The Rainbow Motel in Greeley, Colorado, where Haitian migrants were housed while they started new jobs on the JBS beef processing line. Mary Anne Andrei
Mackenson Remy didn’t plan to bypass security when he drove into the parking lot of a factory in Greeley, Colorado. He’d never been there before. All he knew was this place had jobs—lots of jobs.
Remy is originally from Haiti, and in 2023, he’d been making TikTok videos about job openings in the area for his few followers, mostly other Haitians.
What Remy didn’t know was that he had stumbled onto a meatpacking plant owned by the largest meat producer in the world, JBS. The video he made outside the facility went viral, and hundreds of Haitians moved for jobs at the plant.
But less than a year later, Remy and JBS were accused of human trafficking and exploitation by the union representing workers.
This week on Reveal, in an update of an episode that first aired in February 2025, reporter Ted Genoways with the Food & Environment Reporting Network assesses what has changed for these workers since our story first aired, including becoming targets of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.
