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Nexstar Media, Inc. is a leading, diversified media company that produces and distributes engaging local and national news, sports, and entertainment content across its television and digital platforms. The My Nexstar sign-in works across the Nexstar network—including The CW, NewsNation, The Hill, and more. Learn more at nexstar.tv/privacy-policy.

Gathered for a luncheon Tuesday at La Plazuela at La Fonda Tuesday in Santa Fe, front row from left, Think New Mexico 2026 Summer Leadership Intern Viviana Ornelas, Board President Roberta Ramo and Intern Marly Fisher. Back row from left, Think New Mexico Field Director Noah Apodaca, Intern Ian Hernandez, Think New Mexico Board Secretary Liddie Martinez, Intern Awlen Salazar and Healthcare Reform Director Lauren Leland. Courtesy/TNM

Gathered Tuesday at La Plazuela at La Fonda in Santa Fe, front row from left, Think New Mexico 2026 Summer Leadership Intern Viviana Ornelas, Board President Roberta Ramo and Intern Marly Fisher. Back row from left, Think New Mexico Intern Ian Hernandez, Think New Mexico Board Secretary Liddie Martinez and Intern Awlen Salazar. Courtesy/TNM

Think New Mexico News:

Each summer Think New Mexico offers four paid Leadership Internship positions to college or graduate students. Interns have the opportunity to meet with Think New Mexico board members and leaders in state government, as well as to assist Think New Mexico’s staff in researching and developing policy proposals.

The 2026 Summer Leadership Interns include:

Marly Fisher grew up in Albuquerque and graduated from Albuquerque Academy in 2023. As a senior in high school, she and three peers spearheaded a successful effort to pass a bill implementing period products in New Mexico’s public schools. She has since interned for Representatives Melanie Stansbury and Gabe Vasquez. Fisher is a senior in the dual degree program between Sciences Po Paris and Columbia, majoring in Political Philosophy and History, and serving as Senior Editor of the Columbia Political Review. She is passionate about improving education in New Mexico.

Ian Hernandez was born and raised in Santa Fe and graduated in the top 1% of his class from the MASTERS Program Early College Charter School. He was a 2023 recipient of the Davis New Mexico Scholarship, which allowed him to attend and graduate from the University of Denver this past June. Hernandez earned his B.A. in Socio-Legal Studies and History and hopes to begin law school in the fall of 2027. As an undergraduate, He interned with U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO). He also worked as a teen journalist for the Santa Fe New Mexican, and as a teacher and tutor for Breakthrough Santa Fe. Hernandez hopes to use his education and life experiences to improve the lives of as many people living in New Mexico and the American Southwest as possible.

Viviana Ornelas is a Santa Fe native who graduated as Valedictorian of her Capital High School class. She received Davis and LANL scholarships to study at the University of Chicago, where she is earning a B.A. in Psychology and Public Policy with a minor in Education and Society. In high school, Viviana led a chapter of the New Mexico Dream Team. As an undergraduate student, she has worked as a research assistant in Dr. Levine’s Cognitive Development Lab where she helped conduct studies to understand the relationship between solving math word problems and spatial skills. Ornelas has also worked as a tutor for the Neighborhood Schools Program in Chicago and a teacher for Breakthrough Santa Fe. She hopes to return to New Mexico to pursue a career in education policy.

Awlen Salazar is a graduate of New Mexico State University (NMSU), where he earned a B.A. in Political Science with minors in Public Administration & Policy and Public Law. He is pursuing a Master of Public Policy at the University of New Mexico. Throughout his time at NMSU, Salazar was a part of the Associated Students of NMSU, where he held roles in the legislative and executive branches as public relations officer and as one of three standing committee chairs for the Senate. At the start of his senior year, Salazar re-chartered the NMSU College Democrats after the club’s two-year hiatus, and he served as President of the club until his graduation in May 2026. Since then, he continues to be involved in the Young Democrats of New Mexico, where he now serves as National Committee Representative. Off campus, Salazar worked closely with nonprofit sector leaders throughout Doña Ana County. In the summer of 2025, he interned for the Doña Ana County Resilience Leaders, where he helped advocate for policies to mitigate adverse childhood experiences (ACE’s) and expand access to affordable housing. Salazar also worked with NM Comunidades en Accion y De Fé (NM CAFé) as Social Media Associate.

