This content was first published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning analytical newspaper, along with The Frontier.
On the morning of April 12, the farmhand woke up struggling to breathe and dizzy with illness.
Jiaai Zeng had spent the previous month daily working at a weed farm in Oklahoma that was run by other Chinese refugees. The work was terrible, the 57-year-old had told friends in New York. He said his leaders made him work up to 15 days a day in the blast-furnace warmth of a house. He planned to go back to New York that night for medical care because he was still feeling bad after a trip to the dentist.
At 9: 38 am, Zeng sent an audio message to a niece in Manhattan’s Chinatown. He asked her to buy a case of fruits for when he arrived in an agonized voice.
” I do n’t want to eat anything”, he said, speaking a dialect of Fujian province. ” I just want to take a look at fruits and see if I’ll have an appetite”.
When three farm-related drivers drove Zeng to a local doctor about an hour later, he was unconscious and without pulse. They dropped him away and left in a hurry while doctors were trying to revive him, according to a medical record.
Zeng was dying by 11:05 am.
” This death is not normal”, his brother, Westin Zeng, said in an interview with ProPublica and The Frontier. ” He lives that for a little bit over 30 time: from a good person to a dying man. To me, it does n’t make sense. In my mind, there’s a natural link from his job to his condition, and from his condition to how they handle that, and a connection to his death”.
The tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants who have secretly become the foundation of many US cannabis businesses are exposed by the farmworker’s tale, which provides a view into the terrible and frequently harsh conditions they endure.
” It is one of the most terrible sections of what we see in this business”, said Donnie Anderson, the chairman of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, who met with Zeng’s family and ordered an investigation.
Cannabis fields have boomed in claims that have passed medical and recreational marijuana laws. However, politicians did n’t create corresponding regulations to protect personnel when Oklahoma’s voters approved a legislation allowing the production of medical marijuana in 2018. Oklahoma’s generally poor workers protection system leaves the protection of workers mostly to the federal government. Because cannabis is prohibited on a regional level, the US Department of Labor has tighter control.
As a result, employees who are already isolated by language and culture have found themselves generally at the mercy of their companies – usually criminals who rely on Chinese immigrant workers. As ProPublica and The Frontier have reported, Chinese cartels — some with feared relations to the Chinese government — have taken advantage of state-level legislation to occupy a global black market for pot.
During raids, inspections and investigations at more than a thousand farms over the past five years, Oklahoma law enforcement officers, fire marshals, federal labor inspectors and other officials have encountered a litany of abuses: Bosses
- threaten and intimidate workers,
- sexually assault them,
- steal their wages,
- confiscate their identification cards,
- restrict their movements and
- Use noxious chemicals and pesticides to force them to work in dangerous heat.
Wrongdoing is rampant at many Chinese-owned farms, where immigrants are often so fearful of their employers and the authorities that they do not cooperate with investigations, according to law enforcement officials, court cases, human rights advocates and workers.
The mistreatment and squalid conditions are the hallmarks of human trafficking, said Craig Williams, the chief agent of the marijuana and human trafficking sections of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.
” It’s difficult to describe what it’s like until you’re standing there, looking at the people, looking at the environment, smelling the environment, and seeing what they’re living in,” Williams said. ” Your heart goes out to them like,’ This is just wrong.'”
While issues are particularly severe in Oklahoma, studies and media reports have documented similar risks for laborers across the country, many of whom are recent arrivals who have crossed the Mexican border illegally. Exploitation of Chinese immigrants pervades the marijuana underworld from California to New Mexico to Maine, according to interviews and court cases.
Overseas as well, authorities have found patterns of mistreatment at Chinese-run marijuana sites from Chile to Ireland.
A police official in Spain, a center for illegal marijuana cultivation in Europe, said,” These are people living in a situation of semi-slavery,” who spoke on the condition of anonymity for safety. ” They are locked up 24 hours a day. They are unsure of the nation they reside in. They do n’t have contact with the outside world”.
During raids in 2021 on cannabis plantations hidden in warehouses near Barcelona, Spain, police freed 10 immigrants from Fujian whom gangsters had forced to work to pay off smuggling debts of up to$ 35, 000. The drug traffickers forced the workers to sleep on mattresses on the floor and locked them in the filthy, windowless buildings. Some of the victims spent up to a year in captivity, police said.
