An agricultural labor contractor recruited five Guatemalan farmworkers under the H-2A visa program, charged them an illegal $2,500 annual fee to work, confiscated their passports, and threatened to have them deported if they complained.
Purpose Point Harvesting and its owners, Milton and Lucille Gomez, employed Luis Gomez-Echeverria, Hervil Gomez-Echeverria, Darwin Joel Fuentes Perez, Artemio Coronado Esteban, and Leonel Lopez y Lopez, Guatemalan citizens with work visas for temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs, for the 2017 through 2019 growing seasons. The $2,500 annual recruitment fee — illegal under the H-2A program — amounted to more than a year’s wages in Guatemala, forcing the workers to take out high-interest loans just to show up for the job.
It got worse from there.
Workers logged 19-hour days that never showed up on their paychecks, because records documenting their hours were destroyed.
They lived in small trailers, sleeping on couches instead of in beds.
Milton confiscated their passports and Social Security cards (a federal crime) and Lucille made herself an authorized user on workers’ bank accounts without their knowledge, at one point withdrawing $2,500 from a worker’s account herself.
When one worker needed medical care for an infected hand injury, he waited two weeks and ultimately needed surgery.
When workers tried to leave, Milton posted on Facebook that they were missing, and reported one to police as a missing person rather than to the Department of Labor, as the law required.
The jury found the defendants liable under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the FLSA, and Michigan wage and trafficking law, awarding $105,000 in compensatory damages and $450,000 in punitive damages — a figure the 6th Circuit called “rather modest” given the conduct and the TVPRA’s own 20-year, $500,000 criminal exposure. It’s hard to argue with that assessment.
If your business model depends on illegal fees, confiscated documents, and the threat of deportation to keep people quiet, the punitive damages ratio was never going to be your problem. Your misconduct was. That’s why Purpose Point Harvesting earned its nomination for the Worst Employer of 2026.
