Modern Slavery: Scientologists Exploited Immigrants in the US for Decades

How the Church of Scientology Abuses Religious Visas to Lure Thousands into Hard Labor Documented.

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England, 1994 Tina was 14 years old. Her parents lived in Scientology complexes in the United States, and church officials wanted Tina to join them using an R-1 visa, a permit recently issued by Congress for religious officials, valid for five years. Officials told Tina she should tell anyone who asked that she would be attending a special Scientology school and volunteering at the church part-time. It wasn't true. Once approved, Tina worked 24-hour shifts doing construction, furniture making, and administrative tasks. “None of this is voluntary,” she said.

Hungary, 1997 Attila Sonkoli, then 21, received up to five calls a day from Scientology representatives urging him to come work for the organization in the US on an R-1 visa. He eventually agreed, and to help him pass the interview, the recruiters shared the psychological profile of the person who would screen him at the US consulate. The visa was approved, and Sonkoli soon traveled to Clearwater, Florida, where one of the church's headquarters is located. The official took his passport from him and forced him to sign contracts in English, which he did not understand. Sonkoli realized that what he was ordered to tell the consulate - that he would perform religious duties as a priest - was a lie. “They wanted us to do a disgusting job,” he said. “And very, very hard manual labor.” He estimated that two-thirds of the people working in Clearwater were foreigners.

Canada, 2001 Hayley Keldani, then 17 years old and living near Vancouver, was taking calls from a recruiter who wanted her to get an R-1 and move to Clearwater. Her parents were Scientologists and had sent her there a year earlier for classes; during the visit, Keldani says she was raped in a swimming pool by a man in his 40s.

Church officials forced her to take responsibility and punished her. A spokesman said: “There have been no reports of rape at the church.” Now the recruiter was telling her exactly what to say to pass the R-1 interview. After receiving the document and entering the United States, Keldani was hired to demolish a house owned by the church. Several men wrestled with a heavy roll of industrial carpet and handed the job over to Keldani and another girl. “I destroyed my spine and neck,” Keldani says. Today she considers Scientology's Florida operations a forced labor camp. “It was clearly slave labor,” she said. — The R-1 visa itself was fake. There was no religious volunteering. I have never been certified or trained for ministers. I was just a young girl."

Over the past year, journalist Kevin Dugan has corresponded with more than three dozen former Scientologists from 12 countries on five continents. Some joined the church while founder L. Ron Hubbard was still running the show; some as recently as last summer. Whenever Dugan asked them to talk about their time in the organization, they didn't really dwell on Tom Cruise, volcano cosmology and aliens, or any of the other sensational things that get the most attention. They talked about rules, bureaucracy, jargon and quotas.

And work. For those who were part of the clergy, known as the Sea Org, their lives revolved around work. They cleaned, cooked, landscaped, cared for children, guarded, did construction and demolition, and did many jobs that brought money to the church, all for little or no pay. At Scientology bases in the US, called organizations, workers live in dormitories and work shifts are often 16-hour shifts, though some told Dugan that shifts can go over 24 hours without sleep breaks. Again and again, his sources described that the feeling of being unable to leave their organizations or give up hard work was akin to coercion, even slavery.

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Scientology is not a popular religion. Stephen A. Kent, a professor at the University of Alberta who studies the church, estimates its global size at no more than 30 people. But it's a wealthy church with billions in assets, including prime properties in big cities like New York and Los Angeles. The money comes from its members in the form of fees for audits (a kind of confessional) and courses that are necessary in order to rise higher in the church. Pressure campaigns encourage believers from all economic backgrounds to donate their savings. However, in the US, Scientology has long suffered from a serious image problem, making it difficult to attract new members domestically.

To increase membership, church leaders have recruited thousands of people from overseas, actively using the R-1 visa program, a strategy that is almost unknown to the general public and has never been fully explored. Federal regulations specify that R-1 applicants must be adherents of a particular religion for two years and must promise that they are coming to the US to work "solely in the capacity of a minister or in a religious calling or occupation." But former Scientologists told Dugan that they were instructed by church officials what to say about their work to immigration officials, who allowed them to get a religious visa. Upon their arrival, they engaged in non-religious work for a long time. Such activities may expose the Church of Scientology to responsibility in a number of ways. “If a person is hired to do administrative work and taught to pretend that it is religious in nature, then this is fraud,” says Michael Wilds, an immigration expert who spent four years as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn.

Wilds highlights the rehearsals and rote exercises that Tina, Sonkoli, Keldani and other workers, according to Dugan, performed with Scientology officials before their visa interviews.

