A farmworker died. Another became disabled by a heat stroke. Their employer keeps sending people out to the fields.

Tina Vásquez

Sep 29, 2026

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This story was co-published with Guardian US and Enlace Latino NC.

It was 4 p.m. and 90 degrees when farmworker Carlos Vargas Moreno and other laborers set out to weed a watermelon field in Goldsboro, North Carolina, on July 19, 2022.

The workday had begun at 7 a.m. and included two 15-minute breaks and a one-hour lunch eaten outdoors. The heat index—what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature—was 98.3. It was the kind of day that a heat safety app created by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) defined as “hazardous” for outdoor workers.

According to court documents, government records, and testimony from workers present that day, Vargas Moreno paused to get a drink of water just before 6 p.m. A few seconds later, he staggered and then collapsed. He was later diagnosed with heat stroke.

Since then, the 38-year-old man is unable to walk or care for himself. In the absence of federal and state standards to protect farmworkers from dangerous heat, there has been little accountability for the employer who twice failed to implement many basic safety measures—including on-site supervision and access to timely emergency medical care. Vargas Moreno’s family is telling their story to Prism, The Guardian, and Enlace Latino NC for the first time, as they continue adjusting to their changed lives in North Carolina.

Heat stroke is a preventable condition—and it should have been on the minds of Vargas Moreno’s employers, a company called Florida Orange Gold. Almost exactly two years earlier, another man it employed, Carmen Sebastian Hernandez Mosqueda, died from the condition also while weeding a North Carolina field.

“Had to put up with the work”

Ever since “the accident,” everything about Vargas Moreno’s life has changed, said Daysi Romero Arellano, the farmworker’s wife.

“Accident” is a nicety. The heat stroke caused brain injury and disability that means Vargas Moreno must use a wheelchair. Romero Arellano now bathes her husband, dresses him, helps him use the restroom, and feeds him.

“Nothing is the same,” Romero Arellano said through an interpreter during an August interview. Seated next to Vargas Moreno, she lovingly rubbed his head. “Verdad, Carlos?” she asked him. Vargas Moreno locked eyes with his wife and nodded.

Due to the brain injury that resulted in cognitive and linguistic deficits, Vargas Moreno cannot verbally articulate the facts associated with his case.

To report this story, Prism, The Guardian, and Enlace Latino NC spoke to the farmworker’s family; attorneys Katherine and Francisco Bricio, who represented Vargas Moreno in his workers’ compensation case and civil suit; and Aaron Jacobson of the Farmworker Unit of Legal Aid of North Carolina, who is currently representing him in an immigration case.

This reporting is also based on thousands of pages of government records and court documents. This includes depositions of farmworkers, Florida Orange Gold employees, and North Carolina Department of Labor (NC DOL) officials. Accounts include conflicting information, including whether workers had sufficient water or breaks in extreme heat.

Florida Orange Gold has denied that Vargas Moreno’s condition was a result of workplace injury; the farm worker later won a workmen’s compensation case. The company did not respond to several requests for comment regarding allegations against it in NC DOL records and as part of Vargas Moreno’s case. When Prism, The Guardian, and Enlace Latino NC called a phone number listed for Florida Orange Gold’s bookkeeper Gilberto Gutierrez, the person who answered hung up and did not respond to text messages. No one responded to queries sent to the company email address.

Vargas Moreno first worked for Florida Orange Gold in 2021 as part of the federal H-2A visa program for temporary agricultural workers. A skilled farmworker, he previously worked side-by-side with his wife in Mexico’s fields, harvesting strawberries, asparagus, and blueberries. When a relative told him about the H-2A program, Vargas Moreno told his wife that he wanted to work in the U.S. so she could stay home and raise their young daughter.

He eventually signed on with Florida Orange Gold, a company formed in 2017 by the farm labor contractor (FLC) Jose Javier Gutierrez. Florida Orange Gold obtained approximately 500 H-2A workers in 2022, and Vargas Moreno was one of 314 sent to North Carolina that year. Gutierrez’s father was also a labor recruiter with his own business, and Gilberto is Jose’s brother.

