GBH, July 2025
From the outside, the houses in Braintree and Melrose may have looked like regular single-family suburban homes, but inside, prosecutors say, undocumented immigrants were toiling to pay off smuggling debts by growing marijuana as part of a multimillion-dollar illegal enterprise. Seven Chinese nationals were charged on Tuesday in federal court in what prosecutors say was a scheme to use illegal immigrant labor to produce black market marijuana in non-descript homes in towns across Massachusetts and Maine. Six of the defendants have been arrested and one is still a fugitive, officials said.
“This case pulls back the curtain on a sprawling criminal enterprise that exploited our immigration system and our communities for personal gain,” said U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley in a press release. “These defendants allegedly turned quiet homes across the Northeast into hubs for a criminal enterprise — building a multi-million-dollar black-market operation off the backs of an illegal workforce and using our neighborhoods as cover. That ends today.” Prosecutors say the Chinese laborers were allegedly smuggled into the U.S. and confined to the homes. Their passports, they say, were confiscated and held by the operators of the criminal enterprise “until they repaid their smuggling debts.”
