: It was a sure thing. If they came to Colorado, he would find them a job.

So Remy went home and cut together a montage of his footage from inside JBS and around Greeley and recorded a voiceover with the information from Ebah. This isn’t a job for lazy people, he says in Creole. But you don’t need to know English. And, if they came, Remy told his followers, he knew places they could stay. “Those apartment is pretty close from the job,” he told me later, translating the voiceover. So if you’re interested? “You can text me, tell me when you want to come.” He posted the video that night and went to bed.

The next morning, he checked TikTok. Most of his videos only got a few dozen views, but this one had been shared by a Creole-speaking influencer who often went by the handle JeanJean Biden—and it had gone viral. It was already at 35,000. Remy’s phone started blowing up, flooded with direct messages from people who wanted to know more. But Ebah had told him that they only had several dozen positions, so Remy texted him right away. Ebah seemed unconcerned. “100 200 people,” he texted back. “Have them just book theirs flights tickets to Colorado, you and I will take care of the rest…”

Remy told me he was still worried. Where would people live?

“Tell everyone just to come,” Ebah replied. “Don’t worry anymore about where there are going to live, trusted me.”

Ebah and his supervisors at JBS came up with a plan. The company struck a deal with the Rainbow Motel, a tiny motor lodge less than a mile down the highway from the plant, to house new Haitian workers recruited by Remy’s TikTok.

But as these workers started to show up, it became clear that the job proposed in the videos was even harder than advertised. A local union representing workers at JBS, in complaints filed with multiple government agencies, would describe conditions at the motel as “squalor.” And inside JBS, the complaint says, this new crop of Haitian workers was asked to work at “dangerously unsafe” speeds. This past September, the union publicly accused JBS of abusing immigrant workers and human trafficking. (A JBS spokesperson told me that the company takes the safety and welfare of its employees seriously and that it follows all laws and regulations. The spokesperson also said that no substantiated evidence was provided that tied Ebah or company leadership to the claims outlined by the union.)

Since Donald Trump was elected to a second presidential term, things have only gotten worse. In January, Trump fired enough members of the boards of federal worker protection agencies to temporarily leave those bodies without a working quorum, effectively killing any investigations. Then, in February, the Trump administration announced that it would rescind the temporary protected status of more than 200,000 Haitians who had entered the United States legally during Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump reportedly intends to establish detention camps on military bases, including one in Colorado, to hold migrants while they are processed for deportation. Against this backdrop, the story of the workers in Greeley takes on new urgency and raises pressing questions. What does this country owe to the people it has admitted on humanitarian grounds? And what will we do without the workers who produce the lion’s share of our food?

Twenty years ago, at least one-quarter of all meatpacking workers were undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico. That changed on a single day. On December 12, 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement simultaneously raided six Swift & Company beef plants spread out across the country—in places like Grand Island, Nebraska; Cactus, Texas; and Greeley, Colorado. Federal agents and local law enforcement, many dressed in riot gear, entered and arrested 1,300 undocumented workers on charges of immigration violations and identity theft. It was the largest workplace immigration raid in American history. At the Greeley plant alone, 252 workers were arrested.

Swift needed to replenish its workforce fast. A Senate bill proposed expanding guest worker visas, but as a company spokesperson at the time said, “Our needs are year-round.” But few American workers were interested. Within about a month, the company reported its loss at $30 million. News reports at the time detailed the company’s attempts to start recruiting refugees who had migrated to the United States from places like Somalia and Myanmar. “Our survival was at stake,” a company executive said. But it wasn’t enough. In July 2007, Brazilian-owned JBS acquired Swift in a $1.5 billion all-cash deal.

With the purchase, JBS became the largest beef processor in the world. Months later, the company announced it would hire enough new workers to staff a second shift in Greeley, including some 400 Somali refugees. And soon, the rest of the industry followed JBS’s lead. Today, in many packinghouses, refugees account for as much as a third of the workforce. But most don’t last long on the line. The turnover rate is somewhere between 30 and 40 percent each year—one of the highest of any US industry. The reason is simple: The work is not only relentless, but often grueling.