Everyone has their own unique story, but the truth is that they have not escaped China’s darkness, according to Ju Ma, a Chinese human rights advocate who runs a migrant shelter in New York to assist marijuana users.
In the Zeng case, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics are investigating. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner recently concluded that the cause of the farmworker’s death was pneumonia.
According to Westin Zeng,” they are treating the workers like slaves because they are making a lot of money in the marijuana industry.” ” I want to find out everything that happened and get justice for my family”.
The farm’s owners have not been charged with a crime in relation to the case. Jeffrey Box, a lawyer for one of them, rejected the Zeng family’s allegations that neglect and harsh working conditions played roles in the farmworker’s death.
Official data and reports on labor in the marijuana industry are sparse, and Chinese workers rarely talk about their experiences. ProPublica and The Frontier spoke with a number of current and former law enforcement officials from the United States and abroad, as well as with representatives from farmworkers, human rights advocates, lawyers, and other organizations. Reporters also reviewed court documents, medical files, government reports and social media posts in English, Chinese and Spanish.
The reporting exposes a desperate saga that is largely invisible to the US public. Zeng’s case is rare because his family has spoken out. Many Chinese immigrants enter the nation’s marijuana industry hoping to plant the seeds of new lives, but they end up suffering in silence.
No one will report anything if they go missing, Williams said. ” I sincerely wonder how many people are buried on illegal marijuana grows”.
The journey
Zeng was born in a village in Yongtai County, Fujian. His nephew remembers him departing at dawn, to cultivate rice and plum trees, and returning after dark.
Westin Zeng, a 32-year-old business consultant in New York, said,” He carried four if people were carrying two baskets of stuff.”
A father of two, Zeng also did itinerant manual labor in Shanghai and other cities to support his family, including his father and a grandson who are both disabled. According to an account he later wrote for a US immigration court, he converted to Christianity ( his US relatives are Christians ) and was so threatened by police in his hometown. At the same time, the pandemic was worsening China’s economic woes and the hardships of its working people.
Zeng decided to leave. His US relatives lent him about$ 65,000 as compensation for the smuggler’s fees. The money included a payoff to expedite issuance of a passport by Chinese officials in Fujian, a coastal province whose longtime smuggling underworld intertwines with official corruption.
Zeng traveled via Bolivia and Mexico, climbing the border fence into San Diego in December 2022. He requested political asylum after Border Patrol agents detained him, and he was granted his release.
He arrived during a multiyear surge of immigration from China. Around 31, 000 Chinese nationals were apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in the first eight months of the 2024 fiscal year. That’s over 15 times more than the entire 2019 fiscal year.
Some Chinese border-crossers find work in marijuana operations after they arrive. Other people are brought across the globe specifically to work in the cannabis industry.
A former senior Drug Enforcement Administration official said the agency has learned about these clandestine labor pipelines from informants and a jailed high-level human trafficker and money launderer.
The phrase” We need more manpower for all these marijuana farms” was spread by Christopher Urben, who is currently the managing director of the global investigations firm Nardello &, Co.” The same networks are involved in weed, money laundering, and human smuggling,” Urben said.
Blackwell
When Zeng reached New York in early 2023, he gave thanks at a Fujianese church in Chinatown and became a regular worshipper.
” He was surprised how much people were willing to support him”, Westin Zeng said. He was truly moved. He told my father it’s totally different here”.
Zeng first worked at a restaurant and then, at the suggestion of a cousin employed in the marijuana industry in Oklahoma, spent a month last summer working at a marijuana farm there. According to his family, he had no complaints about the experience. He saved money to send to family in China and to pay off debts incurred by his overseas journey.
Zeng, who had just received Medicaid insurance coverage, had a medical checkup in New York in early March that, according to the doctor who examined him, his medical records, and his family.
On March 7, Zeng returned to Oklahoma to work at a farm in the small town of Blackwell, near the Kansas state line.
Photos and public records show the 65-acre lot had six greenhouses and nine indoor grow houses. The farm had about 13 workers, according to Zeng’s family. The metal fence displayed signs depicting a pistol above the warning” Lawful Concealed Carry Permitted on Premises”.
According to his family, Zeng made about$ 4,500 per month for mowing plants, spreading fertilizer, and removing pests. His shift began at 7 am and lasted as late as 10 pm, with no days off. He slept in a cubicle in a partitioned room in the red-roofed main house.