The company operates across Florida and North Carolina, and it is one of hundreds of middlemen nationwide contracted by U.S. growers and crop farmers to hire migrant farmworkers and oversee their work. FLCs are the fastest-growing segment of farm employment, and they are the worst violators of federal employment law in agriculture. Though they manage hundreds of vulnerable workers in an industry rife with wage theft, labor trafficking, and other serious abuses, FLCs require no special training or certification.

Her husband’s decision to enter the H-2A program now haunts Romero Arellano. “Our life in Mexico was poor, but it was simple and we shared everything. I wish we moved forward with the little that we had,” she said at the couple’s apartment in Raleigh. In the dining room, there were balloons and streamers, remnants of another birthday celebration held over WhatsApp for their 13-year-old daughter in Mexico.

During Vargas Moreno’s second year working with Florida Orange Gold, starting in May 2022, he began to share alarming details about his work when he called his wife during meals and at night when back at the labor camp where he was housed.

“He said they were working him very hard and that there wasn’t enough water; there wasn’t a way to carry the water with them while they were working and that they weren’t given enough breaks to drink water,” she recalled.

As part of Vargas Moreno’s workers’ compensation case after his injury, she said in a June 2024 deposition that her husband told her on a daily basis that Florida Orange Gold wasn’t giving them enough breaks. He also told her that workers had to buy their own water to have at the labor camp and that there weren’t enough refrigerators to keep beverages cold. Vargas Moreno also reportedly detailed meetings in which Florida Orange Gold discussed H-2A workers fleeing the job.

The work was merciless. From July 16, 2022, until his heat stroke that occurred around 5:50 p.m. on July 19, Vargas Moreno worked between eight and 11 hours each day. The heat index never dipped below 94.4 degrees.

When he collapsed, there was no Florida Orange Gold supervisor on site. Farmworkers tend to have little control over their work conditions and surroundings, said Taylor Arnold, a Wake Forest University School of Medicine assistant professor who studies the impacts of heat on child farmworkers.

“Often workers are very spread out in a large area. So they may not notice if someone is in distress and they may not receive adequate training about what to do if someone is experiencing heat stroke. Workers can have difficulty communicating their exact location to emergency responders because fields are often remote or lack easily identifiable addresses. All of these factors together are extremely dangerous,” Arnold said.

Vargas Moreno’s fellow workers didn’t know what to do when he began to have a seizure. A worker called Florida Orange Gold’s founder, Jose Gutierrez, who was in another field several miles away. Gutierrez did not instruct workers to call 911, and he did not call 911. Instead, the contractor told the workers to wait for him.

The farmworkers carried Vargas Moreno onto a bus without air conditioning and drove him to the side of a nearby road. Vargas Moreno, now unconscious, was then placed on the ground outside the bus until Gutierrez arrived about 15 minutes later. Rather than putting him in the cab of his air-conditioned, four-door pickup, Gutierrez had workers load Vargas Moreno onto the bed of the truck.

By the time they arrived at the emergency room at 6:.32 p.m., Vargas Moreno was unresponsive, covered in vomit, and had a body temperature of 109 degrees. He remained hospitalized for almost a year.

During Romero Arellano’s deposition, Gutierrez’s attorney asked whether Vargas Moreno was the type of person who could stand up for himself and ask to work less hours. Romero Arellano wavered.

“Yes,” she said, but he also wanted to “obey the bosses” who were paying him. “He said he had to put up with the work.”

In a deposition, Jose Gutierrez did say that on the day of Vargas Moreno’s injury, he asked the laborers if they wanted to continue working in scorching 3 p.m. temperatures; he claimed they said yes. In NC DOL’s investigation of Vargas Moreno’s heatstroke, weeks after the incident occurred, the workers Florida Orange Gold provided to NC DOL for interviews claimed they agreed to continue working; that they previously received heat stress training; that they took additional breaks that day; and that Florida Orange Gold often ended their days early if it was too hot. But these claims were later contradicted by additional H-2A workers deposed in Vargas Moreno’s workers’ compensation case, suggesting to attorneys that some might have been coached by the farm labor contractor.

