I reached out to more than 75 blueberry brands, grocery stores, fast-food chains, farmers, trade groups and labor contractors while reporting this series. Only one brand responded.

Fruits and vegetables from those farms are labeled with a green sticker of a woman holding a basket of tomatoes. When I’ve found produce with these stickers in my grocery stores, they don’t cost measurably more than others without the label.

Supermarkets commit to paying a little more for produce — a cost so negligible, only a few pennies per pound, that one expert said it shouldn’t drive up prices. For those few pennies, grocers get crops from farms that offer their workers stronger protections.

You might find the location where the berries are grown/distributed. But not the farm. To keep up with demand, and to help keep prices low, a brand will buy berries from a whole bunch of farms and sell them under one label. Here’s an illustration of where you’d find that info.

Federal regulators don’t require blueberry brands to disclose on their packaging any information about the individual farms they buy from. I began by looking at labels, snapping photos, researching brands and going through government records.

I eat a lot of blueberries, which happen to be the fruit grown most where I live: Georgia. Every time I reached for berries in my fridge, I struggled with the disconnect between the problems on America’s farms and the limited awareness of those problems in most households.

I’ve reported at length about abuses of foreign farmworkers who come to the U.S. on H-2A visas: stolen wages, guns pointed in their faces. One woman I met was kidnapped, raped and nearly killed. I wanted to know: How do I tell if the produce I buy is part of the problem? 👇

This past June, the Trump administration went one step further, suspending any enforcement of the new program’s rules until that litigation is resolved. The number of H-2A visas issued has increased every year since Sofi arrived.

But though this case revealed how easy it is to exploit and abuse visaholders, little has changed. The Biden administration increased protections for H-2A workers, but several lawsuits filed by states including Georgia have prevented them from fully going into effect.

Mendoza declined multiple requests for an interview and did not provide comments in response to ProPublica’s letters detailing the case. His lawyer has maintained that his relationship with Sofi was consensual. Here’s more details on how we were able to report this story.

Mendoza became one of the first people indicted in Operation Blooming Onion, which exposed widespread abuses of H-2A workers in Georgia. He later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in forced labor. Operation Blooming Onion is one of the largest H-2A trafficking investigations ever.

After he was released from jail, Mendoza tracked Sofi down, kidnapped her and drove her to a cemetery. According to evidence detailed in a police report, on the way there Mendoza sought advice from a colleague in Mexico on what to do. The colleague said he should kill her.

A labor contractor named Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr. helped Sofi secure an H-2A visa for a job at a blueberry farm in Georgia. But he ignored the terms of her contract. She was not sent out to work in the fields like the others. She would not be paid at all.

In each of those states, insurance regulators can’t point to a single penalty for ghost networks.