These jobs are essentially like working on a dis-assembly line, a standard factory run in reverse. The live cow walks off the back of a cattle trailer and is slaughtered, then gets broken down into steaks and roasts and ribs and hamburger meat. When parts of a carcass slide by on the chain conveyor system, workers sink large meat hooks into those cuts—heavy loins or shanks or slabs of ribs—and then carve with a knife held in their other hand.

The pace of the chain is so fast—around 300 cattle per hour—that many can barely keep up. Workers at JBS and their union say the speed of the line makes serious injuries more commonplace. Complaints filed with OSHA detail ghastly injuries: a worker who was killed when he was hit in the head by falling machinery and knocked into a vat of chemicals; a worker whose arm had to be amputated after it was pulled into the sprockets of a conveyor belt. But more often, the injuries are from repetitive stress. Workers clutch the meat hooks for so many hours in such cold temperatures inside the refrigerated plant that they end up with carpal tunnel syndrome or trigger fingers or ulnar nerve palsy, known as claw hand.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, those jobs became increasingly deadly. Early in the outbreak, after packing plants were forced to close, Trump ordered them to reopen. Before JBS even had Covid safety protocols in place, it brought workers back to the line. In the Greeley plant alone, six workers died and hundreds were sickened when the company refused to heed union demands for a temporary shutdown. A Senate investigation—prompted in part by reporting I did with Esther Honig for Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network—led OSHA to fine JBS $15,000 for failing to protect employees from exposure to Covid, a drop in the bucket compared to the meatpacking giant’s record revenue of $51 billion that year.

In September 2021, after months of negotiations, Kim Cordova, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 in Denver, finally reached a new collective bargaining agreement for workers at the Greeley plant. Cordova told me she pressed Tim Schellpeper, CEO of JBS USA, for improved safety standards, higher wages, more paid sick leave, and better health care benefits. Schellpeper finally gave in to the union’s demands—but in some ways the victory was short-lived. After JBS was found to have been using a third-party cleaning company that had been employing children, the Brazilian owners ousted Schellpeper and installed Wesley Batista Jr.—the son of one of the owners—as the new American CEO in May 2023. (JBS characterized these moves as a “reorganization”; the company settled a federal investigation into child labor charges for $4 million in January.)

Batista would prove less amenable to the union’s demands. Cattle prices had begun to climb as JBS reported a shortage in supply. Batista instituted a new work plan at the Greeley plant that Cordova told me is aimed at getting some of those profits back: the white bone program. “What the company is trying to do,” Cordova explained, “is get as much of the meat off a bone, as much yield off the animal, as possible. It’s literally a white bone.” She said this change meant more cutting. More repetition. More exertion. And all at a dizzying pace—“line speeds we had never seen before.”

Workers started quitting. And Cordova said the culture had shifted; union members weren’t willing to work under hazardous conditions anymore—they mobilized, staged walk-offs, or left for good. The union said JBS responded by looking for a more vulnerable and compliant workforce. “JBS needed a new group of workers to come in,” Cordova said, “so that they had more control over them, especially to work at this high speed.”

This was all in the air when Edmond Ebah met Mackenson Remy in December 2023. After Ebah began working on the slaughter side of the operation in 2017, he quickly rose to become an HR supervisor—in part because he speaks seven languages. But he was especially focused on recruiting new workers from his native Benin. In 2020, with JBS struggling to keep its lines running amid the pandemic, Ebah helped hire at least 30 new recruits from his home country, collecting newly created referral bonuses worth up to $1,500 per employee. He bought a van and started an LLC to carry them to and from the plant.

JBS presented Ebah’s story as a manifestation of the American Dream. He was building a private business on the side by providing jobs to his countrymen and a stable workforce for his employer. A banner with his picture above the word “humility” hung in the plant’s main hallway. The company posted to its LinkedIn page congratulating Ebah when he became a US citizen, and it touted his good work in recruiting new employees by producing a two-minute promo video shared on its website and social media channels. The camera work is all soft focus and slow motion. Ebah narrates his experience at JBS over a bed of lush strings. “I’m happy to do what I’m doing,” he says. “I can help people come to work for JBS.”

But after Remy’s TikTok video unexpectedly went viral, people started pouring in—more than Ebah could house at the Rainbow Motel. A hundred. Two hundred. And still, people kept coming.

