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For Immediate Release
November, 17 2008, 09:01am EDT
Contact:
Rachel Myers, (212) 549-2689; media@aclu.org
ACLU Joins Lawsuit Challenging Trafficking of Indian Guestworkers
Abuse of Workers in Federal Program Violates US and International Human Rights Law
NEW ORLEANS
The
American Civil Liberties Union today charged that workers brought to
the United States from India to work in shipyards after Hurricane
Katrina were misleadingly recruited, exploited and mistreated. The ACLU
and the law firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP joined a class action
lawsuit brought on behalf of over 500 guestworkers charging the workers
were trafficked into the U.S. through the federal government's H-2B
guestworker program with dishonest assurances of becoming lawful
permanent U.S. residents and subjected to squalid living conditions,
fraudulent payment practices and threats of serious harm upon their
arrival.
"Immigrant guestworkers are among
the most vulnerable groups of workers in the United States," said
Chandra Bhatnagar, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program
and co-counsel in the case. "Often paying exorbitant sums of money to
deceitful and abusive recruiters in their home countries, these
guestworkers are subject to the control of a single 'employer-sponsor'
once they've arrived in the U.S., with no safeguards in place to
protect even the limited rights guaranteed by law."
The complaint charges that
recruiting agents hired by the marine industry company Signal
International held the guestworkers' passports and visas, coerced them
into paying extraordinary fees for recruitment, immigration processing
and travel, and threatened the workers with serious legal and physical
harm if they did not work under the Signal-restricted guestworker visa.
The complaint also charges that once in the U.S., the men were required
to live in Signal's guarded, overcrowded labor camps, subjected to
psychological abuse and defrauded out of adequate payment for their
work.
"Trafficking immigrants to perform
forced labor for little to no pay under the guise of a guestworker
program amounts to involuntary servitude," said Bhatnagar. "The
government must take immediate action to stop sanctioning worker abuse
and fix this dangerous system."
The ACLU charges that the federal
government has fallen short of its responsibility to protect the rights
of guestworkers in this country. According to the lawsuit, the workers
are victims of human trafficking and their treatment violates the
Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA), which is
meant to protect and defend the human rights of victims of contemporary
slavery and trafficking. The TVPA is currently up for reauthorization.
The ACLU and Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP
join the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Asian American Legal Defense
and Education Fund, the Louisiana Justice Institute and the New Orleans
Workers' Center for Racial Justice in the lawsuit against Signal, which
was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
Louisiana in March 2008. The litigation arose out of a broader
organizing campaign spearheaded by the Alliance of Guestworkers for
Dignity, a project of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial
Justice.
The amended complaint is available online at: www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/immigrants'rights/36237lgl20080429.html
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
(212) 549-2666LATEST NEWS
'Horrible Scenes' in Gaza as Winter Storm Compounds Vicious Impacts of Israel's Genocidal Blockade
"This suffering is being manufactured by policy, not weather," said a humanitarian aid coordinator for Oxfam.
Dec 16, 2025
Makeshift tents billowing furiously in the wind. Children wading through ankle-high water. A young boy futilely beating back an oncoming wave with nothing but a broom.
These are just a few of the scenes that came out of Gaza in recent days as its population of nearly 2 million people was beset by heavy rainfall and punishing winds from Storm Byron, which hit late last week.
According to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Jerusalem, more than 1.3 million Palestinians in the territory are without proper shelter following more than two years of relentless Israeli bombing, which destroyed or damaged over 90% of housing units.
"The conditions are catastrophic, I must say," Jonathan Crickx, the chief of communication for the UN Children's Fund, told PBS News. "I've been in many, many tents in the past two days, and the tents are completely flooded. I met with tens of children. Their clothes are wet, the mattresses in the tents are completely soaked. And those children, they are cold."
At least three children, including two infants and a 9-year-old, died from hypothermia or cold exposure within a 24-hour period. Another five were crushed after a house sheltering displaced civilians collapsed due to the storm. As of Friday, at least 14 people were reported dead from the storm, and several more are injured, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Interior and National Security.
"Civilians are now wading through sewage, mud, and debris, with no proper shelter," said Bushra Khalidi, the policy lead for Oxfam in the occupied Palestinian territories. "This is not a failure of preparedness or capacity; it's the direct result of the systematic obstruction of aid."
"The Israeli authorities continue to block the entry of basic shelter materials, fuel, and water infrastructure, leaving people exposed to entirely preventable harm," Khalidi continued. "When access is denied, storms become deadly. This suffering is being manufactured by policy, not weather."
Under the terms of the "ceasefire" agreement signed between Israel and Hamas in October, Israel was required to allow more than 600 trucks carrying humanitarian aid to enter Gaza each day. But according to UN data published earlier this month, just 113 trucks per day on average have been allowed to enter the strip, less than a fifth of the agreed-upon amount.
The Rafah crossing, the largest entry point for aid, still remains almost totally closed after being opened briefly during the first week of the ceasefire. Israel said earlier this month that it may soon reopen the crossing, but only to allow for the exit of Palestinians.
