Lawsuit: Community college program was human trafficking

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Eleven students from Brazil and Chile have filed a federal lawsuit accusing a northwest Iowa community college, a recruitment company, a pet food manufacturer and a packaging company of human trafficking and involuntary servitude.

The lawsuit filed Monday in the Northern District of Iowa says Western Iowa Tech Community College and J&L Staffing, both in Sioux City, lured the students to Iowa in 2019 under a work- and study- based visa exchange program only to push them into factory jobs that had no educational value and were unrelated to the field of study.

The lawsuit says the students were paid significantly less than U.S. employees and some of their money was deducted from their paychecks to fund kickbacks to the college and staffing agency. Two of the students are from Chile and nine are from Brazil.

Civil rights lawyer Roxanne Conlin said her clients remained in Iowa after the program ended and that the lawsuit seeks to require the college to make good on its promise to provide them with an education.

“It appears to us the documents are very clear what promises were made. It’s also clear that they never had any kind of a program to teach these students robotics or the culinary arts. They worked at a pet food manufacturing company on the line,” she said. “You cannot coerce or persuade people to go to work by making false promises and that’s what they did here.”

The jobs were at a Royal Canin pet food plant in North Sioux City, South Dakota, and Tur-Pak foods, a Sioux City company that packs and assembles food products.

Missouri-based Royal Canin said in an email response Thursday that it’s aware of the lawsuit but does not comment on pending litigation.

Conlin filed the lawsuit under the federal Trafficking Victims...