Johana Ramirez, the NC DOL safety compliance officer who oversaw the investigation into Vargas Moreno’s heatstroke, noted some of these inconsistencies in her files. In her own deposition, Ramirez said she heard of the workers’ decision to continue from company sources and not farm workers themselves.

Refusing work has sharp consequences for H-2A workers. Florida Orange Gold required its workers to sign a statement that said, “I understand that if I refuse to do any work or leave early, then I forfeit my job, and the three quarters guarantee housing benefit and transportation.” Losing an H-2A job also means losing the ability to lawfully work in the United States.

The standard is no standard

While Vargas Moreno felt he had no choice, Florida Orange Gold didn’t adopt practices that could save workers’ lives and that were strongly recommended after a farmworker’s death in the blistering Southern summer of 2020.

Carmen Sebastian Hernandez Mosqueda was one of 40 H-2A workers who spent July 18, 2020, pruning tobacco plants and hand-weeding rows of sweet potatoes. That week, the National Weather Service issued an advisory warning of dangerous heat. Florida Orange Gold H-2A workers still spent between 11 and 12 hours in the fields each day.

At approximately 4 p.m., when the heat index peaked at 108, Hernandez Mosqueda reportedly said he wanted to take the rest of the day off because he “felt tired.” As he exited the field, he buckled.

There was no Florida Orange Gold supervisor at the scene, and workers did not call 911.

The closest hospital to the field was UNC Health Johnston, located about 24 minutes away in Smithfield. But for unknown reasons, Hernandez Mosqueda was driven for 14 minutes to a parking lot in Newton Grove, where he was transferred to another vehicle. While en route to Sampson Regional Medical Center 22 minutes away, Hernandez Mosqueda lost consciousness. Only then was 911 called—50 minutes after the farmworker first collapsed. The records are not clear about who was driving each vehicle or who called 911.

Heat stroke is a time-sensitive emergency. By the time an ambulance arrived at 5:07 p.m., Hernandez Mosqueda’s body temperature was 101.5 degrees. By 5:15 p.m., he was dead. He was 25 years old. The medical examiner later listed his cause of death as hyperthermia.

Neither the state of North Carolina nor federal OSHA has a heat standard that requires employers to establish standards for access to drinking water, rest breaks, and temperature control. However, OSHA recommends employers implement a heat stress prevention plan to “control heat risk.” The Occupational Safety and Health Act’s general duty clause also requires employers to provide a workplace “free from recognized hazards” that are “likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees.”

As part of NC DOL’s investigation into Hernandez Mosqueda’s death, an unnamed Florida Orange Gold employee was asked whether the company had a heat stress prevention program. “If hot, take a break,” the employee told the investigator.

The employee also said workers carry a banana with them, and “they wet it to cool them down.” When asked to clarify, the employee explained that a wet banana peel can be used around a person’s neck to cool them off.

NC DOL ultimately cited Florida Orange Gold for multiple violations, including the general duty clause. For the death of Hernandez Mosqueda, NC DOL determined a proposed penalty of $7,000 and required the company to “abate the hazard” by immediately implementing a heat stress prevention program so another worker wouldn’t die or experience serious physical harm.

When Vargas Moreno experienced heat stroke, Florida Orange Gold made no alterations to H-2A workers’ schedules to account for the temperature—a direct violation of the heat stress prevention program the FLC purportedly implemented after the death of Hernandez Mosqueda, said Katherine Bricio, Vargas Moreno’s workers’ compensation and civil suit attorney.