Think New Mexico is New Mexico’s think tank – a results-oriented think tank whose mission is to improve the lives of all New Mexicans, especially those who lack a strong voice in the political process. It fulfills this mission by educating the public, the media, and policymakers about some of the most serious challenges facing New Mexico and by developing and advocating for enduring, effective, evidence-based solutions.

Its approach is to perform and publish sound, nonpartisan, independent research. Unlike many think tanks, Think New Mexico does not subscribe to any particular ideology. Instead, because New Mexico is at or near the bottom of so many national rankings, its focus is on promoting workable solutions that will lift all New Mexicans up.

Consistent with its nonpartisan approach, Think New Mexico’s board is composed of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. They are statesmen and stateswomen, who have no agenda other than to see New Mexico succeed. They are also the brain trust of this think tank.

Think New Mexico began its operations Jan. 1, 1999. It is a tax-exempt organization under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. In order to maintain its independence, Think New Mexico does not accept state government funding. However, contributions from individuals, businesses, and foundations are encouraged, appreciated, and tax-deductible.

As an independent, statewide, results-oriented think tank, Think New Mexico measures its success based on changes in law or policy that it helps to achieve.

Think New Mexico’s results include:

• Making full-day kindergarten accessible to every child in New Mexico;
• Repealing the state’s regressive tax on food and successfully defeating efforts to reimpose it;
• Creating a Strategic Water Reserve to protect and restore New Mexico’s rivers;
• Establishing New Mexico’s first state-supported Individual Development Accounts to alleviate the state’s persistent poverty;
• Redirecting millions of dollars a year out of the state lottery’s excessive operating costs and into college scholarships
• Reforming title insurance to reduce closing costs for homebuyers and homeowners who refinance their mortgages
• Winning passage of three constitutional amendments to professionalize and streamline New Mexico’s Public Regulation Commission
• Modernizing the state’s regulation of taxis, limos, shuttles, and moving companies
• Creating a one-stop online portal to facilitate business fees and filings
• Establishing a user-friendly health care transparency website where New Mexicans can find the cost and quality of common medical procedures at any hospital in the state
• Enacting the New Mexico Work and Save Act to make voluntary state-sponsored Individual Retirement Accounts accessible to New Mexicans who lack access to retirement savings through their jobs;
• Making the state’s infrastructure spending transparent by revealing the legislative sponsors of every capital project;
• Ending predatory lending by reducing the maximum annual interest rate on small loans from 175% to 36%;
• Repealing the tax on Social Security for middle and lower-income New Mexicans with incomes under $100,000 as individuals or $150,000 as married couples;
• Enhancing the training and transparency of local school boards;
• Leading a campaign to make financial literacy a high school graduation requirement, now in place in 46 districts reaching nearly 48% of New Mexico students; and
• Establishing a $2 billion permanent trust fund for Medicaid.

Think New Mexico is headquarters in the historic Greer House at 505 Don Gaspar in Santa Fe, at the corner of Paseo de Peralta and Don Gaspar, directly across the street from the state Capitol. To learn more, visit thinknewmexico.org.

by Wufei Yu, High Country News
July 16, 2026

This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

“Farmwork in New Mexico, legal work authorization card required.” 

It was fall 2020, three years after Mark and Mary (not their real names) first moved to the United States from eastern China. Laid off from their jobs a few months earlier, they were desperate for income, living in a cramped Monterey Park, California, apartment that they shared with four others. 

For over two decades in China, alongside their day jobs, they had cultivated peanuts, rice and sweet potatoes on two acres in an undeveloped agricultural part of the country. The crops helped keep their six children fed. But as their own parents aged and their children got older, they wanted a steadier future.

