Migrant Legal Services

Southern Migrant Legal Services (SMLS), a project of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, provides free legal services to migrant agricultural workers in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Our work concentrates on the employment-related legal problems of migrants who work in:

• agriculture
• nurseries
• forestry
• chicken catching and poultry plants
• beef and pork processing
• catfish ponds and processing plants

SMLS provides legal services for the following legal problems:

• wage and hour claims
• claims for breach of the employment contract or working arrangement
  (including H-2A agricultural guestworkers)
• employment discrimination claims
• housing claims, where the housing is provided by the employer
• transportation claims, where transportation is furnished by the employer or crew
  leader
• workplace injury claims
• racial profiling of migrant workers by law enforcement and immigration
  officials
• tax problems, which mostly result from the employer’s misclassification of the
  worker as an independent contractor
• unemployment compensation, with most cases relating to the employer’s failure to report the worker’s earnings as required by law
• education, where migrant children are denied access to education or educational benefits due to their migrant status

Most of SMLS’s work involves litigation against employers. The principal statutes upon which we rely are:

• The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (providing for a federal minimum wage
  and overtime pay)
• The federal Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act
  (providing for, among other things, disclosure in writing to migrant farmworkers by recruiters of the terms and conditions of employment, recordkeeping obligations on employers, and health and safety standards for transportation and housing)
• The federal regulations governing the H-2A agricultural guestworker program, and state contract law (providing for the contractual terms pursuant to which agricultural guestworkers may be employed in the United States)
• Title VII and state laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, gender, or age in employment
• State wage-and-hour and payday laws
• State workers’ compensation statutes
• State unemployment compensation statutes

SMLS does not provide services in the following areas: immigration, consumer, divorce and family, probate and estates, most public benefits, non-migrant education, housing, and real estate. In addition, because SMLS is an LSC-funded legal services program, it does not provide services in criminal matters. SMLS also cannot represent undocumented workers or H-2B non-agricultural guestworkers. (Most H-2B guestworkers in the South are employed in tree planting.)

Because SMLS’s mission is to represent workers in agriculture, broadly conceived, we do not typically represent workers in industries not connected with agriculture, such as construction, landscaping, and hotel and restaurant services. Nevertheless, workers with such problems should be referred to SMLS. We can assist workers in filing complaints with the U.S. Department of Labor, and we do take on the occasional significant case from these sectors of the economy.

Outreach paralegals and lawyers from SMLS and Texas RioGrande Legal Aid regularly travel throughout the six-state SMLS service area to engage in community legal education and to investigate cases. We typically find our client population at churches, Mexican restaurants, Wal-Mart parking lots, trailer parks, and farm labor housing camps.

Workers with legal problems may call SMLS toll-free at 1-866-721-7828. SMLS’s staff speaks Spanish.

SMLS Staff:
Douglas L. Stevick, Managing Attorney (licensed in Tennessee and Texas)
Katherine D. Esquivel, Staff Attorney (licensed in Tennessee, Georgia, and the District of Columbia)
Benjamin Holt, Staff Attorney (licensed in Tennessee)
Benjamin Weber, Equal Justice Works Fellow (licensed in Tennessee)
Chris McCallum, Outreach Paralegal
Dina Guardado, Administrative Assistant/Secretary

Southern Migrant Legal Services
A Project of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, Inc.
101 Church Street, Suite 325
Nashville, Tennessee 37201
Phone: (615) 251-3244
Fax: (615) 251-3347
Cell: (615) 828-7657
Toll-Free: (866) 721-7828
Toll-Free from Mexico: 001-766-721-7828