This month, hundreds of federal and local law enforcement agents seized scores of Northern California properties purchased with money wired to the United States by a Chinese crime organization and used to grow colossal quantities of cannabis.<\/p>\n
According to a\u00a0press release<\/a>\u00a0from the Justice Department release, on April 4, California authorities cooperated in the raids because the cannabis was apparently being grown for shipment across state lines. Additionally, none of these grow operations were licensed by the state.<\/p>\n The raids \u2014 involving some 500 officers, including SWAT teams \u2014 followed a months-long investigation targeting dozens of Chinese nationals who purchased homes in seven counties across California. U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said most of the homeowners were in the United States legally, and were not arrested. An investigation is underway to determine if the homeowners were indebted to the criminal organization and coerced into growing cannabis.<\/p>\n Scott said the growers may have essentially been \u201cindentured servants,\u201d and many speak only Mandarin Chinese.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cWe\u2019re treating them as victims,\u201d added FBI Special Agent in Charge Sean Ragan, speaking to<\/a> the\u00a0Associated Press.<\/p>\n Authorities said they monitored at least 125 wire transfers totaling $6.3 million from China\u2019s Fujian Province \u2014 all just shy of the $50,000 limit imposed by the Chinese government, as the AP notes. The feds said the cannabis was being shipped to various states across the country, as far east as New York City.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was a large-scale operation, with millions of dollars coming into the U.S. from China,\u201d said Cindy Chen, assistant Special Agent in Charge at IRS Criminal Investigation. \u201cThis criminal organization used foreign money to purchase homes and turned them into marijuana grow houses; all at the cost of innocent neighborhoods.\u201d<\/p>\n The\u00a0hardline<\/a>\u00a0U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions<\/a> struck a xenophobic tone in his statement, saying that transnational criminal organizations are \u201ca blight on our communities, bringing dangerous drugs to our streets and trying to impose a false sovereignty over our neighborhoods.\u201d<\/p>\n Exploitation of immigrant labor is a phenomenon now widely seen in the West Coast\u2019s cannabis industry, just as in traditional agribusiness sectors. But where cannabis operations remain outside the law, there are even slimmer prospects for decent labor standards. Signs of this problem have been mounting for some time.<\/p>\n Last August, a dispute at a cannabis farm in California\u2019s Yuba County erupted into a\u00a0shoot-out<\/a>,\u00a0leaving one employee dead and two sheriff\u2019s deputies wounded. The violence broke out when police responded to reports of a trimmer at the farm uprooting and damaging plants following an argument with his employers. Management described the employee as a \u201ctrimmigrants<\/a>,\u201d the slightly derisive sobriquet for seasonal workers hired to trim the newly harvested buds.<\/p>\n And in Washington, another state that has legalized, government officials conducted a series of raids in which over 50 Chinese nationals were arrested for unlicensed cultivation. Authorities in Grays Harbor County said the suspects were believed to be \u201cindentured servants<\/a>\u201d who had been brought to the United States on \u201cfalse pretenses\u201d and forced to work to pay off their passage.<\/p>\n A related problem is the stigma that attaches to immigrant labor \u2014 which may follow even where there is no evidence of such exploitation. Recent months have seen a controversy in Northern California\u2019s Siskiyou County, where ethnic Hmong immigrants from Laos have been moving into the local cannabis industry. This has sparked suspicion and resentment from many of the county\u2019s white residents, and led to claims of discrimination<\/a>\u00a0from Hmong residents, who charged they were being selectively targeted in marijuana raids. A discrimination suit filed against the county by Siskyou Hmong was rejected by a federal judge in Sacramento in September.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong> did you know foreign crime networks grew cannabis in California?<\/p>\n The post Chinese Crime Networks Linked to Crackdown on CA Grow Ops<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
This month, hundreds of federal and local law enforcement agents seized scores of Northern California properties purchased with money wired to the United States by a Chinese crime organization and used to grow colossal quantities of cannabis. According to a\u00a0press release\u00a0from the Justice Department release, on April 4, California authoritiesContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[148,50,3950,696,1126,380,3951,1127,3952,553,96,81,3953],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25337"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25338,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25337\/revisions\/25338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Chinese Crime Networks Linked to Crackdown on CA Grow Ops<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"