The ad, on a popular job postings site for Chinese-speaking migrant workers, didn’t specify what kind of farmwork they’d be doing, but the line about paperwork made it sound legitimate. They called the number listed in the ad, and the details sounded promising: $200 a day for eight to 10 hours of “flowering trimming,” with food and accommodation provided. A few days later, they received a text message showing the location: Farmington, a sleepy oil-and-gas town of 46,000 on the edge of the Navajo Nation. It is the largest city in the Four Corners, the area where New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona meet, and it is one of New Mexico’s major towns. 

In the first week of October, the couple began the 740-mile, nearly 12-hour drive east. As they neared Farmington, they watched the sun bear down on Ship Rock, an escarpment rising 1,400 feet above the rugged high desert, visible for 50 miles in almost every direction. Beneath the watchful gaze of the winged, cathedral-like pinnacle, the San Juan River trickled through a dry, khaki-colored valley past stony mesas and rolling hills.

When the couple arrived at their destination, a pink, two-story motel, Mary told me that a middle-aged Chinese-speaking man took their car keys and confiscated their phones. Mary and her husband were put into separate rooms. Some had been converted into a makeshift processing facility, with the mattresses stashed in the bathroom and the dresser drawers emptied out. The doors were kept locked or guarded, according to legal documents, and Mark, Mary and the other workers were told to sit on an upside-down bucket beside heavy-duty black trash bags stuffed with lime-green marijuana plants. 

Mary remembered the plant’s distinctive odor. The work left her nose swollen “like an elephant” and she spiked a 100-degree fever. Mary’s assignment was to cut the leaves from the plants’ buds with scissors from 7 a.m. or earlier, until 10 at night, working almost nonstop, according to legal documents. She was denied medication, and when she tried to stop work, she was forced to continue, a civil case she and others filed later stated.

Mark and Mary had unwittingly walked into the shadowy fringes of New Mexico’s brand-new legal weed industry — and the early days of a network that sought to use Chinese immigrants as labor on the farms that supplied the growing demand for the drug. 

New Mexico, which legalized the adult use of weed in 2021, began its first licensed sales in 2022, and currently sells at least $35 million every month. Colorado and other states in the region have also legalized the plant’s use over the past decade and a half. At the same time, cannabis entrepreneurs started to see the potential for an unexpected workforce: Chinese immigrants. With youth unemployment hovering around 15% in China amid the post-pandemic economic downturn, over 60,000 Chinese migrants crossed the Mexican border into the U.S. from 2021 to 2024.

When law enforcement tried to rein in illegal weed operations like this one, the workers became the focus of their efforts. Despite the efforts of social support groups, the trafficked immigrant workers ended up bearing the brunt of the punishment for the very system that exploited them.

LATE ON THE AFTERNOON of Oct. 8, 2020, a local passerby noticed that a man was moving marijuana plants from a vehicle into a room at the motel. A strong smell of weed was emanating from cars in the parking lot with California license plates. Shortly after that passerby dialed 911, police arrived at the motel room and knocked on the doors.

The workers opened the doors. “At first, I felt like I was finally rescued,” Mary said. But that quickly changed: The officers escorted the 16 workers out of the rooms, instructed and gestured for them to sit or kneel on the ground, according to police dashcam video included in court filings against Mary. Some held their hands behind their heads, and as they waited over two hours to be transferred to the San Juan County Adult Detention Center, a policeman who spoke some Mandarin Chinese arrived and asked if the group knew what they were cutting. Everyone shook their heads. 

After approximately five days of detention, Mary and the workers were advised that they couldn’t leave San Juan County pending trial, according to charging documents. She stared at the legal papers and tried to make sense of letters she did not understand.

A few days earlier, I’d been in Farmington, running down rumors about illegal marijuana grows involving hundreds of Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants on the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico. I collected notes on ads for investment opportunities and jobs,  describing a marijuana operation on tribal land as “undoubtedly a golden opportunity.” I ran into Chinese-speaking workers in mobile home parks and half-empty strip malls in and around Farmington. Outside a motel, I stopped to talk to a Chinese-speaking man about to light a cigarette — one of Mary’s co-workers, it turned out. We stayed in touch, and after he was arrested alongside Mary, he shared his charging documents with me, clearly confused.

