A Central Washington orchard operator is temporarily barred from hiring foreign farmworkers through a widely known visa program after a federal investigation found the company shirked its legal responsibilities, jeopardized workers’ safety and health and verbally abused them.

East Wenatchee-based Welton Orchards and Storage LLC was fined $64,120 for violations to the H-2A agricultural worker program, which allows people from outside the country to work in the U.S. agriculture sector on a temporary basis. An estimated 3 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers are employed across the country, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The department’s Wage and Hour Division also recovered $7,485 in unpaid wages for 26 employees.

“Welton Orchards and Storage intimidated and threatened workers and put their livelihoods at risk as they violated many provisions of a federal program designed to assist the nation’s agricultural employers,” said Wage and Hour Division District Director Thomas Silva in Seattle.

Welton Orchards did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Federal investigators, along with the Northwest Justice Project, the state’s largest publicly funded legal-aid program, found that Welton Orchards and Storage LLC targeted H-2A workers on a frequent basis with abusive and offensive language and routinely threatened to “send them back to Mexico,” the department said.

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