NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - Nightly News Films: Captives of Cannabis

Episode Date: October 1, 2022

Jacob Soboroff details his months-long investigation into labor trafficking in the marijuana black market. Law enforcement tells us that the practice is growing, despite two-thirds of U.S. states legalizing marijuana.

All of this weed was just seized in a raid by the San Bernardino County, California Sheriff's Department. They say that the people growing the marijuana were human trafficking victims. You're watching Captives of Cannabis. It's a name we chose for this documentary because it chronicles our months-long NBC News investigation into labor trafficking in the marijuana black market. The U.S. government defines labor trafficking as a form of modern-day slavery, and law enforcement tells us that labor trafficking in the marijuana black market is growing, even though two-thirds of U.S. states have legalized marijuana. That means that there's a chance that the pot that you smoke, you vape, or you eat could have been grown by trafficking victims, captives of cannabis. But as we saw,

and as you are about to see, not everything about this situation is clear cut. Good morning. I appreciate everyone coming out. It's just before eight o'clock in the morning here in the Lucerne Valley. This is the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, and they're doing a briefing right now for what is about to be a raid on what they say is a suspected illegal marijuana grow run by Chinese organized crime. Let's make sure you guys are safe, and thank you again for coming out. I appreciate it. The San Bernardino Sheriff's Department has conducted hundreds of raids like this one since August of 2021. The head of their task force on black market cannabis is Lieutenant Mark Bracco. People across the country are going to see us and say, hey, they're in California. Weed's

legal in California. Why is the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department going out and raiding weed grows? It's still illegal to grow marijuana if you're not licensed properly. So weed might be legal in California, but these are illegal grows? Yes. And so who are the growers? We have a mix. We have the Mexican nationals, the Chinese nationals. If you took the 90%, 95% that's made up of those two groups, it's split 50-50. If it's a Chinese national growing operation...

How many miles are located on the growing operation... Who are the workers? Who's actually doing the growing at these places? Individuals that have been trafficked here trying to get citizenship. We see a lot of times that they're from out of the area. Usually don't even have passports, green cards. They are strictly here to work, to work off their debt for being smuggled into the country. So they're being trafficked?

Yes. In less than 10 minutes of driving, deputies reached the grow site. Policia! Sheriff's Department search warrant! We followed closely behind with Lieutenant Bracco and saw people fleeing. I take this GoPro down. So those guys out there, that's what they said jumped over the mound? Yeah, they came over the berm.

Get on the ground! Lay down! Get down! Get on the ground! Come here! Let's go! Hey! Stop!

Hands up! Turn around! You guys okay? What the lieutenant said is that the people who they're arresting right now jumped over that berm out here. Here's another guy. Come here. Come here. Here's another guy walking over this way right here. Where are you guys from? No? You can put your arms down.

Arms down. There were nine workers on the site. Can I ask them a couple questions? Yep, go at it. We identified ourselves as journalists, and producer Arnie Heikele, who speaks Mandarin, helped translate. Do you all live here? Are you sleeping and staying here? How did you come here? are you sleeping and staying here?

How did you come here? They found this job through a website, a Chinese website. Through a Chinese website. They all live in New York. Everybody lives in New York. And how long have you lived in New York? Three, four years in New York. Everybody lives in New York. And how long have you lived in New York? How long have you lived in New York? I've lived in New York for 3 or 4 years. 3 or 4 years in New York.

And you're from China? They're all from Guangdong province in China. What were you doing for work before this? They all worked at restaurants before this. In New York? In New York. So you speak a little English? A little bit.

A little bit. Do you know this is In New York? In New York. So you speak a little English? A little bit. A little bit. I just told them this is an illegal marijuana grow and they said they didn't know that. How are you paid? Who's paying you? They said they haven't actually gotten paid yet.

You haven't been paid? No. But if you wanted to leave, you can leave? Yeah. Nobody's telling you you must stay paid? No. But if you wanted to leave, you can leave? Yeah. Nobody's telling you you must stay here? No. They said they can leave if they wanted.

