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Remy had a TikTok channel, so he started shooting videos with narration in Haitian Creole and sharing them with his few dozen followers back home and those recently arrived in the United States...

One woman told him her company wasn’t hiring, but she knew a place where they were always looking for new workers: JBS. The company is the world’s largest producer of meat, especially beef. If you’ve recently eaten a burger at McDonald’s—or anywhere, really—there’s a good chance the meat came from JBS...

Ebah, who had started at the plant after migrating to the United States from Benin in 2017, told Remy that JBS had about 60 positions available slaughtering, butchering, and packaging the meat...

So Remy went home and cut together a montage of his footage from inside JBS and around Greeley and recorded a voiceover with the information from Ebah... The next morning, he checked TikTok. Most of his videos only got a few dozen views, but this one had been shared by a Creole-speaking influencer...

“Tell everyone just to come,” Ebah replied. “Don’t worry anymore about where there are going to live, trusted me.”...

Ebah and his supervisors at JBS came up with a plan. The company struck a deal with the Rainbow Motel, a tiny motor lodge less than a mile down the highway from the plant, to house new Haitian workers recruited by Remy’s TikTok...

But as these workers started to show up, it became clear that the job proposed in the videos was even harder than advertised. A local union representing workers at JBS, in complaints filed with multiple government agencies, would describe conditions at the motel as “squalor.” And inside JBS, the complaint says, this new crop of Haitian workers was asked to work at “dangerously unsafe” speeds.

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