By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Oklahoma News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

On May 11, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that the U.S. is suspending all livestock imports from Mexico due to a resurgence of New World screwworm. Mexican authorities detected the parasitic fly, which was ostensibly eradicated decades ago, in southern Mexico earlier in the month after an outbreak in Panama years ago. Now, officials are increasingly concerned that the screwworm could reach the U.S., and wreak havoc on American farm animals.

Rollins says that the suspension will apply to live cattle, bison and horses, and will be renewed "on a month-by-month basis, until a significant window of containment is achieved." In the meantime, U.S. officials and cattle farmers are on edge.

"It is very, very bad, and it's not just cattle," Dr. Rod Hall, the state veterinarian for Oklahoma, tells Sentient. "The screwworms can affect any warm-blooded animal, so it would be devastating to any of our livestock species."

What is a New World Screwworm?

The New World screwworm isn't a worm at all, but a parasitic fly whose larvae infest and burrow into the tissue of warm-blooded animals. Female screwworms are attracted to open wounds, and bodily orifices in general, and that's often where they lay their eggs. Once the larvae hatch, they burrow into the host creatures' tissue with their powerful mouth hooks.

While several fly species are attracted to open wounds, screwworms are unique in that they infest healthy, living tissue, as opposed to the flesh of dead creatures. What's more, screwworms can lay up to 400 eggs at once, so even a single pregnant fly is bad news for any warm-blooded creature unfortunate enough to encounter one.

"When they get to a certain point, they fall out, burrow into the ground for a week or so, and then they turn into more flies," Hall explains. "So oftentimes, by the time a human realizes that an animal is infected, the damage has already been done, and the next generation [of screwworms] is in the soil, waiting to turn into adult flies so they can lay more eggs."

Myiasis is the official term for a screwworm infestation of living tissue, and it can kill the host creature in one to two weeks if not treated. Thankfully, myiasis is survivable if treated with larvicides, insecticides and daily cleaning of the wounds - that is, if it's detected in time, which is often the biggest challenge for livestock farmers.

Screwworm is a health threat to animals and an economic threat to meat industry producers. But it's generally not considered a public health risk to humans.

Public health officials have said that any livestock infected by the screwworm wouldn't make its way into the domestic meat supply, due to federal meat inspection laws. And although the parasite can infect humans, anybody with such an infection "would notice something" was wrong in time to treat it, Todd Thrift, associate professor of animal sciences at the University of Florida, tells Sentient.

"Unless it was someone that was just totally unaware, this is not something that rapidly affects people," Thrift says. "The probability of it being a human health threat is very, very, very, very low."

As its name implies, the New World screwworm only exists in the Western hemisphere; there's also an Old World screwworm, which is found in parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Oceania. Both types of screwworms live in tropical and subtropical climates, and can't survive extreme heat or cold.

New World screwworms are endemic in South America, Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but usually aren't found north of Panama. There are no screwworms in the U.S. - but there used to be, and it's taken quite a bit of effort to keep them out.

Screwworms Were Once A Major Issue On U.S. Farms

Until the 1960s, the New World screwworm was common across Mexico and the southern United States. After its initial detection off the coast of Guiana in 1858, the parasite became a major problem in North America around the turn of the century as America's livestock industry became more developed and expansive.

By 1920, the screwworm was a serious enough issue on U.S. farms that the Department of Agriculture produced an informational video on how to stop them. But the species was still poorly understood at this point, and it wasn't until the 1930s that a series of discoveries about the screwworm equipped scientists to begin developing a plan for eradicating them.

The key was sterilization. Female screwworms only mate once in their lives, so scientists developed a way of sterilizing male screwworms without otherwise harming them, then released the sterile males en masse into screwworm populations. This became known as the Sterile Insect Technique, and it worked: By 1966, New World screwworm was fully eradicated in the U.S., and remaining populations in Mexico were successfully eliminated by 1991.

Ensuring that the U.S. remains screwworm-free, however, has been an ongoing and international effort. Because an adult screwworm can travel up to 125 miles before laying eggs, eradicating the species in the U.S. effectively requires that Mexico be free of the fly as well. The U.S. and Panama maintain a buffer zone of sterilized flies in eastern Panama to prevent the screwworm from migrating northward, and several other international collaborations have helped keep the species' populations in check - for the most part.

How Did This Recent Outbreak Occur?