They said it's actually very hard now to work in restaurants in New York. So a lot of them are looking for other jobs. And that's when they saw the opportunity online to come here and work on this greenhouse. Is what they're telling you, does it sound typical? I mean, what they're telling us, does that sound typical? I think they're lying to you. They're not being completely honest. I think talking to them in a group might not be helpful for you guys. So they're able to share their story. If you pick them off individually, you might get more. And you think if they wanted to leave, they don't have the ability? I don't think so. They would just get

moved somewhere else. We followed Lieutenant Bracco into the area where some of the workers had parked their cars. All the windows had been broken by deputies as they searched the compound. So this is a very nice car, and it doesn't add up. This is your car? It's your car? She bought this car. You bought this car? The owner of the car said her name was Fang. This is a very nice car, expensive car. But she said she borrowed money from a friend to buy the car. I'm confused because it's hard to understand why you've come here to work in the fields in San Bernardino County at a marijuana grow for not very much money. She said she has a friend here. Well, that's the reason she's here. There's a friend here on the property?

The gentleman, the man over there. I see, the taller guy. We followed her to a trailer. She lives here. So you're staying here? She works and lives in here. Are you okay here? She doesn't want to be here.

So she says it's very, as you can see, it's very dirty, it's very messy. She didn't like the atmosphere and she was preparing to leave. Did whoever bring you here tell you the truth? No, they didn't tell her that. If they told her it would be like this, she wouldn't have come. Even though she was driving a Lexus, she was still a suspected victim of labor trafficking. Where were you planning to go in your car after you were finished working here? All the way back to New York. Did you drive here from New York?

Yeah. How long? Yeah, she drove about 2,000 miles. She has a son that's 18. Where is he? He's in New York. He's in New York. She's worried about her son,

who's in New York right now, being looked after by somebody else. Meanwhile, the deputies have been going through the grow site. We have 25 greenhouses. A majority of them have marijuana growing in them. 25 different greenhouses? 25 different greenhouses down here. This is a shipping container. Can I go in? Oh, it smells like weed, and that's because there's a ton of weed in here. So this is processed. Can I touch this? Yeah, you just put it back.

This product here is going to get sent back to another location to be bagged into either one pound, two pound bags, and then it will end up in a dispensary. In a legal dispensary? Legal, illegal. And that's something California's legal weed regulator, the Department of Cannabis Control, acknowledged to NBC News. While they say it's rare, their inspectors have found marijuana grown at illegal farms like this for sale in legal pot shops. And they, too, have encountered suspected trafficking victims on enforcement raids. A sign outside of the compound raided by San Bernardino County Sheriff's deputies said no marijuana, but inside there were thousands of plants.

I mean, so they're growing high quality weed. Yes, high quality weed. Very good. Some people call human trafficking modern day slavery. I mean, is that, is that what we're seeing here? Because it is modern-day slavery. They're not free to leave. I know they may make that statement. If they were free to leave, why would you stay in these conditions? Do you know the owner of the property? Do you know the owner of the property? I don't know.

No. I've never seen him. She's never seen him. Who's in charge? I've never contacted him. I don't know if they're in touch with him. She said she's had no contact with the owner. She can't tell me who the supervisor is. She's never seen him. Who's in charge? She's saying she's had no contact with the owner.

She can't tell me who the supervisor is. Simultaneously, while conducting the raid that we witnessed, Lieutenant Bracco told us he sent another team of deputies to raid the home of the man running the grow. Since Fong and the other workers wouldn't say they were trafficking victims, Lieutenant Bracco couldn't charge him with trafficking and just gave him a ticket for black market cannabis. They're not giving us any statements that would help us find out who's trafficking them.

Nobody even goes to holding cell? No. She's going to release them? Nope, identified here. And they're going to stay here? Yeah, we'll release them here and we'll take all the evidence for our case. She says she's never going to come again.

She won't, but they'll find someone else. We haven't touched completely, but there's over 13,000 plants here. There's over 1,000 pounds of process, so you roughly have $8.7 million worth of product at wholesale price on this property right now. Where are you going to sleep tonight? She doesn't have a place to go. Because I have nowhere to sleep. And where are you going to go from here?

I will fix the car and then drive back to New York. She's going to fix the car and then drive back to New York. Do you have money to fix the car? Do you have money to fix your car? Not now. No. Doesn't add up. Doesn't add up? Doesn't. None of the statements are ever consistent.

