American Civil Liberties Union

Workers trafficked to the U.S. from India to work in shipyards after Hurricane Katrina were lured here with dishonest assurances of becoming lawful permanent U.S. residents.

The ACLU joined a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of over 500 guestworkers from India charging that the workers were trafficked into the U.S. through the federal government's H-2B guestworker program with dishonest assurances of becoming lawful permanent U.S. residents and subjected to squalid living conditions, fraudulent payment practices, and threats of serious harm upon their arrival. The complaint alleges that recruiting agents hired by the marine industry company Signal International held the guestworkers' passports and visas, coerced them into paying extraordinary fees for recruitment, immigration processing and travel, and threatened the workers with serious legal and physical harm if they did not work under the Signal-restricted guestworker visa. The complaint also alleges that once in the U.S., the men were required to live in Signal's guarded, overcrowded labor camps, subjected to psychological abuse and defrauded out of adequate payment for their work.

The ACLU charges that the federal government has fallen short of its responsibility to protect the rights of guestworkers in this country. According to the lawsuit, the treatment of the workers violates the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The ACLU is co-counsel with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Louisiana Justice Institute, the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice and Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP in this suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana in March 2008. In addition to the federal court litigation, in partnership with the ACLU, the workers have testified before the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, and senior staff at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

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