"If they said something that wasn't true, that would be a reason to take action," he says. According to Wilds, even if some of the workers moved on to administrative work in the church, this had no bearing on their worldly physical labor. “It has to have religious content from the start,” he says.

Other former prosecutors agree. “You're talking about people who were masons, cleaning toilets and things like that. These are not religious functions. These are not religious professions. Not at all, says Theodore J. Murphy, a former Department of Homeland Security prosecutor. “The person who trains them could be involved in conspiracy, which is also a criminal charge.”

Every former Scientologist Dugan spoke with who was visiting from another country said that after arriving at the American organization, church officials took away their passports, visas and other travel and identification documents. “Now you are truly an undocumented person,” says David Spalding, a 23-year immigration official who most recently led investigations for the Fraud Detection and Homeland Security Division of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “You don't exist. You can't go to the police. You cannot talk to a social service worker. You can't buy milk. “You belong to us,” he says.

A coordinated program to recruit foreign workers in the ways ex-Scientologists described would be enough to get federal investigators to investigate the fraud, Wilds said. “If they can prove that there is a pattern and practice for this,” he says, “they could remove the entire church from the R-1 religious program.”

This would be a huge blow to the operations of the Church, especially as the ability of the Church of Scientology to draw on this pool of labor has already been threatened by the pandemic. In 2021, Scientology representatives, along with several other faith-based organizations, formally signed a letter to the Director of USCIS, describing the slow pace of visa issuance during the COVID era as a "crisis" and calling for looser restrictions to make it easier to obtain visas. There is good reason to suspect that this slowdown has worsened the operations and finances of the church. Newly released financial documents show the church's main base in Florida lost money in 2020.

Karin Pou, a spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology, said in an email that the organization "strictly enforces US immigration policy" and "works directly with the Immigration Board to ensure that US immigration policies and regulations are followed." She added that Dugan's sources were liars involved in a "coordinated and deliberate conspiracy to make false accusations."

Scientology has already successfully defended itself in court against allegations of employee abuse. In 2009, Mark and Claire Headley, a US couple who spent over a decade at Sea Org, sued the church for human trafficking, alleging that the organization stole their wages, forced them into manual labor, and forced Claire to terminate two pregnancies. . A federal judge in California dismissed the case, saying the church was protected by a labor law exception. The Ninth Circuit supported the decision, writing that the Headleys could have left the sect at any time and that the law they were suing under, the Trafficking and Violence Victims Protection Act, referred to "transnational crime".

Compared to Headley, foreign workers, especially those brought to the US as children, may have a stronger case. In April, three foreign-born former Scientologists who were drafted into the organization as minors filed a civil lawsuit against the church and its leader, David Miscavige. They claim breaking laws, human trafficking, forced labor, slavery and conspiracy. The Church has not presented a full defense at this stage of the case and is seeking to refer the case to arbitration. She denies breaking US law. Due to the age of the participants in the trial, it is not clear at the time what type of visa they had. But their lawsuit, which was filed in US District Court in Florida, contains claims similar to those Dugan has heard from former R-1 Scientologists for decades.

One of the plaintiffs, Gawain Baxter, who was born in Australia, alleged that he was "obliged to perform manual labor, including building repairs, cleaning other facilities and landscaping for 12 or more hours a day" at a rate of $50 per week. His wife, Laura Baxter, says she "had to spend eight to ten hours a day doing hard manual labor, including digging trenches, cleaning toilets and trash cans, and landscaping," and she was paid about $25 a week. A third plaintiff, Valeska Paris, says church officials "forced her to clean the premises 12 to 18 hours a day, including forcing her to climb into garbage cans and wash them with toxic chemicals without protective gear." The weekly salary, she said, was $15.

"It's just crazy," said Kent Williams, a litigator known for successfully representing hundreds of workers in a wage theft lawsuit against Chipotle. “Prisoners earn more,” he says.

How valuable the Church of Scientology is to immigrant workers can only be a guess based on a significant number of variables: how many hours per week they worked, for how many years, for what nominal wages, and so on. But labor litigation lawyers who specialize in wage theft cases try to make those calculations.

Four of these experts (Nicole Hallett, Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School; Daniel Costa, Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute; David Cooper, Director of Economic Analysis and Research Network at EPI; and Williams) agreed that Based on estimates provided by former Scientologists and tax documents obtained from sources over the past 30 years, Scientology's use of foreign workers has likely saved the church hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially over $1 billion.