In the wake of the bust at the Farmington motel, law enforcement intended to shut down the entire operation. More than 1,000 Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants were employed by the sprawling enterprise at its peak, Navajo Nation police told me. 

Given the high-profile nature of the bust, local law enforcement took the stance that anyone, at any level, involved in illegal cannabis growing was culpable. “You can’t say you don’t know what’s going on,” one of San Juan’s top police officers told me at the time. “We will charge them. And we will prosecute them.”

“At first, I felt like I was finally rescued.”

This is not a new — or uncommon — approach. Since 1979, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has offered grants to fund cannabis eradication. Success is often measured by tracking seizures and destruction, with state and local agencies presenting the number of weapons seized and the amount of product destroyed. That leads law enforcement to focus on the physical operation rather than its finances and leadership. It’s easier to find the workers, laboring in the fields and hoop houses, than it is to catch the financial backers and often-digital systems used to bring in laborers under false pretenses. The legalization and decriminalization of cannabis has also reduced interest in prosecuting those behind the business.

This means that the harshest consequences often fall on those who were least responsible. In early November 2020, a few weeks after local law enforcement targeted the Farmington motel, federal officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the DEA raided Diné politician and entrepreneur Dineh Benally’s farms on the Navajo Nation. They found dozens of Chinese workers, who were underdressed for the cold weather and half-asleep among the plants inside the heated hoop houses. The workers were searched and bused to a nearby high school, where the gym and classrooms were arranged for interrogation. 

None of the farm’s operators or backers were arrested at the time, however. By the time law enforcement arrived, they were long gone. The charges against the 16 workers who were picked up at the motel weren’t dropped until late November, over two weeks after the bust. Yet they were clearly not the ones running the business, and at least some of them had no idea the work they engaged in was illegal. 

Although law enforcement hadn’t arrested the operation’s leadership, I wanted to know just how dozens of Chinese-speaking workers had ended up in this remote part of New Mexico, a state with few Chinese communities. 

SOME OF THE WORKERS I spoke with mentioned a “Mr. Lin.” I tracked the phone number on the Chinese-language investment ads — as well as various speeding citations and calls to local and tribal police — to Irving Rea-Yui Lin, a Taiwanese American entrepreneur based in Monterey Park, California. He agreed to meet me at the lobby of a two-star motel on the eastern end of Farmington. Solid and slightly hunched at 5 feet 7, Lin, then almost 70, resembled any nonchalant grandpa you might run into at a park in China. 

Around 2018, he told me, he began exploring investment opportunities in cannabis and met Benally. In early 2020, Lin brought Benally to L.A.’s suburban Chinatown and served as translator as Benally discussed cannabis investment in the Navajo Nation.

“(Benally) said they were a sovereign nation with their own regulations and licenses, which was similar to China’s ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement in Hong Kong,” Lin recalled. Around 100 people showed up at the meeting room. “The pandemic made it a golden opportunity.”

“We started doing whatever we could,” Lin recalled. Cannabis is strictly illegal in almost all of East and Southeast Asia. And in the U.S., Asian Americans are more likely to believe that marijuana legalization makes communities less safe and to show less support for it than other ethnic groups.

In spite of that, Benally and Lin’s strategy seemed to work. Some people invested tens of thousands of dollars — their life savings — after Benally promised that it was legitimate. Posts showed up on WeChat groups and in classified ads in Chinese-language newspapers through job agencies, offering job opportunities in “New Mexico flower trimming,” “weeding on Indian Reservations” and “building greenhouses and pipework on the Navajo Nation,” according to court filings. 

“And if they’re stuck in New Mexico, they’re stuck on a whole other planet.”

Lin made it clear in repeated interviews with me that he was well aware of the nature of the plants involved — he knew it was marijuana — but that he saw it as part of a long tradition of surviving by using loopholes in the legal system. “Just like how I made money in New York 40 years ago: always going through Pian Men,” he said, using a common Chinese phrase that literally means “side gates”—unofficial, higher‑risk ways of earning money by working off the books, hustling in cash‑only side gigs or trading in gray‑market goods when you can’t get a regular job.

