A Homeland Security Investigations agent and a deputy from the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office stand on May 30 inside an illegal marijuana grow site in St. Albans. Somerset County Sheriff’s Office photo

In late December, someone claiming to be a worker at an illegal cannabis grow site in the Kennebec County town of China called the police. The caller claimed to have been brought to the rural house at 1144 Route 3 against his or her will and was being held without food or sleep in order to maintain and harvest the marijuana crop.

“No cellphones. We were abducted from China, passports were confiscated,” a transcript of the call reads. “No escape from the house, only work but no salary. I want to leave here, we tried to escape but failed. We were beaten. Please come and save us.”

Kennebec County Sheriff’s Office deputies who responded to the call found three people and nearly 1,000 mature cannabis plants inside the house. Two men, Changgeng Chen, 36, and Bing Xu, 41, and a woman, Aiqin Chen, 43, were arrested at the scene.

Officers said they found no one in distress at the house, and Kennebec County Sheriff Ken Mason would later say there was “no indication the tip was authentic.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maine says it has found no credible evidence that there is human trafficking involved in any of the illegal grow sites the office has investigated, more than 40 of which have been raided by members of law enforcement.

“Human trafficking is a heinous crime that our office takes seriously. Any evidence of human trafficking will be thoroughly investigated and if discovered, vigorously prosecuted,” Darcie N. McElwee, U.S. attorney for the District of Maine, said in a statement in May.

Local law enforcement officials and anti-trafficking advocates said in interviews that the illegal marijuana growing operations bear the hallmarks of human and labor trafficking. In court records, some workers detained at the grow sites say the same thing, raising the prospect that workers are being brought to the locations in rural Maine under false pretenses and kept here against their will.

Officials say they have identified more than 200 illegal marijuana growing operations in Maine. Federal prosecutors say the illegal marijuana grows may be operated by transnational criminal organizations with links to China, and similar operations can be found in at least 20 states.

Because they are new immigrants to the United States in search of work, money and housing, workers are often vulnerable to being exploited by the operations, which are seeking cheap, expendable labor they can tightly control.

Human trafficking is defined as “the exploitation of a person through force, fraud or coercion for labor, services or commercial sex,” according to Hailey Virusso, director of the anti-human trafficking division of Preble Street in Portland, which provides services and seeks solutions for those experiencing a variety of issues, including homelessness, a lack of stable and affordable housing, hunger and poverty.

A raid earlier this year revealed what officials say was an illegal cannabis growing operation at a single-family house at 368 West Ridge Road in Cornville, top. The lower photo, taken by the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office, shows the house’s interior.

It is an umbrella term that includes a number of other crimes, including labor exploitation and trafficking, Virusso says. Advocates say all three are likely occurring at Maine’s illegal cannabis grow houses.

Traffickers specifically target Chinese immigrants with promises of good work and steady pay, taking advantage of new immigrants’ trust in the communities they have traveled thousands of miles to join.

Among the grow house workers arrested in Maine, all with Chinese backgrounds, many have given home addresses in Massachusetts, New York, Florida or California, with several coming from the Brooklyn borough of New York City.

Officials say some workers are aware they are growing illegal cannabis, while others are misled and brought to the grow sites through more dubious means.

On numerous Chinese-language job boards, dozens of veiled job listings appear for grow houses in Maine. They are presented as openings for “four-season indoor crop planting,” courier drivers, energy company apprentices and other jobs.

Many of the listings describe themselves as plant harvesting or processing facilities, but none discloses what it is growing. Some present themselves as entry-level jobs with warehouses or electric companies that offer free training and room for growth.

Most require basic legal documents, such as a driver’s license and tax filings. Nearly all offer free accommodation and transportation, which experts say are hallmarks of human trafficking operations.

The same contact information appears on nearly a dozen job listings across several Chinese-language job boards, offering roles ranging from “watering and cleaning potted plant debris” to “warehouse workers with legal jobs and basic English reading and writing.”

A reverse search for the Maine telephone number listed on nearly a dozen job listings across several websites does not return results. Many other listings direct applicants to anonymous recruiters on WeChat, a Chinese messaging platform.

Offering free housing and requiring tax documents allows criminal organizations that operate grow houses to scoop up low-income immigrants who largely come legally to the United States from China, according to officials.

Misleading online job listings have rapidly become the primary avenue for human traffickers to recruit workers across all fields. According to data from the National Human Trafficking Hotline, 67% of victims of labor trafficking were recruited through what appeared to be a legitimate job offer in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available.

Human traffickers often take advantage of people’s individual needs and trust in their communities to coerce them into forced labor, according to Rafael Flores Ávalos, director of bilingual communications at the Polaris Project, which operates the National Human Trafficking Hotline.

Ávalos says those with lower incomes and a lack of stable housing are most susceptible to forced labor.

“There’s a big myth that if you’re going to be trafficked, you’re going to get kidnapped in a white van. That is not the case,” he said. “What we hear more of from the hotline is of the recruitment process, of people attracted to these opportunities by someone they trust.”

Aside from their Chinese descent, many of the grow house workers have little else in common. Some are men, some are women. Some are elderly, some are in their early 20s. Some have received education, others have not.

INSIDE THE HOMES

Once workers are brought to Maine, they are put to work planting, watering and harvesting hundreds of cannabis plants each day inside single-family homes that have been gutted and converted into massive marijuana farms growing as many as 2,000 plants at a time, according to several sources in law enforcement.