Zeng sounded unhappy when he called family members. Although his bosses and co-workers were also Fujianese, they mistreated him because they were from another county with a different dialect, he told his relatives. He informed them that the workers were quitting because of the fast-paced pace and that the plastic-covered, dome-shaped greenhouses were incredibly hot.
” He was complaining to my aunt that he had to work almost naked because it was too hot in there”, Westin Zeng said. ” The only way to cool down was to spray himself with water”.
According to Williams, researchers have found that some farms had temperatures exceeding 120 degrees. During raids, agents routinely cut the sides out of the greenhouses to dissipate the heat and fumes from chemicals. Agents wear oxygen monitors because farmers use CO2 to promote plant growth, a practice that reduces oxygen levels without agents or laborers realizing it.
” I worry about our agents ‘ health all the time”, Williams said. ” And those workers are living in it”.
According to government and academic research, heat and humidity in greenhouses can encourage bacterial growth and lead to heat stress, and chemicals, gases, and other marijuana-farm chemicals can cause conditions ranging from allergies to fatal asthma. Other research shows that extended time in excess heat can cause human organs to shut down.
Another danger is caused by fires and explosions. And many farmers use toxic pesticides smuggled from China or across the Mexican border that have made workers sick in California, officials said.
The extent of such hazards at the Blackwell farm is not clear. According to his family, Zeng told his family that he occasionally wore a mask because it odors like marijuana and chemicals.
Box, the lawyer representing an owner of the farm, disputed the family’s allegations about extreme heat and other conditions at the farm.
Around April 9, Zeng fell ill. On April 10, a farm worker took him to a doctor in Oklahoma City. The doctor diagnosed cystitis and a urinary tract infection — conditions that research shows can be exacerbated by heat stress— and prescribed an antibiotic, according to medical records and the relatives. ( The doctor declined to comment. )
That night, Zeng talked to his family about flying back to New York, where his insurance would help cover further treatment.
” I want to give it a few days, wait until I get better, then leave”, he said in an audio message.
Despite receiving the antibiotic, his condition continued to decline. His bosses bought him a plane ticket to New York for the afternoon of April 12, his family said. He sent his cousin the audio message that morning.
” You can hear he was dying”, Westin Zeng said.
At 10: 35 a. m., an hour after Zeng sent the message, a minivan pulled up to the emergency room at Stillwater Medical Center-Blackwell. Nurses discovered Zeng lying in a blanket and slumped down. They began CPR, put him on a stretcher and rushed him inside, according to the hospital report.
According to the report, the woman and the two men who brought him from the farm claimed they could not communicate in English and that nothing “aside from the patient’s name and birthdate” had been provided.
Using a Mandarin-speaking phone interpreter, the nurses got a few answers from the woman, who identified herself only as Stella. She “was not very forthcoming” and asked several times when she could leave, the report says. According to the report, she denied knowing Zeng, but that he had been seen by a doctor, had been sick for two or three days, and had worked at a marijuana farm.
Stella “left with the other two males”, the report says. “CPR continued”
Doctors pronounced Zeng dead a half hour after his arrival. Tests revealed he had sepsis and pneumonia, the report says. A hospital spokesman declined to comment.
‘ Selling hope ‘
Zeng passed away in a time when Oklahoma is confronting the perils of its march toward the marijuana frontier.
In 2018, voters passed the ballot petition that legalized medical marijuana with 56 % of the vote. The petition written by citizens included virtually no regulations. The state Legislature passed a number of laws the following year that protected the right of consumers to access medical marijuana, but they neglected the health and safety of marijuana workers.
At the peak of the billion-dollar marijuana boom in 2022, the state had almost 10, 000 cannabis farms, which have an estimated average workforce of 15 to 20 employees per site. Authorities have been able to reduce the number of farms despite a crackdown on black market marijuana trafficking because of it. However, they still encounter abusive, qualid, and unsafe workplaces.
Problems are endemic at Chinese-owned farms engaged in illicit activity, officials said. Workers often tell investigators that their bosses promised to pay them at harvest, but that the bosses then claimed the harvest was n’t big enough.
According to law enforcement officials and workers, owners occasionally offer new hires a potential cut of the profits and even encourage them to put their hard-earned savings into the endeavors before taking their money, according to owners.
