August 13, 2012
Eric Holder, Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530-0001
Re: Dismissal of Global Horizons Case
Dear Attorney General Holder:
We are the Thai farm workers who were victims of labor trafficking in the Global Horizons Manpower Case. It was not easy for us to come here. We have had to incur enormous debts and submit ourselves to tremendous hardship and exploitation, but we came because we could scarcely provide for our families with the meager resources we have at home. We have left behind our families with the hope that we would receive a just wage for our labor. Instead, we were forced into a terrible situation that none of us had expected. Many of us were sent back home to Thailand when we protested our conditions, but the rest of us who remained on US soil believed that we could find justice in this country.
We were told that we would be safe because the rule of law in the US was trustworthy. We knew that back home we would be in definite danger. Since we reported the trafficking to the US government, we were told that the crimes were being investigated.
Some of us spent hours upon hours detailing our experience over and over again to federal agents. Many of us still had the documents needed to prove everything we said was true. So much time had passed, several years, and we still had faith in the US justice system. We knew that the perpetrators of this crime would have to face their punishment one day because they were wrong to take our money, dignity, and land.
After this long and difficult struggle we are told that all criminal charges are dismissed, even though some of the accused had already pled guilty. After years and years of investigation, we were mortified to hear this news just a month before trial. We were ready to face the wrongdoers, ready to go to the courthouse in Honolulu to confront Motti, Pranee, Sam, and all the rest of them about what they had done to us. We wanted justice.
We are sorry that this case has come to an abrupt end without ever being tried. We are especially sorry because we know what we have undergone and what we are still enduring today because of Global and nothing is ever going to change that fact.
Respectfully,
The Thai Farm Workers
This is total baloney
The U.S. Federal Gov has done SO MUCH for all these Thai worker victims
Enough already , they should be happy it is over . Now all they want is more money
and their lawyer needs to get paid . The victims might think about paying their attorney fees
off and not gambling so much .
[…] workers issued a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Aug. 13, 2012, expressing their outrage over the dismissal of the […]
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