"Without question, the Israelis and their persistent bureaucracy have prevented us from bringing in the necessary shelter that would provide adequate dwellings for the people living in Gaza," said Chris McIntosh, Oxfam's humanitarian response adviser in the territory.
In the crowded coastal area of al-Mawasi, he said, some residents have been left with little to protect themselves from the elements but blankets and flimsy tarpaulin.
"Obviously, a blanket is not going to do much against torrential downpours and winds that are at nearly gale force," he said. "The Israelis have not permitted these tents to enter the Gaza Strip, not for many months... The population is bracing for a very, very tragic situation right now."
Official estimates put the death toll in Gaza at more than 70,600 since October 7, 2023, including more than 300 who have been killed during the ceasefire period across hundreds of attacks by Israel in violation of the agreement. But other independent studies, which take indirect effects of the genocide, like malnutrition and disease, into account, place the death toll much higher.
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Trump Economy 'Stalling Out' as Unemployment Rate Hits Highest Level in 4 Years
"Trump may give himself an A++++ on the economy, but these latest jobs numbers are failing working families."
Dec 16, 2025
Federal data belatedly released Tuesday shows that the US unemployment rate rose to the highest level in four years last month as President Donald Trump's administration continues its assault on the government's workforce and American corporations lay off workers at a level not seen in decades.
The unemployment rate rose to 4.6% in November, up from 4.4% in September, according to the Labor Department report, whose release was delayed due to the recent government shutdown.
US employers added 64,000 jobs last month following the loss of 105,000 jobs in October, fueled by the Trump administration's large-scale layoffs of federal workers. The manufacturing sector, which Trump has promised to bolster with his tariff regime, shed 5,000 jobs in November, according to the newly published federal data.
Over the past six months, the US has averaged just 17,000 jobs added per month—a number that underscored concerns about the frailty of Trump's economy.
"Today’s long-awaited jobs report confirms what we already suspected: Trump’s economy is stalling out and American workers are paying the price," said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative. "Far from sparking a manufacturing renaissance, Trump’s reckless trade agenda is bleeding working-class jobs, forcing layoffs, and raising prices for businesses and consumers alike. Trump may give himself an A++++ on the economy, but these latest jobs numbers are failing working families.”
Another notable trend in today's payroll release is the gradual slowdown in nominal wage growth. As the unemployment rate rises, workers struggle to find jobs and have less leverage when it comes to demand higher wages. Both indicate a slowdown in affordability for workers and their families.
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— Elise Gould (@elisegould.bsky.social) Dec 16, 2025 at 10:17 AM
The new figures were released after Trump kicked off a tour of battleground states in an effort to defend his economic policies, which voters—including many of the president's own—increasingly blame for driving up prices. Trump and White House officials have insisted, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that the US economy is stronger than it's ever been.
Julie Su, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and former acting head of the Labor Department, said Tuesday that "for months, Donald Trump and his administration have been hiding data about the economy, leaving workers and employers in the dark when trying to make critical hiring decisions."
"But you can’t hide the reality every American knows," said Su. "An economy where costs are too high for people to afford the basic necessities and also can’t find jobs is an economic crisis that requires massive change so that working people can actually come out on top."
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Yale Historian Warns Trump Is Putting US on Path to World War III
Historian Greg Grandin argued that Trump's foreign policy will likely result in "more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war."
Dec 16, 2025
Yale historian Greg Grandin believes that President Donald Trump's foreign policy is putting the US on a dangerous course that could lead to a new world war.
Writing in The New York Times on Monday, Grandin argued that the Trump administration seems determined to throw out the US-led international order that has been in place since World War II.
In its place, Grandin said, is "a vision of the world carved up into garrisoned spheres of competing influence," in which the US has undisputed control over the Western Hemisphere.
As evidence, he pointed to the Trump White House's recently published National Security Strategy that called for reviving the so-called Monroe Doctrine that in the past was used to justify US imperial aggression throughout Latin America, and that the Trump administration is using to justify its own military adventures in the region.
Among other things, Grandin said that the Trump administration has been carrying out military strikes against purported drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, and has also been "meddling in the internal politics of Brazil, Argentina, and Honduras, issuing scattershot threats against Colombia and Mexico, menacing Cuba and Nicaragua, increasing its influence over the Panama Canal, and seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela."
Most ominously, Grandin said, is how the US Department of Defense has been "carrying out a military buildup in the Caribbean that is all but unprecedented in its scale and concentration of firepower, seemingly aimed at effecting regime change in Venezuela."
A large problem with dividing the globe into spheres controlled by major powers, Grandin continued, is that these powers inevitably come into violent conflict with one another.
Citing past statements and actions by the British Empire, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, Grandin argued that "as the world marched into a second global war, many of its belligerents did so citing the Monroe Doctrine."
This dynamic is particularly dangerous in the case of Trump, who, according to Grandin, sees Latin America "as a theater of global rivalry, a place to extract resources, secure commodity chains, establish bulwarks of national security, fight the drug war, limit Chinese influence, and end migration."
The result of this policy shift, Grandin concluded, "will most likely be more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war."
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