Settlements involve payouts totaling more than $5 million

By Clark Kauffman, Iowa Capital Dispatch
July 26, 2024

Western Iowa Tech Community College has agreed to settle the second of two federal lawsuits alleging the school conspired with others to engage in human trafficking.

As reported by Radio Iowa earlier this week, WITCC of Sioux City has agreed to pay $2.3 million to settle a lawsuit initiated by 10 students from Brazil. In April, the school agreed to pay $3 million to settle similar claims brought by 13 students from Chile.

Court documents confirm that while the lawsuits have yet to be dismissed, settlements between the school and the students have been finalized.

College President Terry Murrell said earlier this week that he took responsibility for the problems in the school’s J-1 visa program that was intended to offer educational opportunities for foreign students.

“The J-1 program is complex, it’s complicated,” Murrell stated, “and I don’t think we appreciated that when we stepped in, and all of that is my fault … We got too deep into something we were not overly familiar with, and we didn’t do a good job.”

The Sioux City college was accused of procuring visas for the students to enroll in the school’s international education program, and then steering them to work in area meat processing plants. The college then diverted money from the students’ paychecks to reimburse the school for the cost of the program, the lawsuits claimed.

The defendants in the two cases, all of whom denied any wrongdoing, included the college and several of its employees; Tur-Pak Foods, which runs a food-processing plant in Sioux City; Royal Canin USA, which runs a dog-food factory in North Sioux City, South Dakota; and J & L Staffing and Recruiting, which allegedly helped place the students in the two plants at the behest of the school.

Court records indicate that J & L remains a defendant in one of the cases and that J & L, Royal Canin and Tur-Pak Foods remain as defendants in the second case.

The two lawsuits survived a broad array of legal challenges mounted by the defendants over the past three years. Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa Leonard T. Strand dismissed claims of racketeering and indentured servitude against the defendants in one case, but let stand several counts alleging human trafficking, breach of contract, fraud and, with regard to the school, the intentional infliction of emotional distress.

“WITCC specifically prohibited (the students) from seeking other employment without permission, making their labor for Tur-Pak or Royal Canin the only way they could provide for themselves,” Strand stated in his ruling. “The (students) are foreign nationals with varying levels of proficiency in English. They all made financial sacrifices to be a part of the program, with several of them selling nearly everything they owned prior to enrolling in the program.”

The lawsuits alleged that WITCC recruited the students with the promise of working in the culinary arts or robotics industries. However, the culinary arts program students signed up for was allegedly rebranded as a “food-service diploma program” and the robotics program students signed up for was rebranded as an “electromechanical technician program.”

After arriving in Iowa, the students were put to work on meatpacking production lines to help fill a labor shortage in western Iowa. Some of the students had to work 12-hour overnight shifts and then report to class by 8 a.m., one of the lawsuits alleges.

The school allegedly arranged for J & L to put the students to work at Tur-Pak and Royal Canin. The arrangement allegedly called for the two companies to pay $15 an hour for the students’ labor, with $7.75 an hour of that routed to the college to offset the expense of the students’ housing, tuition and fees.

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Deputy Editor Clark Kauffman has worked during the past 30 years as both an investigative reporter and editorial writer at two of Iowa’s largest newspapers, the Des Moines Register and the Quad-City Times. He has won numerous state and national awards for reporting and editorial writing.

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