Jiaai Zeng had spent the past month working nonstop at a marijuana farm in Oklahoma run by fellow Chinese immigrants. The job was brutal, the 57-year-old had told relatives in New York. He said his bosses made him labor up to 15 hours a day in the blast-furnace heat of a greenhouse. He was feeling awful even after a visit to the doctor, so he planned to return to New York that evening for medical treatment.
The farmworker’s story gives a glimpse into the harsh and often abusive conditions endured by the tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants who have quietly become the backbone of many U.S. marijuana operations. The mistreatment and squalid conditions are the hallmarks of human trafficking, said Craig Williams, the chief agent of the marijuana and human trafficking sections of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.
In the Zeng case, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics are investigating. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner recently concluded that the cause of the farmworker’s death was pneumonia. The reporting reveals a saga of despair that remains largely out of sight for the U.S. public. Zeng’s case is rare because his family has spoken out. Many Chinese immigrants enter the nation’s marijuana industry hoping to plant the seeds of new lives, but they end up suffering in silence.
Zeng decided to leave. His U.S. relatives lent him about $65,000 for the smuggler’s fee. The money included a payoff to expedite issuance of a passport by Chinese officials in Fujian, a coastal province whoseintertwines with official corruption. Zeng traveled via Bolivia and Mexico, climbing the border fence into San Diego in December 2022. After Border Patrol agents arrested him, he requested political asylum and was released.
“He was surprised how much people were willing to support him,” Westin Zeng said. “He was really touched. He told my father it’s totally different here.” Zeng earned about $4,500 a month for trimming plants, spreading fertilizer and doing pest control, his family said. His shift began at 7 a.m. and lasted as late as 10 p.m., with no days off. He slept in a cubicle in a partitioned room in the red-roofed main house.
“I worry about our agents’ health all the time,” Williams said. “And those workers are living in it.” That night, Zeng talked to his family about flying back to New York, where his insurance would help cover further treatment.Despite the antibiotic, his condition deteriorated. His bosses bought him a plane ticket to New York for the afternoon of April 12, his family said. That morning, he recorded the audio message to his cousin.At 10:35 a.m., an hour after Zeng sent the message, a minivan pulled up to the emergency room at Stillwater Medical Center-Blackwell.
Problems are endemic at Chinese-owned farms engaged in illicit activity, officials said. Workers often tell investigators their bosses promised to pay them at harvest, then claimed the harvest wasn’t big enough. Owners sometimes offer new hires an eventual cut of the profits, and even entice them to invest hard-won savings in the ventures, then rip them off, according to law enforcement officials and workers.
Later, an owner of the farm tried to apply for bankruptcy, but a court found she had not disclosed hundreds of thousands of dollars in income from marijuana ventures, court documents say. Public records also show that the phone number for the farm belongs to the Chinese owner of a furniture store in Oklahoma City that the FBI raided last year in an investigation that led to three other people being convicted.
“I’m so scared will take revenge on me, my daughter, or family,” the woman wrote in a request for a protective order. “I have to live in fear every single day.” Police found 1,500 pounds of illegal marijuana, $32,000 in cash and two pistols in the run-down property, which served as a processing depot for Chinese-owned farms involved in illicit trafficking, according to court documents and interviews.
Chen has not been charged with any crime. But public records show that her Blackwell farm has multiple ties to another farm that was recently raided by the Oklahoma Organized Crime Task Force, which led to six In general, though, the reluctance and elusiveness of victims discourage authorities from filing charges of human trafficking or workplace abuses. They focus instead on drug-related offenses by the owners.