Although the U.S.-Panamanian buffer zone has largely been a success, it's not completely impermeable. There have been isolated outbreaks of the screwworm in the U.S. at various points since 1966, most recently in the Florida Keys in 2016, but all were eventually contained.

In 2023, however, a major screwworm outbreak occurred in Panama; though it's not entirely clear how the screwworm managed to escape the buffer zone, conservationists have suggested that illegal cattle trafficking is to blame. Since then, the fly has been detected in several countries north of the buffer zone, including Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador.

"Panama was pretty much focusing all the sterile male flies in the Panama region to control it there," Hall says. "So once it got out of the control area without people knowing it, it had the opportunity to begin spreading. And it's hard to get ahead of it, because the animals can't talk to us and tell us they have a problem."

This is a big reason screwworm is so hard to combat: the lag time between infection and detection. It's why screwworms are a much bigger problem on cattle farms, where cows are often dispersed over a large area and aren't seen for days at a time, than on pig farms, where animals tend to be confined in tight quarters, and farmers can typically put eyes on each animal every day.

"It might be a few weeks before the authorities [in Central America] would realize that they had a case of it," Hall says. "And by then, the screwworm flies had multiplied and moved even further. So instead of being able to get ahead of it, we're kind of chasing it."

In 2024, a New World screwworm infected a cow in southern Mexico near the border of Guatemala. In response, the USDA suspended livestock imports to the U.S. from Mexico in November 2024, and increased its deployments of sterile screwworm males south of the border. By February 2025, the U.S. and Mexico had agreed to a series of enhanced security protocols aimed at preventing screwworm from crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, and the suspension was lifted.

In May, however, the USDA announced that screwworms had been detected in Mexican farms around 700 miles from the U.S. border. It was this discovery that compelled Rollins to suspend Mexican livestock imports again.

Screwworm Policy: Public Health, or Politics?

In her announcement, Rollins stressed that the import suspension "is not about politics or punishment of Mexico, [but] about food and animal safety." Nevertheless, there has been a bit of political tension between the U.S. and Mexico as of late that's worth noting.

Some of this tension has been strictly rhetorical; Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum didn't take kindly to President Trump's suggestion that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the "Gulf of America," for instance. But some has been more substantive, stemming from Trump's new tariffs on Mexico and his visa suspensions of certain Mexican officials.

In April, Rollins accused the Mexican government of delaying U.S. efforts to contain screwworms in Panama, and demanded that it "eliminate restrictions on USDA aircraft and waive customs duties on eradication equipment."

The two countries quickly struck a deal to resolve this issue, but the new import suspension has frustrated Mexican authorities, with Scheinbaum calling it "unfair" and defending her government's efforts to fight the parasite.

Zooming Out: Screwworms Are Common In South America

The presence of screwworms is panic-inducing for many American farmers. But in many parts of South America, they're just the cost of doing business.

"In South America, they live with this," Thrift says. "It's there all the time, and so it doesn't wipe out their cattle populations or the wildlife populations or anything else. It's just part of the normal flora."

This begs the question of how these countries deal with the screwworm. The answer is decidedly low-tech, according to Thrift: They just check the cattle for infections more frequently.

"Beef production in some of the South American countries is different because their labor is considerably cheaper," says Thrift. "Having 20 cowboys out there checking for this pest, and doctoring any animals that might have it, would not be near the labor burden that it would be in this country."

For his part, Thrift isn't quite as apocalyptic as some others about the prospect of screwworms returning to the U.S. He notes that the detections in Mexico are "still 700 miles from the [U.S.] border," and that although the parasite would cause problems for cattle ranchers, the screwworm itself "is not an unsolvable problem."

"There's definitely concern," he says, "but this is not something that is insurmountable."


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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Groups advocating for clean, safe water are pushing back on proposals to revive a pesticide labeling law introduced last year in Congress which would give chemical companies legal immunity from claims if their products cause cancer.

A similar measure failed in Iowa this year, despite intense lobbying by the pesticide manufacturer, Bayer.

Jennifer Breon, Iowa organizer for the group Food and Water Watch, said public sentiment has been decidedly against giving chemical manufacturers immunity from lawsuits if their products are shown to cause cancer.

"I was not surprised there was overwhelming opposition to this bill," Breon observed. "There was polling by one of the organizations in our coalition that said 89% of the people they polled on this bill were opposed to that. Hundreds of Iowans took thousand of actions to stop this bill."