Auguste calls his journey from Haiti to the United States “an epic experience.” Violent gangs now control about 90 percent of Port-au-Prince. Fearing for his safety, Auguste (not his real name) flew to Brazil in March 2023. From there, he set off north, traveling across 10 countries, walking and hitching rides for thousands of miles. The journey included hiking across the Darién Gap—a 60-mile expanse of thick rainforest at the Colombia–Panama border that separates South America from North America. He slept on the jungle floor, woken in the night by the sounds of wild animals. He was always on guard because people warned him of armed thieves who would rob people—or worse. And then, of course, there were the dead. He saw bodies of people along the way who would never finish the journey. In lakes. On the shores of rivers. By the roadside.

Yet Auguste was never afraid. He believed in himself. He had faith that if others had made this journey, then he could make it, too. And he did. It took a month, but he finally reached Mexico, where he immediately used the online app CBP One to apply to enter the US legally via temporary protected status—TPS for short.

The Biden administration made extensive use of TPS. When Biden first took office, he used this executive authority to protect Afghans after the Taliban retook Kabul. Then he extended the policy to Ukrainians after Russia invaded. Between 2021 and 2023, Biden took a more controversial stance—expanding TPS to include people fleeing dictatorships and gang violence in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti. Today, Haitians make up one of the largest groups with temporary protected status.

Biden’s decision allowed Auguste to legally live and work in the United States—without a path to citizenship, but also without the threat of deportation. Auguste entered the country in May 2023 and made his way to Baltimore, where he stayed with family. Until his work visa was approved, he was unable to make money and would often go hungry. But, he told me, “It’s easier to live without food than it is without hope.”

He’d been in the US for six months when a friend showed him Remy’s TikTok. Auguste was skeptical at first, so he let his friend go ahead to Greeley. When the friend reported back that the job was legit, Auguste booked his flight to Colorado. He says he paid Remy $120 for a ride from the Denver airport to the Rainbow Motel. That’s when he realized the hardships he’d endured to make it to the US weren’t exactly behind him.

All the workers packed into the motel’s tiny rooms were in a strange place, with little to no money. There was also nowhere to make food. Auguste says that at one point, they got a hot plate so they could cook. But when the motel managers found out, they stopped them. Those managers later reported to JBS that it appeared workers had been using the bathtub as a cutting board. Auguste explained that the motel was off a busy highway with little around for miles. It wasn’t easy to walk anywhere to eat. Plus, it was the dead of winter and freezing outside. They had no money to order a ride, and if they did, what would they tell the driver? Many didn’t speak English. They felt stranded.

And then, there was the work. Auguste didn’t want to say where, exactly, he is on the line, for fear he could be identified. But he is on the “cold side,” the refrigerated side of the plant where beef is trimmed, cut, and packaged. He works with a meat hook and knife. He told me he was shocked by the speed and strain of the job. He’s not alone. I spoke to four current and former line workers from Haiti who said the pace was fast and kept getting faster as more Haitians were hired. The Denver Post reported that one worker filed a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that JBS intentionally discriminates against Haitian workers by subjecting them to unsafe and unequal working conditions.

According to the complaint, the speed of the chain on the A shift is usually between 250 and 300 head of cattle per hour. But as Haitians arrived and were put on the B shift, which runs from about 2 to 11 p.m., the chain speed at night allegedly pushed past 400 head per hour, to as much as 430. “We have people that have been working at the plant for 10, 15 years,” one union representative told me. “They have never seen any chain speed going over 390.”

Cordova, the Local 7 president, said complaints started pouring into the union offices. “New hires are now largely comprised of Haitian refugees,” an official complaint filed by the local with the Department of Labor alleges. The complaint claims that JBS “increased chain speed to dangerously unsafe levels when these workers occupied the line.”

The alleged exploitation didn’t stop there, according to the union complaint. The union suspected that applications for this new group of workers were being submitted with one mailing address for everyone—Ebah’s home address. “The hiring manager and connected individuals likely have control over incoming mail to these workers,” the union alleges. Letters were withheld. And Haitian workers were forced to sign documents in English that waived their rights after on-the-job injuries, “with workers not understanding what they were being asked to sign.” Many, Cordova said, felt trapped.