“We came on tourist visas”

The Church of Scientology's reliance on immigrant labor is almost foundational, going back to the early days of the religion. In 1967, 14 years after the church was founded, the Internal Revenue Service canceled its tax exemption after it determined that Hubbard had unjustly enriched himself. In response, he founded Sea Org, sailing outside US jurisdiction with his closest followers on three ships. They hoped to spread the religion throughout the world so that people's minds would be "purified" or freed from pain and anxiety. But the journey turned into a long-term disaster as they were banned in the UK. In 1975, Hubbard and his team quietly returned to Clearwater, and it was there that the organization's cat-and-mouse game with the US immigration system seemed to have begun.

“It all started when we first arrived in the US from the Apollo,” says Australian-born Mike Rinder, referring to one of Hubbard's ships. “We came on tourist visas and we were coached and instructed what to tell the immigration office if they asked, told to say that we just came on a short vacation and that we all have return tickets. But then we just stayed." Rinder rose through the ranks over the years, becoming head of Scientology's Special Affairs Division and spokesman for the church. He left the organization in 2007, concerned, among other things, by its activities related to immigration and labor. “I'm sure it's a scam,” says Rinder.

After Congress introduced the R-1 visa category in the Immigration Act of 1990, Scientology leaders seem to have quickly realized its value. The permit rules state that religious organizations are not required to pay R-1 workers, although they are usually required to provide some non-wage compensation, which may be simply room and board. According to former immigration officials, obtaining one of the visas involved relatively little financial disclosure to the government. They are valid for a long time, up to five years, and the holder has a clearer path to getting a green card than some other immigrants.

The Church of Scientology has grown to include hundreds of corporations and non-profit organizations, and various parts of the organization have adopted R-1s at various times. Sea Org in Florida appears to have been the first. By 1992 church leaders were apparently willing to go to great lengths to secure access to visas. .

In 1993, the IRS restored Scientology's tax-exempt status, and the following year, Florida officials helped a 14-year-old Mexican man named Serge Gil obtain an R-1. “They had a person who decided what to say, how to coach, what lawyers to contact—everything,” says Gil, whose parents were Scientologists. “They were cocky.” They gave me a letter saying that I was an intern at the church.” He signed a billion-year contract with Sea Org, as is customary. “This is not hyperbole,” Gil says. “It took me a long time to understand that I was a slave.”

Church officials sent visa instructions to their bases overseas. One of those who personally saw the directives was Peter Bonyai, a former Sea Org official who worked in Budapest in the 1990s and 2000s. “There was a lot of pressure because they saw it as an easy way to reach a lot of people quickly,” he says. Bonyai recalls how Clearwater officials faxed "fabricated" letters claiming they needed workers from Budapest because America had a large population of Hungarian-speaking Scientologists who needed their help.

“They didn't really need people from Hungary to serve Hungarian Scientologists,” Bonyai says. “They just needed labor.” It was a cover story." Bonyai said that after potential clients interviewed consular officials, they would then talk about the questions they were asked and what answers seemed most appropriate to them. These details were included in the scripts for future applicants.

Clearwater officials instructed overseas organizations to focus their efforts on recruiting. “They were looking for very specific groups and very specific people,” says Kirill, a member of Scientology from 2006 to 2018 who worked for Sea Org. He asked not to be named. According to him, the people they were targeting were "humble backgrounds, didn't speak English at all, didn't work, didn't have big family obligations, didn't have credit card debt, didn't have mortgages." Kirill says that he personally participated in the training of visa applicants, helping them to play scripts, dialogues that they could remember, from English into Russian.

The Moscow organization also tracked which consulates were easiest to obtain visas from. “Moscow was considered more difficult than Vladivostok, St. Petersburg or Yekaterinburg - and sometimes we sent people to former satellite countries of the USSR, where immigration authorities were considered less demanding,” says He.

Potential employees were told that Scientology was the path to a better life—the path to fulfillment on a personal, professional, or spiritual level. Recruitment of recruiters varied depending on the purpose. Men can build emotional relationships with young women. “They flirted with young girls and made them fall in love with them, and then they brought them to Sea Org and gave them hope that they would date,” says one woman, a former member of an organization that worked for Florida Venezuela. Another woman, who says she came to the US from Canada at around age 13, was promised help preparing for a career as a building designer. “I joined them on the assumption that I would be accepted into some kind of architecture program right away and be able to design their buildings,” she says. - I bought it, and it was a complete lie. It was just slave labor."

The new members of the church told Dugan that they had been shown pictures of good living quarters and had no idea that they would have to work very long hours. Many also thought that they would not be required to believe in the principles of Scientology. “One of the main arguments in favor of the fact that you supposedly can - and this is absolutely not true - be of any religion and not be a Scientologist,” says an American, a former member of this religion who worked with recruiters in California.