The pesticide glyphosate, contained in the herbicide Roundup, is as the heart of what's known as the "Cancer Gag Act." While there is circumstantial evidence, the Environmental Protection Agency has not declared glyphosate carcinogenic Congress has not yet introduced a bill.

Bayer has four lobbyists working in Iowa. Despite the special interest pressure to pass the Cancer Gag Act, Breon noted the people of Iowa spoke up on social media, used phone banks and contacted their lawmakers, asking them to oppose it.

"This Cancer Gag Act was a cruel bill," Breon contended. "Nobody wants this in their community. To have their right to make their case in court that their cancer could have been caused by pesticide exposure."

Cancer Registry data show Iowa ranks second in the nation for cancer cases and is the only state where cancer rates are on the rise.


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By Grey Moran for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Trimmel Gomes for Mississippi News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

As avian flu decimated poultry flocks, two major U.S. egg producers - Vital Farms and Cal-Maine - have seen their profits and stock values soar. Between February 2024 and February 2025, Vital Farms saw its share value spike by 157.4 percent, while Cal-Maine observed an 87.4 percent uptick. These climbing stocks coincided with sky-high egg prices, often attributed to the shrinking egg supply, leaving consumers pinched.

The financial strain faced by consumers stands in sharp contrast to the financial windfalls of major egg companies - and their investors - over the course of the avian flu outbreak in the U.S. that began in early 2022. This stark disparity is emblematic of the often inverse relationship between consumer and corporate financial pressures during economic crises.

"When eggs are short, everybody wants in," Russell Diez-Canseco, the CEO of the egg producer Vital Farms, said on a call with investors in 2023, following a quarter of record-breaking revenue, as average egg prices soared across the U.S.

Vital Farms' top institutional investors - BlackRock, Wellington Management Company, Vanguard Group, Amazon, and Pictet Asset Management, according to Nasdaq - have also benefited from the company's soaring stocks over the course of avian flu. Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, may have also benefited from higher retail prices of eggs, as well as the record-level volume of sales reported last quarter.

"[Amazon] is making money in both directions. They're making money if Vital Farms is charging Whole Foods a higher wholesale price, and Vital Farms' profit margins are improving, which they are, year-after-year," Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of Farm Forward, an advocacy research group, tells Sentient. Amazon has around a four percent equity stake in Vital Farms, which currently sells at Whole Foods for around $11 for a carton of organic eggs.

Vital Farms attributes some of its major boom in profits to avian flu. "We grew 55 percent in the first quarter of 2023, due in part to the category disruptions from avian influenza," Diez-Canseco said in another investor call. This momentum continued through 2024, as Vital Farms reported a 28.5 percent increase in net revenue over the course of the year. And as the company experienced reported outbreaks of avian flu in 2022, 2023 and 2024, it continued to rake in soaring profits to the benefit of its investors.

As profits soared, some investors bought more stock. For instance, in February of 2023, BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, disclosed that it increased its ownership in Vital Farms to 8.3 percent of the company's stock.

Top Companies Enjoy Rapid Growth Despite Avian Flu & Record Egg Prices

Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer in the U.S., has observed a similar trajectory of record profits and rapid growth even as avian flu wiped out entire flocks. The company reported two outbreaks on its farms during 2023 and 2024, yet this was not enough to make a serious dent in Cal-Maine's egg supply: The company sold more eggs in both 2023 and 2024 than previous years, cementing its corner of the conventional egg market.

Meanwhile, during the first three months of 2025, the egg producer saw its net profits rise to $508 million, more than three times the level from a year before, and eight times more than at the start of the avian flu outbreak in 2022. As a recent report by Food & Water Watch observed, "The bird flu outbreak and Cal-Maine's price increases likely helped push its stock value up, which more than doubled since the start of the outbreak." The report also found that the company's board chair's stock value grew by over $9 million in three years.

Cal-Maine's top institutional investors include BlackRock, Vanguard, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Renaissance Technologies and State Street Corp, according to Nasdaq - some of the largest asset managers in the world that appear to be benefiting from the high egg prices. Earlier this year, the four daughters of Cal Maine's founder decided to cash in the high stock, converting $4.8 million shares of stock at $92.75 per share.

Corporate Accountability Remains Scarce

While the spike in egg prices is often blamed on supply and demand, the dramatic surge of profit has raised questions about whether Cal-Maine has raised prices beyond what is reasonable to compensate for a more constrained egg supply. This has prompted the Department of Justice to open an investigation into Cal-Maine for price gouging.

