North Carolina Farm Faces Lawsuit for Wage Theft and H-2A Visa Workers’ Passport Confiscation

(BAILEY, NORTH CAROLINA) — Axel Campos Arroyo filed a lawsuit on July 28, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina accusing Lamm Farms, LLC and Alvarado’s Harvesting, LLC of confiscating his passport and the passports of other H-2A workers after they arrived in Bailey, then subjecting them to human trafficking, wage theft and non-agricultural work.

Campos Arroyo, an H-2A visa farmworker, alleges the companies recruited him in 2022 for agricultural work in Bailey under the federal temporary farm labor program. Once he and his co-workers arrived, the suit says, the defendants took their passports, withheld details about where they would work and used threats of deportation and harm to family members to control them.

The complaint also alleges workers put in up to 60 hours per week without the wages they had been promised or overtime pay. It says the defendants conspired with other employers to assign construction work, even though H-2A visas restrict workers to agricultural labor.

Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Farmworker Unit and Farmworker Justice represent Campos Arroyo in the case. The claims place passport confiscation, work assignment rules and wage protections at the center of a lawsuit that tracks a wider pattern of disputes over North Carolina farm labor.

Federal rules bar H-2A employers from holding workers’ passports or other immigration documents. The prohibition appears in 8 CFR § 214.2(h)(5)(xi), one of the regulations tied to the program’s labor protections.

Campos Arroyo’s lawsuit also sits within a broader legal framework that reaches beyond contract pay disputes. The allegations invoke the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a federal law used in cases where workers say employers used coercion, threats or document seizure to force labor.

Wage rules for H-2A workers appear in 20 CFR §§ 655.120(a), 655.122(l). Those regulations govern required pay and working conditions, and they draw a line between agricultural employment that the visa allows and other work that falls outside the program.

Another North Carolina case produced a settlement this year after workers raised similar allegations. A class action filed in December 2022 against Lee and Sons Farms in Four Oaks accused the farm and related defendants of confiscating passports and Social Security cards, charging illegal meal fees, withholding wages, denying overtime and failing to reimburse travel and visa costs.

That case named Lee and Sons Farms, Boykin Farms, Inc., Rhodes Farming, LLC, and operators Tony C. Lee, Cameron Lee, and Clint Lee. It also identified Willie C. Boykin as president of Boykin Farms and Matthew Z. Rhodes as managing member of Rhodes Farming.

U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle approved a $305,000 settlement on March 16, 2026 for 99 Mexican H-2A workers. The agreement directed $5,000 each to the named plaintiffs, $300 to each opt-in plaintiff, and more than $100,000 in attorneys’ fees for the North Carolina Justice Center and Higgins Benjamin, PLLC.

Consent decrees in that settlement required kitchen access for food preparation, reimbursement in the first paycheck for travel, visa and subsistence costs, accurate payroll practices and compliance by labor contractors. Those terms addressed the same pressure points that appear in many H-2A disputes: who controls workers’ documents, how costs are shifted onto laborers and whether payroll records match the hours worked.

A separate North Carolina class action by Fernando Javier Rodríguez Luna also alleged trafficking and wage theft violations involving migrant farm labor. The available court record described it as another H-2A case built around claims that workers faced coercive conditions alongside pay violations.

North Carolina has also seen enforcement outside private lawsuits. The U.S. Department of Labor fined father-daughter farm contractors $166,000 and debarred them for 3 years for H-2A violations, showing that federal agencies as well as private lawyers are policing the program.

Another fight is playing out over wages. USA Farm Labor Inc., based in Waynesville, North Carolina, sued the Labor Department over 2023 wage rule changes affecting how H-2A pay is calculated, arguing the rules put farms at risk and could push employers toward undocumented labor.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld Labor Department rules requiring higher wages for specialized H-2A jobs such as truck driving. That ruling preserved a pay structure meant to protect U.S. workers when farms use visa holders for tasks that demand different skills than field labor.

Taken together, the cases show how the H-2A system can generate several types of legal exposure at once. A single set of facts can produce trafficking allegations if workers say employers used passport confiscation or threats to compel labor, wage theft claims if pay fell short of federal standards, and contract claims if workers performed jobs different from the work they were recruited to do.

The allegations in Bailey are especially pointed because they combine document seizure with claims of hidden work locations and threats tied to immigration status. In labor trafficking litigation, those details matter because a passport is not simply identification; it is often the worker’s main proof of lawful presence, nationality and ability to move freely.

Employers in the H-2A program also face a strict boundary on the kind of work they can assign. If a worker enters the country to perform agricultural labor, shifting that worker into construction can trigger liability under both wage-and-hour law and the visa program’s own terms, particularly if the hours exceed 60 per week and overtime pay does not follow.

North Carolina agriculture relies heavily on contracted labor crews and outside farm labor contractors, a structure that can blur responsibility when workers complain. The lawsuits filed in Bailey and Four Oaks both reflect that arrangement by naming farm operators and labor contractors together, rather than treating recruitment, housing, transportation and payroll as separate pieces of the same operation.

That structure also shapes how remedies are pursued. Workers can file individual suits, bring class actions when conditions affect a group, or seek agency enforcement that can result in fines and debarment, which bars contractors from using the H-2A program for a set period.

Passport confiscation carries particular weight because federal law treats it as more than a paperwork dispute. Within trafficking cases, the taking of travel documents often appears alongside threats, debt and isolation, and in H-2A litigation it can become one of the clearest markers that workers could not leave freely or challenge conditions without risking retaliation.

Wage theft claims in these cases also stretch beyond hourly rates. Workers have alleged unpaid wages, denied overtime, illegal deductions for meals and failures to reimburse inbound travel, visa fees and daily subsistence costs, expenses that can turn a promised job into debt if employers push them back onto workers.

The settlement in the Lee and Sons matter showed one path to recovery, with direct payments to workers and operational changes written into court-approved decrees. Campos Arroyo’s lawsuit against Lamm Farms and Alvarado’s Harvesting has not produced a recorded settlement or final resolution in the latest available filings, leaving the Bailey allegations as an active example of how North Carolina’s H-2A visa system continues to face legal scrutiny over passport confiscation, wage theft and the treatment of farmworkers brought to the state under federal labor visas.