The largest suspected human trafficking ring ever uncovered by U.S. law enforcement brought its victims into the country on commercial airliners, using completely legal documents, records show.

For almost a decade, three companies and 12 accused human traffickers charged in a landmark Kansas City human trafficking case allegedly took advantage of a guest worker visa program that is easy to defraud.

An investigation by The Kansas City Star found it’s a loophole-ridden system that permits traffickers to file transparently bogus paperwork that goes virtually unchecked by at least three federal agencies.

With approved visas in hand, traffickers around the country have brought thousands of workers to the United States, where they are often exposed to hazardous living and working conditions and paid just pennies an hour.

And the U.S. Labor Department — the agency charged with protecting workers — does little to root out the problems, even returning almost $200 million earmarked for visa fraud detection to the federal Treasury.

As part of its investigation, The Star obtained hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed investigative records from the alleged Kansas City conspiracy and examined thousands of pages of wiretap transcripts and other documents from labor trafficking cases around the country.

The stories of abuse include workers in Missouri being injured on the job and going without adequate medical treatment because their employers didn’t buy workers’ compensation insurance; employers requiring workers in Alabama to rent crowded apartments so shabby that they resembled “pig sties” while the trafficking schemes’ leaders lived in a $700,000 home with an air-conditioned doghouse; and women illegally working in a Tennessee motel paid so little that they were “dying of hunger.”

Federal prosecutors exposed weaknesses in the guest worker visa program as recently as May, when they announced human trafficking charges in Kansas City against the leaders of the Giant Labor Solutions conspiracy.

Prosecutors alleged that GLS and others brought more than 1,000 foreign workers to Missouri, stole their wages and exposed some to terrible living and working conditions. It’s the first human trafficking case in the nation filed under federal racketeering laws.
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