"The total number of hens and the total number of eggs produced fell maybe five percent over that first year [2022], but prices went...up about two and a half times," says Amanda Starbuck, the research director of Food and Water Watch. "[This] suggests that a lot of it has to do with corporate consolidation more than actual shortages." While there is not a 1:1 relationship between egg supply and prices, the shrinkage of the egg supply didn't appear to justify such a sharp rise in prices, according to Starbuck.

Though Vital Farms and Cal-Maine are both large, publicly-traded companies, they have different business models and customer bases.

Vital Farms, which sells pasture-raised eggs, has always priced eggs at a higher cost than conventional eggs. During the early covid pandemic, the company prided itself on not raising its price of eggs. "Despite fluctuations in demand, the cost of our eggs - nor other Vital Farms products - have not increased," stated the company on its website in 2020.

But this shifted in 2022, when Diez-Canseco announced that the company would "reluctantly and in small amounts" raise prices. Just last week, the company announced again that it would raise wholesale egg prices by at least 10 percent in response to the Trump Administration's tariffs. It remains to be seen whether Vital Farms' retailers, like Whole Foods and Target, will respond to this hike by also raising retail prices even more.

Diez-Canseco did not respond to a request for comment, but he has previously attributed Vital Farms' recent success to an increase in total eggs sold, not increases in the price of eggs - particularly as the price of commodity eggs has risen much more sharply than pasture-raised eggs over the course of the avian flu outbreak.

Cal-Maine also didn't respond to a request for comment, but the company has previously "strongly" denied the allegations of price gouging.

The Bottom Line

Flush with profits, both Vital Farms and Cal-Maine have expanded their operations over the course of the avian flu outbreak, cornering an even larger share of the egg market. Vital Farms is expected to soon begin construction on a new egg packaging and washing facility in southern Indiana, enabling the company to add165 farmers to their supply chain. Meanwhile, Cal-Maine acquired the former egg production facilities of ISE America, Inc. in 2024, adding the capacity for 4.7 million laying hens. Last month, it acquired the popular breakfast foods brand Echo Lake Foods.

"That's part of this broader trend toward just enormously large companies," says Lisa Graves, a democracy researcher and the founder of True North Research, an investigative research watchdog group, who has observed similar consolidation across the agriculture industry and other sectors. And even as these companies see record profits, she notes that worker wages remain about the same.

Referring to the sky-high egg prices and profits, Graves observed that, "it seems like consumers are being gouged in order to enrich the shareholders in ways that are really affecting the daily lives and the budgets of families across the country."


Grey Moran wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Nina B. Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

At the end of their studies at San Carlos University in Guatemala City, Fredy Alvarado Contreras, Sergio Escobar Gonzalez and Dennis Najera Barillas were recruited to participate in a special opportunity: a year-long internship at a swine operation, where they would learn from experts, partake in American cultural activities and agronomy courses and receive free housing, according to a new lawsuit. The plaintiffs came on a J-1 visa: a State Department visa commonly awarded to foreigners coming here for educational or research programs. Yet according to the lawsuit, plaintiffs instead worked dangerous jobs in hog processing facilities and discovered that most of the other promises — from free housing to cultural exchange — were a “sham.” Before their first paycheck, the plaintiffs had to shell out thousands of dollars, relying on loans and selling their belongings.

“My hope in coming to the U.S. on a J-1 visa was to share my culture and learn about U.S. culture. I wanted to improve as a person, as a professional, and economically. I wanted to improve my job prospects and get a certificate to help with that,” said Sergio Escobar Gonzalez, one of the plaintiffs in this action, via a press release from the legal advocacy non-profit FarmSTAND.

The lawsuit was filed against Livingston Enterprises Inc. (LEI), a company that operates in Nebraska and Kansas, and Worldwide Farmers Exchange, a California-based non-profit. A number of employees at both organizations are also named in the suit. The plaintiffs are represented by FarmSTAND, Legal Aid of Nebraska and Georgia-based law firm Radford Scott LLP.

Work visa programs, like the H-2A program, allow immigrants to temporarily fill agricultural labor shortages in the United States. H-2A programs are controversial and rife with exploitation, a recent investigation by the nonprofit newsroom Prism shows. In December, a Connecticut farm that employs H-2A visa holders was served a class-action lawsuit for violating labor conditions.

