A mother and her daughter are accused of luring two adults and a teenager to Tigard, Oregon, from Haiti and forcing them to work long days for $2 an hour at their adult foster care home.
Marie Gertrude Jean Valmont, 66, and her daughter, Yolandita Marie Andre, 30, made the three sleep on the floor of the home and threatened deportation if they complained to anyone, according to prosecutors.
Valmont and Andre entered not guilty pleas during their first appearances Friday in federal court in Portland to a seven-count indictment charging each with conspiring to commit forced labor, committing forced labor and benefiting from forced labor.
To keep the Haitian immigrants quiet, Valmont threatened “they would be deported, killed and cursed,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Eliza Carmen Rodriguez told a judge.
Lawyers for Valmont and Andre vigorously denied the allegations, saying the three Haitians were relatives of the mother and daughter.
Valmont and Andre had sponsored the three to come to the U.S., but the relatives from a younger generation then demanded money and a car without working, the defense lawyers said.
The three tried to “strong-arm” Valmont into giving them money, said Oregon Federal Public Defender Fidel Cassino-DuCloux, representing Valmont.
The Oregon Department of Human Services had licensed Velida’s Care Home in Tigard and paid the mother-and-daughter owners and operators $191,506.97 to care for residents in 2023. Valmont and Andre, who is a registered nurse, were being paid almost $13,000 a month for two residents of the home alone, Rodriguez wrote in a detention memo.
The home opened in spring 2022, according to its website. Andre “discovered her love of gerontology” in nursing school, had worked in nursing facilities but longed for more “one-on-one time” with residents and preferred the “low provider-to-resident ratio,” of the foster care home, the website said.
The state suspended the home’s foster care license upon the recent arrests of Valmont and Andre.
The alleged forced labor occurred over 10 months from Sept. 8, 2023, through July 24, 2024, according to the indictment.
The investigation began when a 16-year-old girl had surgery last year and reported the conditions to her pediatrician while hospitalized, the detention memo said. State child welfare workers were alerted and passed the allegations to the state Department of Justice, which asked the FBI to investigate.
The three immigrants told investigators they were lured to Oregon by Valmont and Andre on the promise of help obtaining U.S. citizenship.
Valmont is accused of promising to sponsor the three under what she called the “Uncle Biden Plan,” her term for temporary protected status that U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services had in place for Haitian citizens, according to the prosecutor’s memo.
But once the three arrived in Oregon, Valmont and Andre made them feel like indentured servants, according to letters they wrote to the court.
All three flew from Haiti to Portland International Airport on Sept. 8, 2023, were taken directly to the care home and were directed to turn over their immigration paperwork to Valmont and Andre, according to the prosecutor.
They were immediately put to work for 17 hours a day or more, starting at 6 a.m., Rodriguez wrote in the memo. They were at first allowed to sleep in an unoccupied room of the home, but then had to sleep on the living room floor once a foster care resident moved in, according to Rodriguez.
They were paid $2 a day or $500 bimonthly, according to Rodriguez.
They were forbidden to leave the home, and if state regulators visited, they were forced to hide, according to the detention memo. When state regulators visited the home, they didn’t encounter the three alleged victims, and sometimes had to call police to get access to the home, according to the detention memo.
If Valmont wasn’t pleased with the immigrants’ work, she would yell or throw things at them and threatened to send them back to Haiti, where she would have someone “find them and kill them,” Rodriguez wrote in the memo.
Valmont claimed “she was or knew” a Vodou priestess who would put curses on them and kill them, according to Rodriguez.
The state human services department had been receiving complaints about the home since September 2023, about the time the alleged victims arrived, according to its records. During that time, state workers made unannounced visits but never saw the three alleged victims at the home. State officials told investigators it was often difficult for them to gain access to the home, and at times, had to call police to enter. Once inside, the state regulators were not given access to the entire home, according to the detention memo.
The prosecutor urged U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Armistead to keep both women in custody pending trial, arguing that they posed a continued threat to the alleged victims and witnesses in the case.
The three immigrants believe that Valmont has Vodou powers. “In their culture, in my victims’ minds, that is a very real threat to them,” Rodriguez said.
When the alleged victims went to Tigard police to tell officers about the conditions at the home, they said Valmont drove into the police department parking lot, causing them to hide out at a nearby fire station until an officer was available to take their statements, Rodriguez said. Andre also visited the teenaged victim’s school in the last two weeks to find out what she may have shared with authorities, according to the prosecutor.
In a letter to the judge, the now-17-year-old wrote that Valmont told her that she wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone outside the home “about anything happening in the house.” If the teen did, Valmont said “she would have my family killed in Haiti,” the girl said in the letter.
Andre’s lawyer, Ernest Warren Jr., said his client’s visit to the teenager’s school was simply “to get information to share with the government.”
Warren and Cassino-DuCloux urged the judge to release their clients.
The defense lawyers said Andre, from the Dominican Republic, and Valmont, from Haiti, are both U.S. citizens, have been in the U.S. for more than a decade and have long-standing ties to the community.
They dismissed the prosecutor’s suggestion that either would flee to Haiti.
“Nobody in their right mind would want to go and try to evade and fly to Haiti, a place that’s unstable, a place that’s corrupt, a place that’s filled with evil,” Warren said in court.
In July, the mother and daughter filed a restraining order against two of the immigrants in Washington County Circuit Court, saying they had come to their Tigard home and were physically aggressive toward them, Cassino-DuCloux told the judge.
He said Valmont isn’t a Vodou priestess.
Armistead granted pretrial release to the mother and daughter with multiple conditions. They must surrender their passports and have no contact with any of the three immigrants or witnesses. He denied a request by a prosecutor to put his release on hold until a district judge reviewed it.
“Thank you. Thank you so much,” Valmont told the judge, as she sat beside her lawyer in court listening by headphone to the proceeding in Creole through an interpreter.
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