According to testimony from the NC DOL agricultural safety and health officer who investigated Hernandez Mosqueda’s death, Florida Orange Gold had to be reminded to abate the violation of the general duty clause and submit its heat stress prevention program. In April 2021, months after the company was first cited for the worker’s death, Florida Orange Gold sent the agency its program: a template from the NC DOL website. The FLC made no modifications to the sample heat stress prevention program, other than inserting “Florida Orange Gold” into blank spaces and naming Gilberto Gutierrez the responsible party for carrying out the plan.

“In simple terms: A worker died and Florida Orange Gold signed a government document promising to correct the hazard that subjected the worker to danger. Instead, they pasted their names across a form, and they never looked at it again,” said Katherine Bricio, who along with her husband, Francisco, filed suit against Florida Orange Gold and the Gutierrez brothers. Also a defendant was Howell Farming, the North Carolina grower who hired the FLC to bring Vargas Moreno and other H-2A workers to the state and whose field he was weeding when he collapsed. Howell Farms did not respond to a request for comment by publication time about whether the company still contracts with Florida Orange Gold and if it has taken any steps since Vargas Moreno’s heat stroke to ensure the farm labor company follows a heat stress prevention problem.

If actually implemented, NC DOL’s sample plan covers a lot of ground: emergency preparedness, trainings for detecting heat illness, and actions employers can take to protect workers. This includes implementing a buddy system for help during emergencies, providing workers drinks with electrolytes, and using OSHA-NIOSH’s heat safety tool to monitor weather and cut workdays short when temperatures are dangerously high.

Based on the Gutierrez brothers’ own testimonies during depositions, Florida Orange Gold took no other precautions leading up to Vargas Moreno’s hospitalization other than providing water. Even years later, the Gutierrez brothers could not answer basic questions about their own heat stress prevention plan.

In May 2024 depositions, Gilberto Gutierrez said no one at Florida Orange Gold was responsible for checking the weather, though his name repeatedly appears in the company’s heat stress prevention plan as the person responsible for checking the weather. Jose was totally unfamiliar with the term “heat index” and didn’t know what electrolytes were. Neither brother had heard of the buddy system.

“There hasn’t been much accountability”

Leticia Zavala is often one of the first people to learn of the tragedies that befall farm workers. Zavala organizes H-2A workers in North Carolina with the farmworker advocacy group El Futuro Es Nuestro, which launched its Ni Una Muerte Más (Not One More Death) campaign to address labor conditions for farmworkers.

She first learned of Vargas Moreno not long after he was hospitalized. As tragic as his story is, she said the exact same thing happened to another H-2A worker in 2025.

“I was just at the hospital last night, visiting another worker who had a heat stroke,” Zavala said during an interview on Aug. 4.

Farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die from heat‑related illnesses than workers in other industries, and as temperatures become more extreme due to the climate change, the effects on these workers will be devastating. A record-breaking heat wave has slammed the South this month and earlier this summer, and nighttime temperatures nationwide rarely fell below 80 degrees—a phenomenon that will become more common. Researchers are now tracking the cumulative effects of heat on H-2A workers whose bodies never have the opportunity to fully rest or recover because their labor camps don’t have air conditioning.

As each passing year becomes the hottest on record, what’s really needed is a heat standard. In July 2024, the Biden administration released a proposed rule requiring employers to develop and implement heat injury and illness prevention plans, though it was swiftly challenged by employers. The proposed rule largely stalled out, but in August that the Trump administration announced plans to make “business friendly” revisions to the proposed rule.

Locally, advocates in North Carolina are also facing an uphill battle.

The North Carolina Heat Stress Coalition, composed of workers, unions, and organizations such as El Futuro Es Nuestro, has spent years pushing the state to adopt a heat stress standard. Last year, members of the coalition met with North Carolina’s new labor commissioner Luke Farley, who previously said he is not in favor of adopting a heat standard.

Zavala said the commissioner gave them only a few minutes of his time and never mentioned that he planned to launch his own heat stress council—one that’s dominated by employer representatives.