The J-1 visa, on the other hand, strictly prohibits using visa-holders to fill a labor need or engage in work that a U.S. worker could be hired for. In theory, these visas are supposed to provide educational work and study opportunities, and are often awarded to visiting professors and scholars. But unlike H-2A visas, which are for temporary agriculture positions, these can cover up to 12 months in the United States.

“Animal agriculture is year-round, so they can’t avail themselves of those visas,” Amal Bouhabib, a senior staff attorney for FarmSTAND, tells Sentient. A recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented the exploitation of J-1 visas by employers seeking cheap labor; and this lawsuit suggests the agricultural sector is not exempt from the practice. Luring visa holders to work in concentrated feeding operations with promises of a cultural and educational experience via the J-1 visa program is deceptive and exploitative, the lawsuit alleges.

Sold on a Fake, (Bedbug-Ridden) Promise

To pay for the approximately $2,535 program fees, Gonzalez sold his car and took out a loan with a monthly interest of around 15 percent. Contreras depleted his savings account, borrowed cash from his parents and put some of the fees on a credit card. They then purchased their approximately $660 flights to Lincoln, Nebraska.

When Gonzalez and Contreras got to their housing there — which they were charged for via a paycheck deduction — they found that they would be living in four-person “makeshift windowless rooms in a former Walmart,” the lawsuit alleges. For the approximately 40 men living in the building, there was one kitchen with one working stove. The lawsuit also alleges that all common areas, including bathrooms, had 24/7 video camera monitoring. Two months into living there, a bed-bug infestation broke out, according to the allegations in the suit.

Their paychecks also did not reflect what they were promised, the plaintiffs allege. To meet the hourly wage they were promised at recruitment — after deductions for housing and a lower hourly rate — Contreras and Gonzalez would have needed to work 70-90 hours a week. They ended up agreeing to a 56-hour a week schedule, which they say their manager advised them to do, citing that most Guatemalans did that, but they could earn more money by working more.

Recent Grads Made to Do a Gruesome Job, Without Training

In the swine processing facilities, Contreras and Gonzalez were asked to “process” newborn piglets. “This included, among other things, applying a tattoo gun to their ears to give them identifying marks, and cutting off their tails with scissors,” the lawsuit states. The defendants were not trained in this practice. “When the piglets Plaintiff Escobar Gonzalez was tattooing began to bleed profusely, Plaintiff Escobar Gonzalez did not receive any instruction or guidance from anyone at LEI as to whether he was performing the task correctly. Even after some of the piglets bled out and died, LEI still didn’t make any effort to instruct Plaintiffs.”

Contreras was also instructed to assist a sow in birthing piglets. The complaint states that he received no formal training in tasks such as administering oxytocin, a hormone used to induce labor. In one instance, Contreras gave one sow two doses, causing her to suffer from a prolapsed uterus and die.

Livingston Enterprises Inc., where the plaintiffs worked, raises 36,000 sows and 1.2 million weaned pigs for production per year. They mention the J-1 visa program on their website, which they describe as an experience for “trainees” to “not only to learn about our farm practices, but to also experience American culture.” LEI did not respond to Sentient’s multiple requests for comment.

The plaintiffs were also instructed to power-wash the barns without instruction or sufficient personal protective equipment. They were only given goggles and an N-95 face mask that they would use for up to three weeks. According to the claims in the lawsuit, this is especially dangerous. The task can cause “the debris to be forcibly ejected into the air in a toxic spray of feces and blood particles and highly concentrated chemicals like hydrogen peroxide that can enter a worker’s mouth, eyes, ears, nose or skin if the worker is not properly protected.”

Because of this, Gonzalez developed hives, which the lawsuit alleges were brushed off by his manager as allergies, and Contreras developed impaired vision and eye pain, even wearing goggles. When Contreras took a day off from work due to these ailments, the Visa Program Administrator/HR Assistant told him that his boss “was punishing him for missing a day of work,” by making Contreras subsequently power wash for three days in a row.

As for the “cultural exchange” promise, the lawsuit alleges that while the plaintiffs were informed of goings on in town, like a bake sale at a local school, the events were during work hours. And, “if Plaintiffs wanted to go anywhere or do anything in their time off, they had to request a company car, a request that was frequently denied,” the lawsuit states. “After several months, unable to handle the isolation, Plaintiffs Escobar Gonzalez and Alvarado Contreras and others pooled together some of their earnings to buy a car together,” the lawsuit alleges.

