COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA — Enrique Balcazar, 37, and Elizabeth Balcazar, 21,– both of Batesburg – and Balcazar Nature Harvesting, LLC (BNH) have been sentenced in federal court for labor trafficking, confiscating passports in connection with labor trafficking, and fraud in foreign labor contracting.
Evidence presented in Court indicated that Enrique Balcazar and his daughter Elizabeth Balcazar operated BNH, which provided seasonal agricultural labor to farms in the Lexington County area. In early 2021, the defendants incorporated the business and obtained permission from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to recruit foreign national agricultural workers by promising it would provide particular work conditions for its workers.
Elizabeth then travelled to Mexico and recruited 55 Mexican nationals to work for BNH in Lexington County in exchange for those same promises. Each worker obtained an H-2A temporary agricultural worker visa that authorized them to lawfully work in the United States. Elizabeth travelled by bus with the workers back to Lexington County, where she and her father brought the workers to a camp facility in Batesburg where they would live and work for BNH. Enrique and Elizabeth confiscated the workers’ passports and visas the same day they arrived.
From April 2021 to December 2021, BNH subjected the workers to forced and exploitative labor. Rather than the 40 hours of work per week promised, victims were made to work nearly twice that, and some weeks as many...
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