At the grow houses that have busted in Maine, workers have been kept in squalor and are rarely allowed to leave the sites, according to several law enforcement sources who have been present for the raids. The living space for as many as three or four workers is confined to one room at each house, oftentimes the kitchen, while industrial-scale heating, lighting and ventilation systems are installed at the houses to accommodate the growth of thousands of marijuana plants.

As a result of the high humidity and warm temperatures needed to efficiently grow marijuana, the houses are often filled with black mold. Potent and sometimes carcinogenic chemical fertilizers are used inside the houses.

While laborers were previously living and working for months at a time within each individual cannabis grow house, the operations have adapted since the first police raids in January by further restricting workers’ movement, according to several law enforcement sources.

Police who raided a home in Madison in April say they found evidence of an illegal marijuana growing operation and signs of black mold. Somerset County Sheriff’s Office photo

Somerset County Sheriff Dale Lancaster, whose office has busted more than 20 grow houses, says the number of sites and the amount of people staffing them has shrunk in the months since the first busts earlier this year, partly due to a shift in how the workers are managed.

“We are executing these search warrants, but there’s no one at the residence, and I think that’s by design,” Lancaster said. “We’re dealing with smart people, and they’re adjusting how they do business.”

Laborers are increasingly being transported by their managers from house to house, diligently watched as they harvest and process each site’s cannabis crop for several hours, before being brought to the next location, according to several law enforcement sources.

Nearly all have their movements restricted to and from the cannabis grow houses by managers overseeing the movement of the fertilizers, electrical equipment and people required to operate the facilities. The organizational structure beyond that remains murky.

Federal and local investigators say they are seeing fewer lower-level workers living within a single grow house, with more laborers being taken from one site to another — trends indicative of labor trafficking.

“They’re being dispatched to work in these places, where they were originally staying in these places, sometimes in vans or cars,” one law enforcement source said on the condition of anonymity because the source was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.

Restricting transportation is one of the most restrictive ways control their victims, Virusso said, especially when workers are brought to remote areas where they have not been before.

“If you’re faced with a situation where your employer says, ‘You’re done for the day, but my buddy down the road needs some extra help,’” Virusso said, “you have basically only two options: Go work at the other location, or say no to the person your employment, housing and livelihood is tied up into.”

KEPT IN THE DARK

At one Somerset County marijuana grow site, workers did not know the names of the towns where they were being sent to work and sleep. This was not because they did not know English, but because their bosses never let them see the outside world, according to Lancaster.

“Speaking with them, one of the males didn’t even know what town he was in or what town he was staying in,” Lancaster said. The man only knew “that he got picked up in the morning, taken to a facility to work and taken back.”

In court documents and police affidavits, several people arrested at the cannabis grow houses have described being brought to the sites against their will and having their pay withheld after they arrived.

A worker at a growing operation in Whitefield told police he had “been working for a few years,” but never received a paycheck. When arrested in January, the man, Ding Zhan Liao, said he had less than $500 despite having grown illegal marijuana for years.

Federal investigators say each cannabis grow house is run differently, and some laborers receive payment based on the amount of marijuana they harvest and process.

“Typically, workers on the ground are earning at least several thousand dollars (monthly),” Andrew Lizotte, the assistant U.S. attorney who is leading the federal investigation into the illegal cannabis grow houses, said. “It’s an agreed-upon labor structure where they are acting in exchange for payment to staff up these illegal operations.”

Still, many of those arrested at the cannabis grow are unaware that what they are doing is illegal, according to several sources, because they are new to the United States, unfamiliar with cannabis laws and sometimes being told lies by their bosses.

Some workers are told by their bosses that what they are doing is legal under Maine’s marijuana laws, according to a law enforcement source who asked not to be named because the source has not been cleared to discuss the investigation publicly.

The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office in January raided 615 Wiscasset Road in Whitefield, where officials say they found 300 marijuana plants that were part of an illegal grow operation. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal file

“Some of them don’t know that what they’re doing is illegal because they just have been told (marijuana) is legal in Maine,” the source said. “Some of the houses even have fake (marijuana growing) licenses they can point to and say, ‘See, we’re not breaking the law.’”

The fact that workers are being forcibly kept at and trafficked between marijuana grow houses is indicative of forced criminality, Virusso said, regardless of how much they know about Maine cannabis law.

“Forced criminality is a form of labor trafficking that is oftentimes deeply invisible,” Virusso said. “(It) is when someone’s trafficking experience required or compelled them to engage in illicit or criminalized activity. That could be selling drugs, if somebody’s forcing them to engage in that.”

Federal investigators maintain that their investigations have found no evidence of human or labor trafficking within the cannabis grow houses, though Lizotte noted that nearly identical operations in nearly a dozen other states have employed forms of human trafficking.

“It’s been reported that different states and different regions have disparate dynamics; for example, Oklahoma, the Pacific Northwest, California,” Lizotte said. “But here in Maine, we haven’t seen evidence to suggest that there is human or labor trafficking. The U.S. attorney’s views on that remain unchanged.”

Local law enforcement and anti-trafficking advocates dispute that assertion, noting that the cannabis grows are cloaked in layers of secrecy.

“Illicit marijuana grows are rife with the potential for exploitative conditions because they create layers of invisibility, which creates real fear and justifiable fear,” Virusso said. “Just because we don’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

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