Meanwhile, Auguste and his fellow Haitians would go back to the Rainbow Motel with little to no food, a line for the bathroom, and only the floor to sleep on. One woman told me that the conditions were so bad there that she agreed to be “the girlfriend” of a more established line worker, just to have someplace safe to stay and something to eat. At one point, there were almost 50 Haitian workers staying in only nine rooms.

Auguste told me he can’t shake the humiliation. Every day at work, he walked through the slaughter side of the plant, where each cow has its own little holding pen, but he was expected to share a tiny space with five of his co-workers. He found himself thinking the cows had it better. “I feel like,” he said, “I was being treated as a slave.”

“I would not say I’m a victim of the process,” Tchelly Moise told me, “but I was a direct witness.” It’s hard to know whether the union would have even been aware of the dismal conditions at the Rainbow Motel if it weren’t for Moise, a Haitian line worker at JBS who had taught himself to speak nearly flawless English by watching YouTube videos and then working in a call center. Moise came to the US via a long journey from Nicaragua in 2023 after he was shot in the chest in a robbery and nearly died. Once he was allowed into the United States, he discovered his cousin had found a job working at JBS through a TikTok video.

Moise flew to Colorado and his cousin drove him to the Greeley plant for an interview, where his language skills quickly came into use. None of the other applicants spoke English, and the HR manager was struggling. Moise translated for 30 job interviews and was offered a job in the packing plant on the spot.

In the meantime, his cousin had started to pick up extra money—as a driver for Mackenson Remy, who was shuttling in recruits whom he’d connected with Ebah at JBS, taking them to work and driving them around town. Moise was along for one of the pickups at the Rainbow Motel. “You have eight people inside of that one little motel room with one bed, one bathroom, women and men at the same time?” he told me. “It was a very bad situation.” Moise said the motel finally got so packed that Ebah was forced to rent a house nearby. But it wasn’t much better.

There were around 40 people living inside a five-bedroom house, he said. “I’m saying people sleeping on the floor, on the blanket, people everywhere. And at some point, they didn’t have electricity in the house and it was winter, so you can imagine how bad the situation was.” Other workers, including Auguste (who lived at Ebah’s rental house for five months), confirmed that the electricity and water often went out.

Because Moise is fluent in English, some of the Haitian workers asked him to carry forward complaints to the union. Cordova soon told JBS that Ebah was charging workers for rides to work and putting his name on referral bonuses. JBS opened an investigation in December 2023 into Ebah’s activities, suspending him for several months during the process. Lawyers conducted more than a dozen interviews with employees.

But when the investigation was complete, Ebah was merely reprimanded, and he returned to JBS’s plant. Remy and Ebah continued their recruitment work. Cordova continued to press the company before finally reaching out to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. In August 2024, JBS opened a second investigation.

The next month, the Journal published its story. Remy was featured throughout, alongside allegations of exploitation from the very Haitians he thought he was helping. Some workers alleged that Remy was working with JBS and getting paid $3,000 for every worker he brought to Greeley. He denies this. He says the company never paid him anything. (A JBS spokesperson said Remy never worked for the company and it notified local authorities and banned him from the premises.)

With these allegations made public, JBS was forced to respond. In an email to the Journal, JBS said it fired the two HR managers above Ebah and that Ebah was moved to a different facility in Greeley. The company said it also put in new training programs to teach employees about proper recruitment.

Still, the union kept demanding answers. “We have been dealing with what we believe is human trafficking and exploitation,” Cordova said, arguing that the workers were brought to Greeley under false pretenses. They were promised a good job and a place to stay but instead found unsafe work conditions and substandard housing.

JBS maintains that its leadership didn’t know what was happening at the Rainbow Motel, but I’ve seen the texts between Ebah and Remy. Ebah asked Remy who was being checked into the Rainbow Motel. Remy replied with five and six names to a room. After the Journal article came out, Ebah abruptly cut ties with Remy and hasn’t been in contact with him since.

The union hoped for a federal investigation into JBS. But that’s looking less and less likely in the current political climate. “While we were exposing this,” Cordova told me, “Trump, during his campaign, made up these crazy statements that Haitian workers were eating people’s pets—you know, their cats and dogs.” Now the Trump administration plans to evict them.

In the days after his inauguration, Trump issued a series of executive orders directing federal agencies to go after undocumented immigrants. Then in February, his administration started to go after legal immigrants, rescinding the temporary protected status of Venezuelans and then Haitians. If that policy remains in place, more than a million people will be forced to leave the country before August 3, including nearly all the Haitian workers who arrived at the JBS plant in Greeley because of Remy’s TikTok video.