” We see promised pay that has n’t been delivered on”, Williams said,” – very frequently now. They believe that working in a terrible environment for a while will pay off in the long run. They do n’t realize they’re working on an illegal grow. And that the work they’ve done, they’re never going to get paid for anyway. The bosses are, in some ways,” selling hope.”
In a rare workplace enforcement case in 2021, the Oklahoma Department of Labor judged that four Chinese employees were owed a combined total of nearly$ 57, 000 in unpaid wages and damages after investigators found they were not paid for months of intense physical labor at a marijuana farm in southern Oklahoma.
Through an interpreter, Yulin Zheng said in an interview with ProPublica and The Frontier,” We were overworked.” Nearly 50 employees worked up to 14 hours a day, no days off, and lived in trailers without air conditioning, she said.
Zheng and her husband, Chang Qin Jiang, both in their late 60s, took jobs in Oklahoma after someone told them cannabis was a lucrative industry. Each of them received$ 4, 000 in cash the first month. But the next month, a boss told them he did n’t have the money, according to screenshots of text messages they included in a complaint to the Labor Department.
In a text message, he said,” I’ll pay the wage in a few days, probably next week.” ” Believe me”!
The cash never came. He told the couple that if they bought one of the farm’s greenhouses to grow and sell themselves, they could make money, several months later.
” It was like a chicken game”, Zheng said. The bosses “were trying to keep as much money as possible” they claimed.
The employer eventually abandoned the farm, leaving many workers without food or transportation, according to the couple and court documents. The couple’s son in California drove to Oklahoma and helped them file the successful claim.
According to court documents, the farm’s owner later attempted to file for bankruptcy, but the court discovered she had not disclosed hundreds of thousands of dollars in marijuana-related income, according to court documents. Public records also show that the phone number for the farm belongs to the Chinese owner of a furniture store in Oklahoma City that the FBI raided last year in an investigation that led to three other people being convicted. The store was being used as a staging area for a criminal network that sold marijuana to the East Coast using fictitious Amazon delivery vehicles, according to investigators.
Workers at other farms have recounted their struggles in Chinese-language blog posts. In 2021, an electrician at a farm near Maramec, Oklahoma, alleged that his employer threatened to “have our legs broken” when he and his wife asked for months of wages they were never paid. A boss at a different farm threatened her with an iron bar and a gun as she confronted her over an unpaid salary. Court documents show the farm was later raided and the owner convicted on drug charges.
Scams are also prevalent in other states, according to interviews and court records.
” What we see is Chinese nationals who are either here legally … or were smuggled in across the Mexican border and are forced into labor, or more often tricked into labor”, said Kevin McInerney, a commander at the California Department of Cannabis Control.
Agents in Southern California are investigating the recent case of a woman who invested$ 10, 000 to work at a marijuana farm in exchange for a small monthly wage and an eventual cut of the profits. The employers turned down her first-month’s salary after she labored in repulsive conditions. She stopped working in protest, so they drove her out into the desert and abandoned her at a gas station, officials said.
According to Whitney Anderson, the director of The Dragonfly Home, an organization that serves the needs of Oklahoma City’s homeless people, marijuana business is “inherently more violent” than other industries.
Workers in Oklahoma have suffered beatings and even died in robberies and shootings. In one case, an employee told police her boss grabbed her by the hair, fired shots near her head and threatened to kill her and her daughter, according to court documents.
A danger to victims of sex crimes is also present. A 42-year-old former supervisor at a cannabis farm in Noble County is facing charges of rape and sexual battery after he allegedly assaulted an employee in her sleeping quarters in 2022, court documents say. He had previously attempted to assault her at work by injecting ketamine into her drinking water to elude her, but a coworker intervened, according to the documents. The former supervisor has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
” I’m so scared ]he ] will take revenge on me, my daughter, or family”, the woman wrote in a request for a protective order. I must live in fear every day.
And in another dramatic incident in 2021, a Chinese worker in Garvin County escaped from a marijuana farm and ran to a nearby house, where he banged on the door screaming for help. According to 911 call transcripts, court records, and interviews, a man and a woman chased him down and attempted to drag him across the road.
” They had a big old fight in my front yard”, Diann Skinner, who lives in the house, said in an interview. ” They’d tackle him, he’d get up and take off and they’d tackle him again”.