“His council is a political stunt,” Zavala said. “He might claim that he’s worried about workers, but he’s really just protecting industry groups.”

Farley’s Heat Stress Advisory Council, which met once this summer, includes industry groups such as the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA), the largest employer of H-2A workers in the country—and a group long linked to the mistreatment of farmworkers.

Farley’s office did not respond to questions about his council or his stance on implementing a heat standard by publication time. NC DOL also did not respond to questions about its investigative practices, oversight of heat stress prevention programs, and companies that repeatedly violate the general duty clause. The NCGA did not respond to questions about its treatments of workers or role in the Heat Stress Advisory Council.

A NC DOL compliance safety officer who previously investigated Florida Orange Gold said in her deposition that it’s important to immediately launch an investigation after a serious injury so that employers don’t have time to “clean up the scene.” That same NC DOL employee began her investigation into Vargas Moreno’s near-fatality seven weeks after the incident occurred. This is because the Gutierrez brothers failed to report Vargas Moreno’s hospitalization to the agency. The law requires notification within 24 hours, and it was attorney Francisco Bricio who made the call on Sept. 2, 2022.

“Farmworkers tragically die almost every year, but it’s hard to say that Carlos is ‘fortunate,’” Jacobson, Vargas Moreno’s attorney in his immigration case, said. “I think it was the intention of Florida Orange Gold to drop Carlos off at the hospital and not tell anyone what happened.”

In Vargas Moreno’s case, NC DOL eventually determined that Florida Orange Gold was not following its heat stress prevention program and that it had again violated the general duty clause. For these and other violations, NC DOL assessed the FLC a proposed penalty of more than $42,000 and again mandated that it implement a heat stress prevention program.

Those fines aside, “there hasn’t been much accountability,” said Jacobson. “Meanwhile, Carlos is limited in terms of what he can pursue under the law.”

Though Vargas Moreno eventually won his workers’ compensation case, it was originally denied. Francisco Bricio said that Florida Orange Gold initially denied his injuries were workplace-related and then denied that his brain injury was related to hyperthermia. Last month, the farmworker’s civil suit was dismissed—despite what Francisco Bricio called “false records and sham affidavits” submitted by Florida Orange Gold. This includes 2024 affidavits from H-2A workers alleging they received heat stress training before Vargas Moreno’s heat stroke. However, many of these same workers were deposed in November 2022 and said they received no such training.

As recently as this month, Florida Orange Gold was looking to hire 700 H-2A workers in North Carolina. Jacobson said he is worried about the treatment of these workers, but his office’s previous efforts to conduct outreach to workers were rebuffed by the company.

In North Carolina, farmworkers generally have the legal right to receive visitors in their employer-provided housing. But, according to Jacobson, in incidents going back to at least 2019, Jose Gutierrez and members of his family have verbally and physically accosted Jacobson and other Legal Aid employees and volunteers for attempting to speak to workers.

Arguably, FLC such as Florida Orange Gold operate with impunity because they are allowed to—by lawmakers, landowners, state and federal agencies, and local officials. The records associated with Vargas Moreno’s case give unique insight into how this happens.

In legal proceedings, attorneys argue over who owes a duty of safety to H-2A workers and whether strenuous agricultural labor in extreme heat is actually dangerous. An injured worker’s ability to access medical care hinges on the difference between a safety “recommendation” and a safety “requirement,” never mind that the minor action could save a worker’s life.

Almost nowhere inside this system is an expressed desire to do better, to improve working conditions, to create a heat standard so that workers don’t experience catastrophic injuries, or return to their families in body bags.

Romero Arellano said her motivation for going public is the hope that their family’s story will change these conditions.

“The people with the power need to do something so that what happened to Carlos doesn’t happen to anyone else,” she said. As for her husband, Romero Arellano said, “Justice is impossible.”

Update: Oct. 6, 2026: This story was updated to include additional details from North Carolina Department of Labor records.

Editorial Team:
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor