Suit targets business tied to state lawmaker in gov. race
Firm allegedly attempted to manipulate visa program by bypassing American laborers
A group of farmworkers is suing a company owned by the family of a Democratic candidate for governor, accusing the business of trying to manipulate a federal visa program and passing over American workers for foreign laborers.
State Sen. Joseph Cervantes, a lawyer, is defending his family’s company. Cervantes, who this month entered the race for governor, says his family had nothing to do with a recruiter’s efforts to obtain temporary work permits for hired hands from Mexico.
While he maintains that the lawsuit is without merit, the advocacy group that filed it says Cervantes’ family business was part of a scheme that harms workers on both sides of the border.
Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, a nonprofit group that advocates for farmworkers, filed the lawsuit. It names another business owned by the Cervantes family and four other agricultural companies based in Southern New Mexico as defendants. Those four firms have settled, but the case involving Cervantes’ family businesses continues.
“We felt that settling the case would have suggested [it had] some validity,” Cervantes said in an interview.
The lawsuit claims that Cervantes Agribusiness signed an agreement in 2011 with a firm called Workonnection that would supply workers for processing and packaging dried red chile.
Farmers in the area have long com-
plained about a shortage of labor and the quality of workers they can hire on this side of the border. But the federal government has provided few temporary work permits for the agricultural sector in Doña Ana County. Workonnection, which would serve as a middleman by recruiting laborers and provide housing, aimed to get visas for a pool of workers in Mexico and bring them into the United States.
But Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid says plenty of workers already were in the country and willing to take the jobs. It accuses Workonnection and the farmers who signed on with the company of attempting to game the visa program by bypassing American laborers to get the visas anyway.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to rule that the firms broke the law, fine the businesses and award damages to the farmhands.
Cervantes’ family is a fixture of the agricultural community in the senator’s native Doña Ana County, producing pecans, chile, onions and other crops. Cervantes is even better known in political circles. He has served as a county commissioner, a state representative and since 2013 as a state senator. He once mulled a run for Congress and now he’s one of four Democrats seeking the party nomination for governor.
Cervantes’ brother, O. Dino Cervantes, helped manage Cervantes Agribusiness at the time the farm labor agreement was signed with Workonnection.
Founded by Jaime Campos, the former executive director of the state’s border authority, Workonnection searched for laborers in Mexico to bring to the United States under temporary permits known as H-2A visas.
But to convince the federal government to issue such visas, employers must first prove they cannot find American workers to fill jobs.
To ensure the foreign workers are not just used as cheap labor to undercut the wages of workers in the United States, the federal government requires employers pay more than the minimum wage.
At the time, Workonnection would have had to pay $9.71 an hour to farmworkers brought into the country under H-2A visas, well above the statewide minimum wage of $7.50.
Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid says several laborers in the United States agreed to take jobs with Workonnection, even giving up opportunities for work elsewhere because of the relatively high wage.
But its lawsuit says that in November 2011 regulators found Workonnection tried to discourage American workers from accepting the jobs it was offering in Southern New Mexico.
Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid says that Campos met with laborers one night in late 2011 in El Paso. He told them to get ready to begin their jobs the next day, according to lawyers in the case. But when the workers showed up the following morning, no one came to take them to their jobs and phone calls to Campos went unanswered, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit contends Workonnection never provided work, canceling the jobs to avoid hiring the American laborers.
Not long after requesting the visas on the grounds that farmers in the area faced a shortage of workers, Campos wrote to the U.S. Department of Labor and asked to cancel Workonnection’s applications, the lawsuit says.
According to court filings by Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, Campos said farms no longer needed the extra workers because of a drought.
“That’s a bunch of kahooey,” another farmer told lawyers in the case, according to court filings. “The reason they [canceled the H-2A application is] because he wasn’t able to get the people from Mexico in our agreement. It had nothing to do with adverse [weather] conditions. I had chile to pick that year, and I could have used the help and the labor.”
Campos did not respond to a request for comment.
Jerome Wesevich, a lawyer at Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid’s office in El Paso, describes Workonnection as trying to sneak around the American visa program with the help of agricultural companies by appearing to offer jobs for laborers on this side of the border while really intending to hire lower-paid workers from Mexico.
“There are abundant U.S. workers that want these jobs,” Wesevich said. “… It’s a danger to U.S. workers to have these kinds of scams out there.”
The 15 farmworkers in the case, all of whom are either U.S. citizens or have permanent resident status, filed suit in April 2015. They targeted Workonnection and companies such as Cervantes Agribusiness, claiming the businesses were all scheming to bypass the rules of the federal government’s visa program.
Cervantes has asked a judge to decide the case without taking it to trial, maintaining that his family has done nothing wrong.
In an interview, Cervantes said his family’s business never plotted with Workonnection to get foreign laborers into the country.
Cervantes said his family did not know until the lawsuit was filed that the company listed Cervantes Agribusiness on its application for worker visas.
The senator said his brother, O. Dino Cervantes, who helped manage the business, signed an agreement to hire laborers from Workonnection but did not specify whether they would be foreign workers.
“That was the end of it,” Cervantes said. “My brother said he’d hire them if [Campos] would supply them. He didn’t hear from [Campos] ever again.”
O. Dino Cervantes said in a separate interview that his meeting with Campos had been brief.
“I don’t know that he ever mentioned anything regarding foreign workers,” he said.
The family’s businesses, he added, had not previously sought workers under the visa program or other guest worker initiatives.
Still, O. Dino Cervantes has been among many in the agricultural industry who have complained about the federal government’s laws limiting visas for less expensive foreign laborers.
“We need a temporary worker program,” the senator’s brother wrote in a 2013 opinion piece for The Silver City Sun-News. “… Chile processing companies cannot find workers in areas of the state where unemployment is upwards of 15 percent.”
The federal government has permitted relatively few laborers to come to New Mexico for temporary agricultural jobs.
During fiscal year 2015, for example, the U.S. Department of Labor only certified 244 H-2A visas for jobs in the state. That is a small share of the nearly 140,000 visas certified nationwide through the H-2A program that year.
Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid argues that farmers in the area get few visas because there are plenty of workers already on this side of the border, disputing the argument that farmers in Southern New Mexico face a shortage of labor.