It's one of our struggles with trying to hold these human traffickers accountable, is we can't find victims. They don't want to be victims. They just want to be let go and left alone. She just wants to have the car fixed and go home. The next week, we asked Amy Kim, a Shanghai native and grad student at the University of Southern California, to take a look at the website that all the suspected trafficked workers in San Bernardino say they had been recruited from. I think this one is specific for Chinese in America who don't speak English at all. There's Chinese restaurant, nursing, babysitting, accountant. Just based on this, you wouldn't have found those marijuana jobs

on the front page of the Los Angeles section. No, no, I didn't find any. Someone basically would have had to tip you off to go look for that job. Yeah, I think so, yeah. All right, so now if you search marijuana, what do you see? This one is from Los Angeles. And then it says like profitable marijuana farm sublease. So it says you are in charge of growing it and I will be helping you with selling it. Sublease means that you pay to operate the grow. The people who were working at the grow,

they hadn't been paid yet, and they said they would be paid eventually. This doesn't say anything about being paid. It says, we're going to, you're going to grow it. Yeah, yeah. It says like, you will earn money happily. And it didn't say anything about salaries. So you will earn money happily, but nothing about a salary. Yeah. So is it suggesting that people should sublease this land themselves, or is it saying you'll come and work for us on a piece of land that we've already subleased? I think it's for people to sublease themselves, yeah. I see. That's a key point.

The original tip we got was that some of the trafficked workers on black market cannabis grows seemed to have paid to be trafficked. Paying for a sublease to work on a black market cannabis grow would fit that definition. So we traveled across the country to New York to see if we could make better sense of what we were uncovering. We called different law enforcement agencies all over New York and different social service organizations within the government. Nobody seemed to know anything about Chinese national victims of human trafficking in marijuana. So we're going to go see a service provider who helps victims of trafficking in New York City to see what they know.

Inside the service provider called Safe Horizon, I met Anita Tika, senior director of their anti-trafficking program, and Rachel Searle, a staff attorney. Have either of you ever heard of victims of labor trafficking working in illegal cannabis grows before? Not, not I. This is one of the women that we met who was working at the cannabis grow. And this was, if I recall where she was living, let me play this for you. The person or people who

brought you here, did they tell you the truth about what you were coming to do? No, they didn't tell her that. What did they tell you? If they told her it would be like this, she wouldn't have come. You have a reaction to any of that? I know it's only a limited piece of this, but what do you think? That's very common. You know, another interesting thing, though, about this person we met is she was, at least she said she had a vehicle there. And it was actually a relatively nice vehicle. It was like a Lexus kind of crossover SUV. And she had said, New York plates and stuff. She had driven

out with some of the other people who were working there. Is it possible that even though she was there, she might have been a, I mean, it's just so hard to say, right? But I just felt there were contradictory indications about what was going on, which to me felt honestly confusing. I think that's a fair statement. Trafficking doesn't always look the way people would expect it to look because of the way it's been portrayed publicly. The reality is very different. And so it's not uncommon that you can have individuals who are paid some amount, but they're being trafficked. And so it's not uncommon that maybe she had an inflow of money from the beginning, or they were paying her to manage the other individuals who were being exploited or potentially trafficked in this location.

And so I think what she said, though, about if she had known it was going to be like this, she wouldn't have come. That, to me, speaks very strongly of fraudulent circumstances. So promises that were made to her that never materialized into reality. Fraudulent circumstances is important because under U.S. law, the crime of human trafficking involves fraud, force or coercion. I played a second clip. She says you have the freedom to go. I saw you nodding your head a little bit as she was talking. Yeah. I know she said that she was free to leave, but in terms of logistics, whoever put her in this situation has made it so that she can't actually leave in

reality. If she wasn't paid, then how is she going to afford gas for her car and food and the ability to transport herself from California to New York? Where is she going to house herself? Where is she going to work? All of the necessities. She doesn't have anything. We asked ourselves all those same questions. The Sheriff's Department in Riverside County, California, another Southern California county, told us they're also seeing black market grows. So we followed them as they served search warrants on two houses around the corner from each other in an upscale looking suburb. Riverside County Sheriff's Department search warrant.

Demand entry. This house is an illegal marijuana grow site. It's being used to cultivate thousands of marijuana plants inside. Along with thousands of marijuana plants, the deputies found four people. On average, we serve about 200 warrants per year, and roughly speaking, about 50 percent of those grows appear to be Asian-operated. Of the Asian grows that we go to, I would estimate that about 90 percent of them are operated using human trafficking labor. To interview the workers they found inside the house, the deputies called

a translation service so online interpreters could translate their questions into Mandarin. I'm asking if he is here at this house on his own free will. Is he free to leave the house? Yes, I'd like to be here. After interviewing one worker who said he had three adult children back in mainland China, the deputy interviewed his wife. Can you ask her if she feels safe at this house? Safe? I'm working. In each of these cases, anytime we're talking to people that we believe are victims of human trafficking, it's common for them not to give up any information on their trafficker to tell us that they feel safe, because ultimately we believe that they're in fear of with legal cannabis, some of their black market cannabis seems to be produced using labor trafficking from China. Potentially thousands of trafficked Chinese workers producing black market cannabis around the U.S. But we didn't find any accounts of workers saying they were trafficking victims.

