Action seeks to enforce key sections of landmark 2021 Colorado Farm Worker Bill of Rights
Colorado Legal Services this week filed a lawsuit against a Center, CO farm and its farm labor contractor over illegal obstruction of CLS’s visits to workers staying at the farm’s labor camp. The suit seeks to uphold CLS’s right to visit workers at the camp and to prevent the defendants from continuing to violate the law.
Meeting with Colorado agricultural workers to provide information about their rights and the legal services CLS provides is an essential part of CLS’s mission. Colorado law recognizes agricultural workers’ right to receive visitors at their housing and prohibits employers from interfering with that access or retaliating against workers and their visitors.
But Southern Colorado Farms, LLC and its various labor contractors, including most recently AgSocio, have consistently interfered by wrongly insisting CLS staff need permission to visit the labor camp, telling them to leave, following CLS staff around as they speak to workers, and taking pictures or video of CLS staff. At least twice, Southern Colorado Farms’s agents have suggested that female CLS staff are sex workers rather than legal professionals. FarmSTAND and CLS attorneys are representing the organization in the suit.
Colorado’s landmark 2021 Farm Worker Bill of Rights enshrined the right of agricultural workers to receive visitors at their housing. Legislators who voted to limit a separate part of that law early in 2025 made clear that visitors’ access to worker housing, including that of CLS and other service providers, remains in place. Today’s lawsuit seeks to enforce crucial provisions of the Farm Worker Bill of Rights that the legislature has chosen to preserve.
Most if not all workers who live at the Southern Colorado Farms labor camp are Mexican nationals working in the U.S. via the H-2A program, a group exceptionally vulnerable to employer exploitation. The camp is surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. CLS has received multiple reports in recent years that workers at this camp were not receiving enough food, and that community members tossed bags of food over the razor-wire fence to support them.
“Farm workers, like everyone else, must be able to access basic and necessary services, including those related to their health and safety, which at times may require privacy or confidentiality. It is no different for those living in housing provided by their employer. In fact, the need for autonomy and privacy in accessing services may be even more crucial when dealing with a private or sensitive matter that may be related to their employment,” said Jenifer Rodriguez, managing attorney of the Farm Worker Rights Division of Colorado Legal Services and co-counsel on the case.
“Retaliating against our staff when they’re just trying to make sure farm workers are aware of their legal rights and the safe, reliable resources available to them is unlawful.”
Today’s lawsuit represents the next battle in a decades-long fight for workers’ dignity in the area. In the 1970s, at a labor camp near the one at issue in today’s suit, the United Farm Workers sought to gain access to meet with lettuce workers, and filed a federal lawsuit that resulted in an order recognizing UFW’s First Amendment right to speak with migrant farmworkers at the camp.
“Colorado’s Farm Worker Bill of Rights enables organizations like Colorado Legal Services to provide isolated farm workers with critical information about their rights and to meet with them at their housing in order to do so,” said Kelsey Eberly, Senior Staff Attorney at FarmSTAND and counsel for CLS. “We are taking this action today to enforce legal protections that the people’s representatives enacted, and that the defendants are flouting.”