“The tendency to find side gates is a natural one,” Lin added. For first-generation immigrants, “many methods were unconventional, and jobs and gigs were also intrinsically unconventional. Over time, no matter what, it was all side gates. It becomes a habit.”

Lin himself survived on these side gates: After graduating from college in Taiwan, he became a seaman on the Pacific route from Taiwan to San Francisco, where he first dreamed of immigrating while gazing at Oakland’s bustling harbor. In his sailor’s cabin, he studied English and read computer science textbooks between his onboard duties. He developed a plan: “Come to the United States, take the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), study computer science, and get a job at IBM,” Lin said. But he needed money to cover his tuition and expenses at a computer science master’s program in New Jersey, and so he was drawn in by ads shared by job agencies in Manhattan’s Chinatown. There, he found his first job as a warehouse manager, earning $220 a week, or over $10,000 a year.

After graduating, he dabbled in other businesses, including information technology, nickel mines, gold mines and real estate. He was once the leader of a coalition of Chinese IT entrepreneurs, he told me. Chinese people on the East Coast called him “President Lin,” he said. But his reputation was tarnished by at least one copyright lawsuit against his company in the late 1990s, and his other ventures were short-lived successes, forcing him to roam the fringes of American society and reestablish himself in L.A.’s suburban Chinatown. 

The workers at Benally’s operation, he said, were doing much the same. Cannabis cultivation operates nationwide: It’s seasonal, labor-intensive and easy to staff informally through brokers. New Mexico is not the only place it has surfaced; in recent years, raids in California, Oklahoma, Massachusetts and Maine have uncovered similar recruitment and trafficking allegations.

Lin shuttled more than 100 workers from Los Angeles to New Mexico, sometimes for a fee, he said, and offered services to transport up to twenty thousand marijuana seedlings in his 12-seat van. He profited from the business, he admitted. Meanwhile, workers and investors lacked the inside information he had.     

New Mexico has a long history of trafficked workers, but the systems set up to help the victims, who often spoke Spanish, struggled to support those affected by Lin and Benally’s operation. Lynn Sanchez, director of the human trafficking outreach department at The Life Link, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that connects crime victims with legal, economic and housing support, first met Mary and other Chinese workers shortly after the raid on the Navajo Nation. She and a few social service providers waited at the high school where the workers were bused. They brought Spanish- and English-language pamphlets, since law enforcement had told her about providing services to “displaced farmworkers.”

She was surprised to learn that all the workers were Chinese. With a FBI agent translating, Sanchez tried to explain what Life Link could offer. But initially only eight of the nearly 60 Chinese workers Sanchez spoke with that day accepted Life Link’s prepaid debit cards, clothing, food and other essentials. The agent, she recalled, shook her head and snapped: “They don’t want help; they just want another job.”

A public defender later called her. The public defender, Nicole Hall, had seen a stack of case files about the 16 workers picked up at the Farmington motel, with misspelled Chinese names. “Something was wrong,” Hall later told a reporter. “And none of these people should be going to jail.” 

Sanchez followed up with Mary and the other 15 workers at the two hotel rooms in Farmington they shared. “I don’t know what they were eating or how they were surviving, but it looked like they’ve been through an awful lot,” Sanchez told me.

The migrant workers found the place they’d ended up disorienting. Outside, the San Juan River Valley looked tranquil in the shifting pink-orange light of a sunny late afternoon. 

“You don’t see the world the same way when you’ve been psychologically overwhelmed like that, to be their age, to be taken at gunpoint to jail, and then to be told you have to stay here, in this climate that was really very anti-Asian,” Sanchez said. “And if they’re stuck in New Mexico, they’re stuck on a whole other planet.”

The workers’ mugshots had been published by local outlets and republished in China; the anti-Asian hatred that spread during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic further made them a target. While waiting for their hearings, many stayed inside, afraid to be seen, afraid to ask for help.

After the charges were dropped in late November 2020, many of the workers used state funds for crime victims to return to Monterey Park. They found a cold welcome: Few employers would hire them once news of their suspected involvement in the black-market marijuana industry got out in Chinatowns in the U.S. and in China. At least three workers said that they’d received random phone calls that warned them not to seek help or cooperate with law enforcement. “There was a sense that someone was following us,” Mary told me. 

Some of them were desperate to take any opportunity that came their way. Hoping to save money and buy medication for his daughter in China, who suffered from a serious heart condition, a man in his 50s immediately took on a job transporting marijuana plants, according to Sanchez and Lin. In late 2021, he was pulled over while driving a truckload and was arrested in Oklahoma. He then spent around a year and a half in immigration detention centers in Colorado and Texas. During that time, his daughter died. 

The other workers were due to receive checks that covered their lost wages in New Mexico. Sanchez decided to deliver them in person instead of mailing them. She repeatedly visited Monterey Park, a low‑rise, predominantly Asian suburb where Chinese restaurants, storefront churches and employment agencies share the same strip malls. She walked along streets where employment agency windows were filled with ads for working-class jobs. Workers were lined up at the door, sometimes out into the street. 

Sanchez realized that Mark and Mary’s experience wasn’t an isolated one. According to one estimate, around 2.5 million Chinese migrant workers had immigrated in recent decades, many passing through Monterey Park, driven by political suppression and economic distress. “Monterey Park was packed with a dense mass of Chinese men looking for work,” one of the other Life Link employees told me. “And some would end up in New Mexico.” 

Sanchez soon learned that Mary no longer felt safe in Monterey Park. She offered Mary and other workers the chance to relocate to New Mexico. Mary and her husband were among the first to say yes. Life Link helped them apply for affordable housing, rent assistance and health care. Sanchez connected Mary and the others with legal partners, including the New Mexico Immigration Law Center and the Human Trafficking Legal Center of Washington, D.C., to apply for T-visas, which are reserved for trafficking victims and have an annual rejection rate as high as 40%.

Sanchez also hired her organization’s first Chinese-speaking employee: Yuxi Qin, whose father was one of the workers arrested in Farmington. He accepted Life Link’s assistance and moved to New Mexico, and after she saw his relocation and recovery, she began to help Sanchez with the growing number of Chinese-speaking clients.

“The illicit cannabis industry brought migrant workers from China, a place that we’d never expected to see in New Mexico,” Sanchez said. She acknowledged that it had been a learning experience; next time, she hoped, nobody would fall through the cracks. “There is much more to do.”

At the same time, some law enforcement agencies wanted to focus on the people behind the illicit cannabis trade. Like Sanchez, Kevin McInerney, a commander at California’s Department of Cannabis Control and one of Sanchez’s West Coast partners, had spent time strolling around Monterey Park. Following the lead of a Chinese-speaking anti-trafficking investigator with the U.S. Department of Labor, McInerney would sit at an unpretentious joint that served classic Northern Chinese dishes or stop by the employment agencies to read the job postings taped to the doors and talk to laborers waiting on the street for rides to worksites or to the airport for out-of-state work. 

“The workers seemed more like victims of the system than criminals.”

“They were picked up during the days, dropped off, and then ended up in the day-rental converted apartments, where multiple people slept in the same room, with their belongings in a separate place,” McInerney said. The workers seemed more like victims of the system than criminals. He began to have second thoughts about local news clips showing police officers busting into residential shacks and handcuffing workers at marijuana farms. The visuals fit into the conventional logic of dealing with drug crimes, but left him with a lot of questions.

In 2022, California’s Department of Cannabis Control started an anti-trafficking and worker exploitation effort, he said, to “investigate the recruitment pipeline funneling migrant workers into cannabis” and “shift the culture of law enforcement.”

“That’s been a struggle, not just here,” he said, due to the lack of resources for the time-consuming work of investigating the people behind the recruitment, transportation, housing and coercion.

The kind of thing that Lin and others allegedly engaged in is particularly hard to tackle. Labor advocates and investigators have come to realize it is a type of “affinity exploitation.” Operators recruit newcomers through the same language and social circles that immigrants rely on to survive, turning those same trusted networks of trust into a funnel for fraud, coercion and sometimes forced labor. And once they’re involved, the people themselves become a part of the supply chain. Without stability, legal experts explained, people can be exploited by every aspect of their basic needs.

“Cannabis entered and operated within this existing infrastructure,” said Erika Moritsugu, former deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and the Asian American and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander senior liaison at the White House, in an email. The New Mexico case caught her eye after she learned about it through “community partners on the ground” and “field colleagues in government.” She met with eight of the Chinese workers over a video chat in 2021. 

But law enforcement’s growing awareness of the role — and the power — of the illicit operations’ backers lagged behind the fast-moving business. Lin emerged from the Navajo Nation bust relatively unscathed, except for, he said, the visit a law enforcement officer made to his hotel in Farmington. And he quickly returned to corralling new investors for new projects that his partners were starting in Oklahoma.

The winter following the bust, I watched him pitch a group of 20 or so at a Chinese community center in Los Angeles County. The attendees sat at a safe social distance
from one another, wearing masks or plastic face shields. The flyer they held promised “Legally licensed, completely transparent! The COVID-19 Pandemic has brought a turning point to the industry! A senior expert explains!”

 As he took the stage, Lin urged people to join him in investing in cannabis in Oklahoma and promised them a fortune.

“The return on investment is higher than 1,000%. Finance one greenhouse, and you’ll walk away with $300,000.” Lin wandered around in the room with a mic in his hand, gesturing like a stand-up comedian. Once investors put in the funds, he said, “our professional team will take care of the rest.”

Lin said that much of the demand for marijuana grown in Oklahoma came from out-of-state buyers because it was so costly to enter the state-sanctioned cannabis industry. “Running a dispensary is very expensive, and we reduce their cost,” he added. 

Transporting marijuana products across state lines is a federal felony offense, but Lin didn’t make that clear to his potential investors at the seminar or the workers he and his partners hired from job agencies.

Lin obtained a permit for a marijuana farm in Waterflow, an unincorporated community between Farmington and Shiprock, that was issued by New Mexico’s Cannabis Control Division in December 2023. (The license for NNK Equity LLC was revoked in August 2024, after a compliance check determined that the grow had exceeded its allotted plant count.) He also reconnected with Benally, with whom he claimed to have cut ties after the Farmington hotel bust. He told me that he had helped to bring workers to Estancia, New Mexico, 45 minutes southeast of Albuquerque, for a year. Benally had established cannabis grows there.

The operation in Estancia proved to be a turning point for how law enforcement officers in New Mexico dealt with the workers they found. David (not his real name), a sturdy 20-something-year-old cattle rancher from the dry grasslands of northwestern China, was one of those who ended up working in Estancia. His spouse lived in the U.S., and in 2023, he sold his cattle, left China and entered the U.S., walking across the Mexican border to reunite with his spouse. Drawn by the hope of earning at least $4,500 a month, he booked a flight from New York, where he was living, to Albuquerque. There, he and another young Chinese man were picked up by a car bound for Estancia. 

“Finance one greenhouse, and you’ll walk away with $300,000.”

“I was in what seemed like a complete wasteland,” David told me. “Without a single light bulb in sight. And you wouldn’t even know if you were being sold to anyone.”

David said the farm had around 60 employees, all Chinese-speaking, in an isolated environment: one locked gate, dogs as guards. Workers worked long hours, and he wanted to quit on the second day, but his request was denied. And without a car, leaving felt impossible. 

On the morning of the third day, as he ate breakfast and prepared to work, at least 100 officers arrived at the gate, David remembered. Two armored vehicles entered. A truck with a large antenna came in, he said, and a trailer with porta-potties followed. Three helicopters circled overhead. This time, law enforcement was ready: Through loudspeakers, David recalled, officers made announcements in Mandarin Chinese, saying they were from the New Mexico attorney general’s office. 

“Don’t panic, we’re here to search,” one of the loudspeakers blasted. Workers emerged from hoop houses, crouching and covering their heads. Officers checked their documentation. A bus arrived for anyone who wanted to leave. Most decided to keep working until payday, but six workers boarded it, including David.

Law enforcement connected them to Lynn Sanchez and Life Link. David was initially skeptical of Sanchez and her organization. But Mary told him, “Lynn is kind-hearted and genuinely here to help you,” David recalled.

On Sept. 27, 2023, Mark, Mary and 13 other Chinese migrant workers who were arrested in Farmington filed a civil lawsuit against Lin, Benally and others they alleged had trafficked them. McInerney told me the workers’ progress — finding stable housing, legal support, a clearer path to immigration relief — offered a model: Treat trafficked workers as victims first, and use that stability to build cases that target networks rather than individual laborers. 

When I asked Irving Lin for comment on the civil lawsuit, he claimed that he “has a clean background” and merely served as an interpreter for immigrant workers. He felt betrayed by his own people and claimed, inaccurately, that the workers were able to get green cards. “Again, it’s all through side gates,” he said.

His obstinance reminded me of a conversation we had just before Lunar New Year in 2021. He recalled that after he started dabbling in the marijuana industry in 2018, his wife often told him: “I’m sure you’ll be arrested one day.” One of his daughters would say, “Daddy’s crazy.” “But Daddy is creating something,” Lin would snap back. 

“Marijuana would devalue if we don’t move fast, given the wave of legalization in many states,” Lin said. “I’m no longer young. Time is limited. And I might not be able to do this in another three or five years.”

He faced new pressures as the legal system turned its focus to him and the other business operators. In 2024, Benally’s cannabis license in Estancia and Lin’s in Waterflow were revoked, and Lin was arrested in late 2024. On Jan. 23, 2025, after more than five years of federal investigations, the FBI arrested Dineh Benally, and the two men were detained without bail as they face federal charges. Benally pleaded guilty to 15 felonies tied to his operations on the Navajo Nation and elsewhere in New Mexico, including “unlawfully employing illegal aliens” and “conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens.” He faced a mandatory minimum of 15 years and could be sentenced to life. Benally did not return a request for comment.

Lin was charged with three counts of drug conspiracy, manufacturing marijuana and possession with intent to distribute. After he was booked into a county correctional center, according to New Mexico court documents, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. While being transferred between jails and medical care, he continued to assert his innocence and requested English-Chinese interpretation in court. In December 2025, Lin passed away in custody. The official cause of death was heart failure; a representative of his estate filed a wrongful death case in state court. Lin’s family and lawyer did not return requests for comment.

Law enforcement’s efforts to prevent future operators from repeating Lin’s activities face new challenges. In March 2024, Los Angeles County proposed creating a workers’ resource center — a hub for accessing physical and mental health services, transportation and housing navigation, immigration and employment-rights training, wage-theft clinics and other support in Chinese — in Monterey Park. The plan required at most about $2 million per year, a fraction of McInerney’s total budget. Due to a lack of funding, the plan is on hold.

Some of the people trafficked to work on Lin and Benally’s farms will bear the consequences forever, such as the worker who lost his daughter. He still travels between California and New Mexico looking for work. Others, though, have begun to find their footing. Almost all the other workers who had filed suit obtained T-visas. And Mark and Mary have built a quiet life in Santa Fe, in an apartment across the street from the visual art exhibition Meow Wolf. Early in the morning, before the tourists, college students and young professionals trickle in, the couple plays badminton in Meow Wolf’s parking lot. They checked out the exhibition once but weren’t impressed by its colorful mosaics and other dazzling features. They left immediately; they preferred nature, they said, and would drive up to the Santa Fe Mountains, where the high desert opens into a sea of aspens and ponderosa pines. They dream of opening a dumpling restaurant, or perhaps a health center based on traditional Chinese medicine.

“People like them used to feel like they were fish, always swimming aimlessly to find gigs in job agencies and floating around the United States,” Qin said. “They have become trees, started to take root, and are flourishing in New Mexico.” 

Susie Ang is an illustrator based in Singapore.

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This article appeared in the July 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The weed’s industry’s trafficked workforce.”

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