When I spoke with Moise the day after TPS was revoked for Haitians, he was still in shock. “I can tell you honestly,” he said, “this is the first time I feel like this is really happening.” He told me that he kept thinking that Trump officials would look at the violence in Haiti—where more than 5,600 people were killed in 2024 alone—and conclude that they simply couldn’t send people back home. “Going back to Haiti is a death sentence, really,” Moise told me. “ We left the country, obviously, because it was very bad. You’re talking to some members at the plant, and they are telling you, ‘Man, my cousin just got killed today,’ or ‘My family members, they just burned down their house.’ So it’s getting worse every day.”

None of that seems to matter to this administration. The man in charge of Trump’s deportation plans—and his new deputy chief of staff for policy—is immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, who has said his goal is to arrest and deport as many immigrants as possible. He has vowed to use federal law enforcement, National Guard troops, and local police to carry out major sweeps of public spaces and raid workplaces. Those plans make little sense to Cordova. “This workforce is an immigrant workforce,” she told me. “The industry would collapse without these type of workers.”

Not to mention what this would mean for us, the consumers. In his campaign, Trump promised he would lower grocery prices. Instead, tariffs on Mexico and Canada threaten to send food prices soaring. Deporting the immigrant workforce that meatpackers depend on would halt processing at every stage of the supply chain, from feedlots to the packinghouse floor. This would drive up prices for Big Macs and Outback steaks, but also for chicken breasts and pork chops at grocery stores, for Hormel bacon and Campbell’s soup and Oscar Mayer hot dogs.

“I feel like us, the immigrants, we are a good part of the economy,” Moise told me. “Most of the jobs that we are doing, people who are born in this country are not actively looking to do those jobs.” This is why Moise said he’s confused. If mass deportations hurt not only JBS, but the economy as a whole, why do it? He’s left with only one answer. “ I think it’s just hatred against people with different skin color, because that’s the only logical thing that I can actually see.”

Given the animosity and the threat of deportation, you might expect that Moise would be making plans to flee to Canada or elsewhere, but for now anyway, he says he’s planning to stay put. After witnessing how badly new hires were being treated at JBS, he left his job there and now works for the union. He has retained an immigration lawyer and has a pending asylum application. But if Trump sets up deportation camps and fast-tracks hearings, as he has threatened to do, Moise doesn’t know what he’ll do.

Neither does Auguste. He still works at JBS. After about six months, he was able to save enough money to move into his own place, with his own bed and bathroom. But it all comes at a cost. The white bone program is still going on at JBS in Greeley. And Auguste told me that he can no longer fully close his left hand—an injury he says is a result of gripping a meat hook for hours without breaks, of his work being too fast and too repetitive.

Despite everything, Auguste told me he’s still glad to be in the United States, because his life is stable now. He knows all the things Trump has threatened to do, but he’s trying to stay optimistic. Because he doesn’t believe Americans will really let mass deportations happen. After all, he said, “the USA is the mother of democracy.”

It’s hard to share Auguste’s hopeful outlook. Yes, it’s possible that federal courts might intervene, hearing lawsuits from Haitians as they already are in cases brought by Venezuelans. Or some governors might step in. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has vowed to help companies “retain their employees who are doing work critical to our economy—whether in agriculture, construction, service, or industry.”

But this broad-sweeping government crackdown? It will be difficult to oppose. It’s what Americans voted for.

Moise said he fears most Haitians don’t understand this. “I don’t think they really see the threats that is coming,” he told me. “A lot of them, they feel secure, maybe because of TPS, because they know they already filed for asylum. So I don’t think they know the power that Trump is actually going to have.”

Moise said he feels like his life is in Trump’s hands now. His life and the lives of thousands of other JBS workers in Greeley—and at dozens of similar plants in similar towns across the middle of America. The nearly million people who were granted entrance to our country because they were in danger and they sought protection within our borders. They followed all the rules—filled out the paperwork, allowed their cheeks to be swabbed, their fingerprints to be taken. They risked everything to come here and were allowed to cross the border legally. They trusted the United States to grant them asylum and protect them.