Frightened neighbors and passing drivers called police, who arrived as the assailants wrestled with the escaped worker. The woman and two men had held him against his will for three months and forced him to work, the 37-year-old victim reported to police. He was “extremely scared” of his captors and “believed they would try to kill him”, a police report said.
Police found 1, 500 pounds of illegal marijuana,$ 32, 000 in cash and two pistols in the run-down property, which served as a processing depot for Chinese-owned farms involved in illicit trafficking, according to court documents and interviews.
The suspects were charged with kidnapping and drug trafficking, according to the prosecution. But the victim quickly left the state, making it impossible to pursue the kidnapping charge. The two men received sentences of two years in prison and a conviction for the drug offenses. The charges against the woman were dropped.
Fifty thousand dollars
His distraught nephew Westin flew to Oklahoma City the day after Zeng’s passing to meet with a farmland man and four women. They had a tense conversation in the lobby of an apartment building, he said.
” They said,’ We did everything right,'” Westin Zeng said. The conversation was all about” It was your uncle’s fault,” according to the way these people spoke to me.
The group did not give their names and offered to pay$ 50, 000 if the family kept silent, Westin alleges. He claimed he turned down.
ProPublica and The Frontier used photos, social media, public records and other sources to identify the owner of the farm, Xiuna Chen. Westin Zeng recognized her as one of the people at the meeting.
Chen has not been indicted for a crime. But public records show that her Blackwell farm has multiple ties to another farm that was recently raided by the Oklahoma Organized Crime Task Force, which led to six indictments. The defendants have entered a not-guilty plea.
Chen referred reporters to Box, her lawyer, who accused the dead worker’s family of trying to” shake down” his client” for a ton of money”.
Another woman that Westin Zeng recognized from the meeting is Zhixin Liu, who on social media goes by Stella — the name given by the woman who brought Jiaai Zeng to the hospital. Liu’s phone is listed as her owner on a report from the Blackwell farm’s marijuana license, which was obtained by firefighters who were responding to a fire there in April.
In 2022, Liu established a corporation with Zenith Top LLC, an Oklahoma City firm that has been raided for allegedly setting up illegal marijuana ventures, public records show. According to public records and court records, she listed her address as a home that belongs to a suspected owner of Zenith Top. The owners of the firm have not been charged, though agents have executed search warrants and initiated money forfeiture actions against them that are awaiting trial.
Liu declined requests for comment.
Westin Zeng met with an OSHA official and the state anti-drug director while they were in Oklahoma. Officials at both agencies told ProPublica and The Frontier that they are investigating the farmworker’s death and the Blackwell farm.
The family’s interaction with authorities is unusual. Many workers who feel they have been victims of wrongdoing do n’t have contacts in the US or their relatives are fearful and speak little English, officials said.
Last year, the state narcotics bureau succeeded in building a human trafficking prosecution in a grim case: The accused ringleaders forced women to work as prostitutes at a brothel catering to owners and managers of Chinese-owned marijuana farms, flying the women to Oklahoma City from New York, according to court documents.
However, in general, victims ‘ reluctance and elusiveness deter authorities from bringing charges of human trafficking or workplace abuses. They focus instead on drug-related offenses by the owners.
Workers in Oklahoma are especially vulnerable because of the conflict between state and federal laws and weak regulation.
Oklahoma leaves regulation of workplace safety to OSHA, but the agency does not proactively monitor marijuana worksites in Oklahoma, and it only investigates in extreme cases such as job-related injuries or deaths, officials said. Because marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, OSHA has not developed specific workplace safety regulations for the cannabis industry, and relies mostly on the agency’s general duty clause, which covers all employers, for enforcement.
A state task force mandates that owners of marijuana operations take a training course and develop a written injury and illness program in California, which has its own state-level workplace safety agency. Even owners of illegal growing sites are subject to such rules, a spokesperson for the California Department of Industrial Relations said.
Leaders in Oklahoma claim to be working to break through bureaucratic limbo. The state labor commissioner, Leslie Osborn, said in an interview that the heads of agencies met last year” to really knock out who is responsible for what. And there is not a lot of clarity”.
Osborn said,” We let this flourish like a black market, and now we’re kind of behind the eight ball.”
Sebastian Rotella is a reporter at ProPublica. He covers terrorism, intelligence, and organized crime as an award-winning foreign correspondent and investigative reporter. Kirsten Berg is a research reporter with ProPublica. Garrett Yalch , and , Clifton Adcock report for The Frontier.