Worldwide Farmers Exchange’s “About Us” page describes the long-lasting benefits of the program. “For many WFE participants, the true value of the exchange comes in the friendships made, the cultural experiences shared, and the professional connections that last a lifetime.”

In response to a request for comment, Worldwide Farmers Exchange Executive Director Ashley Medulan, who is also a defendant in the suit, wrote to Sentient that while the organization cannot comment on the specifics of pending litigation, “we remain confident in our position and will respond appropriately through the legal process. Our organization is committed to upholding the highest standards of integrity and compliance, and we will continue to operate with transparency and professionalism as this matter proceeds.”

Threats of ICE Detainment and Retaliation, Suit Alleges

When Contreras and Gonzalez asked to lower their hours to a 45-hour a week schedule, they say their boss refused, telling them that the 45-hour schedule was ‘only for Americans. They were then transferred to a different facility, in an apparently retaliatory move. When Contreras asked to do some of the tasks he was initially promised, like learn about the industry, he was told that he was not there to learn, but to do “whatever we tell you to do.”

The workers were also unable to leave the arrangement without consequence. They were told that “if they left early or tried to leave the program, they could be picked up by ICE, they could be detained. One of the threats was that they would never be able to work in the U.S. again,” Bouhabib says.

The plaintiffs were essentially trapped.

“That is really what the federal trafficking statute tries to get at,” Bouhabib says. “You’re not necessarily being physically bound, but the number of ways the pressure can be exerted to coerce someone into staying where they don’t want to stay and do the work they shouldn’t be doing.”

The complaint alleges that the companies involved in recruiting the plaintiffs were experienced users of the J-1 visa program, and thus would have known that the visa cannot be used to replace laborers, let alone exploit them. The plaintiffs’ attorneys are making claims under a range of statutes, including the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, Nebraska wage and employment laws and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory, punitive and declaratory relief, as well as an end to the abuse of the J-1 visa program.

A New Pattern of J-1 Visa Abuse in the U.S.

One recent study found that between 2018 and 2020, 45 percent of surveyed J-1 visa holders reported that the work they performed did not align with what was promoted during recruitment, and that threats of deportation were a common form of exploitation.

From illegally detaining J-1 visa holders to asking undocumented immigrants to “self-deport,” the Trump administration has been imposing a host of new immigration practices. The exploitation of the J-1 visa is a way for organizations to get around the system, says Jeannie Economos, Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Project Coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida, a labor advocacy group. While the administration cracks down on undocumented immigrants, visas are a way for companies “to have cheap labor and fewer restrictions,” she says.

Economos, who has worked at the organization for 25 years, says she first noticed J-1 visas being used for agricultural work in the past few years. She says she knows of one operation that replaced their permanent, undocumented employees with J-1 “interns.”

“It’s supposed to be an internship, and I think that’s kind of stretching it a little bit,” she says. In an internship model, you would expect the students to spend some time in the classroom and some out in the field, she says, which is what they had been told their experience would be. It’s also common to hope for more, Economos says. “They come to learn, they come for an ‘internship,’ but they also have hopes of possibly coming back someday when they graduate in their home country, maybe finding a job here.”

This is why many J-1 visa-holders are afraid to speak out against their employers, Economos adds. They are threatened with not only deportation, but also potentially being barred from returning to the U.S. — threats Contreras and Gonzalez say they experienced in Nebraska.

“All of this mess right now is because we have a broken immigration system that’s getting increasingly worse, literally day by day, if not hour by hour,” she says. “It’s a way to circumvent that.”

As of last month, more than 525 student and faculty visa holders have had their visas revoked this year, according to CNN. Also last month, the Washington Post reported on a leaked memo signaling that Trump’s 2026 fiscal year budget would include major cuts to the State Department, including the elimination of “all educational and cultural programs administered by the State Department.”

Bouhabib says the case highlights an important, often underscored element of the industrialized food system: Many operations rely on foreign, exploited labor to keep prices low and maintain high profits. “Big agriculture is abusing these visas,” she says.

The attorneys are still waiting to hear back on a Freedom of Information Act request, filed with the U.S. Department of State in June 2024.

At the time of publication, LEI is still promoting their J-1 “trainee” program on their website.


Nina B. Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.


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