A federal Grand Jury indictment has been filed against multiple suspects, including four defendants, with names redacted, who were formerly employed with Fayette Industrial Services. They are being charged with harboring and employing undocumented immigrants, including children, while working for a poultry plant in Virginia’s Accomack County as a sanitation contractor
Filed, but also sealed on Nov 5, the indictment was made public Nov. 14. Some of the children involved were in cleaning operations that fall under food safety.
Tennessee-based Fayette Industrial Services was a third-party janitorial service for Perdue Farms in Accomack County and was accused of hiring children as young as 13 as recently as 2024. The clearing contractor was fined nearly $650,000 in penalties following the Department of Labor’s 2024 investigation.
The new indictment reports that the continued federal investigations have found that individuals allegedly were involved in hiring undocumented employees including children.
Those familiar with the now unsealed indictment say the four named individuals include a former division manager for Fayette, a former regional division human resources manager, a former site manager from Guatemala who did did not have legal status to live or work in the country, and a suspect who lived in Parksley and allegedly sold fraudulent IDs to employees to conceal their lack of legal status.
In February of 2022, a 14-year-old employed by Fayette was seriously injured while cleaning a poultry processing machine at a plant in Accomack County owned by what the court filing refers to only as “Company 1.”
A federal investigation was launched at the time, with media reports that it involved a 14-year-old boy from Guatemala who was living in Parksley, VA. He was injured while cleaning a conveyor belt at a nearby Perdue slaughterhouse.
The new indictment claims that Fayette’s I-9 form on file for the injured boy falsely lists him as an adult with a fake name and incorrect legal status.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security found Fayette employees who worked at the poultry plant in Accomack “overwhelmingly used fraudulent documents for their employment,” according to the indictment. The DHS said that of the 353 employees reviewed, 339 were working under suspect documents. About 293 of the employees used ID cards from Delaware or North Carolina. Of those, 284 driver’s license numbers were found to be invalid.
The Grand Jury found that beginning at least in October of 2020 and through January 2024, the defendants conspired with each other and others to defraud the United States by circumventing immigration and child labor laws and concealing undocumented non-citizens for financial gain.
To accomplish this fraud, the suspects have been accused of “producing, purchasing, and using fraudulent identification documents, including Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, so that the illegal aliens could be entered in the I-9 system without government authorities, and concealing and shielding their identities from the same.”
The indictment goes on to list multiple undocumented employees allegedly hired by the defendants to work for Fayette. One employee, according to court documents, was allowed to work under the alias “R.A,” a name flagged by the Social Security Administration as a stolen identity and previously used by another employee.
When one defendant pointed this out to another, the second defendant reportedly dismissed the concern, prompting the first to say, “as long as I don’t know, I don’t care,” according to court documents.
The four defendants face numerous charges, ranging from harboring illegal aliens to aggravated identity theft and unlawful transfer of false identification documents.
The federal indictment seeks to require the defendants, if convicted, to forfeit any property or proceeds derived from the alleged fraud, as well as any property used in the commission of those crimes.
The US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is hearing the federal criminal case.
This latest trend of major poultry and meat brands looking the other way while third-party cleaning contractors use child and alien labor to do dangerous sanitation work first came to light in 2023.
In April 2024, federal penalties were imposed on 13 meat plants that contracted with Packers Sanitation Services, and these relationships resulted in the provision of child labor for critical food safety jobs: PSSI paid fines totaling $1.5 million across eight states.
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