Then we got in touch with the New Mexico Human Trafficking Task Force, and they introduced us to seven workers from mainland China who say they had been trafficked from Southern California, where we met them, to a black market cannabis grow in New Mexico, where they ultimately were arrested in a raid. If you wanted to leave, were you free to go? No. You couldn't leave?

So there was somebody overseeing them, making sure they didn't leave. They all feel they've been cheated. Cheated. We kept hearing from law enforcement and human rights groups that one big factor making people like these vulnerable is debt. They said they all had to borrow money to pay organized crime groups to get them from China to the U.S. So we asked them. How many of you borrow money to pay organized crime groups to get them from China to the U.S. So we asked them,

How many of you owe money to somebody else for either bringing you to the United States or for helping you find work here? Yeah, they all borrowed money. Everybody borrowed money. If you borrow money, can you do it? Most of them. What kind of work were you doing before you signed up for this job? What kind of work were you looking for or do you hope to have in the future?

Restaurants, massage parlor. She took care of kids. How did you find out about the job? They all found the jobs online, on a website. And our understanding is this is happening a lot. You're not the only ones. Have you heard examples of other people having the same kind of situation and treatment? Yeah.

How many? So in the beginning, they had never even heard of marijuana. They didn't know anybody else who had gone in this industry. But now, having gone through it, they know it's very far-reaching. They know a lot of people who have been cheated the same way they have. Lynn Sanchez, co-chair of New Mexico's Trafficking Task Force, says that if her group hadn't been alerted by the public defender's office and gotten involved, these seven, like most trafficked people we'd been hearing about, probably wouldn't have acknowledged that they're trafficking victims at all.

No, no, they wouldn't have. No. And that's typically how it goes. And that's why I think it's really important that people are aware of how much this is happening and how people who are caught up in it are getting victimized and, you know, their lives destroyed. Lin put the seven trafficking victims in touch with attorney Wang Xiaosheng, who's trying to get his client's Department of Homeland Security T visas, which are given to trafficking victims. Number one, my clients are hardworking people. Number two, they want to make money.

Number three, they want to make money to help their relatives back in China. And they heard of this story. They thought it was illegal. They were promised to work in the field or farm. Actually, they were locked in very tiny motel rooms. The freedom is restricted. It's a typical human trafficking case. With the help of Wang, Lin, and her organization, these seven are hoping for stable lives in the U.S. moving forward. But the same doesn't seem to hold for the other trafficking victims

in black market cannabis grows. After the raid in San Bernardino, the deputies gave $500 tickets to the nine Chinese workers, then left. What are you guys going to do now? You're not going to get paid. The windows on your car smashed. New car, nice car. We don't know how to do it right now.

You don't know where to go? Yeah. Does anybody have money? No. I get nothing in my pocket. Nothing in your pockets? Nothing. Everybody know.

You get everybody together, you get $100 over here. We can get a lot of people to work here. Over 100 people over here. Total, over 100 over here. With all these people, you don't have $100? Yeah. And what's going to happen to you guys? What's going to happen to you? What happens?

What's next? I don't know. We're looking for another job. Same kind of thing like this? No. What kind of job? You have a job for me? Anything. Arnie got the cell phone numbers for Jin and Fong's boyfriend, Zhang, and stayed in touch with them the next week. Zhang and Fong said they fixed the windows of their Lexus and drove it back to Flushing, where he got a job as a chef. He was worried about the impact getting a misdemeanor citation would have on his green card status. Two weeks after the raid, when Jin texted Arnie that he still hadn't made it back to Brooklyn due to lack of money, he invited us to visit him at a cheap motel he was staying at temporarily in the suburbs of L.A. He said he'd been sleeping wherever he could,

sometimes even in a borrowed car, and was desperate to find his way back to New York. But the situation for Jin remained grim. I have no money, Jin said. What hope do I have no money, Jin said. What hope do I have?