After such treatment, some disappeared - or tried to disappear. An American working in Los Angeles said he witnessed church officials stationing people at a nearby train station to keep an eye on anyone trying to escape. “They are new to this country and have no idea what is going on,” he said.

Russia, 1999. 11-year-old Ekaterina Tikhonova and her mother Elena lived in the cold and unpromising Siberian city of Barnaul. Her grandmother had converted to Scientology during a trip to Florida several years earlier, and she encouraged her daughter and granddaughter to join the religion to achieve prosperity. “She sold us the American dream,” says Tikhonova. — Just the thought of traveling from Siberia to America? Sales. Right here and now."

Tikhonova's meeting with representatives of the US Immigration Service took place at the end of summer at the US Embassy in Moscow.

A few days before the meeting, her grandmother told her what questions she would face and how to answer, especially regarding whether she would leave the United States after her visa expired. “She didn't act like a grandma. She behaved like a member of the organization,” says Tikhonova. “I was trained and trained and trained and trained to answer the question without stumbling.” I was very scared to go for an interview. I was 11 years old and I knew I had to lie."

On the advice of her grandmother, Tikhonova even brought photographs of her family to interviews to convince immigration officials that their stay would be temporary, she says.

Tikhonova was interviewed. About a week and a half later, she left for Clearwater, where she began working eight-hour days doing housework, building, and cooking in an industrial kitchen. She was also required to study Scientology doctrine for an additional five hours a day. Living conditions in the dormitories were cramped, tiles had fallen off the walls, and the carpets were dirty. At first, she and her mother shared a room with bunk beds, but after her mother became a member of the organization, they were separated and Tikhonova could only see her mother at dinner a few times a month. When Tikhonova stubbornly complained about living and working conditions, her mother wrote a statement against her. This has led to Tikhonova being subjected to so-called "ethical processing", where participants are subjected to interrogations that can last for hours. Tikhonova was also forced to clean toilets and wash an industrial trash can. “It was like a POW camp,” she says.

Over the next few months, her interactions with her mother were limited to five or ten minutes. One day Tikhonova told her mother that she wanted to gain legal independence and leave this place. "Her response was, 'Where are you going to go?' Who will take you? Then I felt stuck. After a month of physical punishment and punishment with interrogations and everything else, and then being assigned to even more difficult manual labor - I felt that they just wore me down mentally and physically to hell. That was the point where I just gave up,” she says. “At that moment I realized that I had no choice. By then I was 12. I had nowhere to go. I'm in the United States. We didn't speak any English when we came here. We have no family or friends here, a completely new country. The only thing I can do is return to Russia. I have a big family there, but who will take me? I am a financial burden - I am a child. So I felt like I was just stuck. I had no other choice."

Tikhonova took Scientology courses and eventually began working as an administrative assistant for an auditor, making sure people showed up for auditing sessions on time. In 2006 she returned to Russia to get a new passport. During the trip, she said, she was raped by two men. Back in the US, Scientology officials interrogated her for several days, questioning her over and over again about the incident.

When she stopped cooperating, the Scientologists expelled her from the church. She had a green card that allowed her to stay in the US, but she decided to return to Moscow. She had no money of her own and thought she would be homeless in America.

“What they do with immigrants is they are constantly threatened,” says Tikhonova, who eventually changed her name to Katrina Reyes.

As immigration laws have changed, so have Scientology's tactics to protect its stream of foreign workers. In 2006, a Government Accountability Office report flagged the R-1 visa program as a program with potential for fraud, and the federal government began reviewing the program. Scientology officials submitted three letters of objection. One was signed by Glen E. Steelo, who was described by Rinder and other sources as a major figure in the Clearwater R-1 program. Stilo's letter challenged nearly every major change the government was considering. He sought to reduce the level of training that ministers had to achieve and opposed a change in regulations that would define a "religious calling" as including duties different from those performed by secular members of the congregation. In his letter, Stilo acknowledged that "a small percentage of our religious order members perform work in our retreat that cannot be considered 'religious functions', such as administrative work specific to the ministry of our church or maintenance of church property." The letter contained a line hinting that Scientology would challenge any Citizenship and Immigration Services rules it did not like. The following year, 2008, the agency dropped a series of proposed amendments that would have strengthened its rules on what a religious vocation is.

A 2009 FBI report noted that up to half of the organization's workforce came from overseas. Other government reports provide a detailed look at Scientology's active R-1 pursuit in the aftermath.

Church officials filed as many as 4160 R-1 visa applications between 2009 and April 2017, according to researcher R. M. Seibert. Each case must be approved twice: first by the CIS, then by the State Department. Former government officials and Scientology insiders told Dugan that in some countries CIS approved almost all applications. The data shows that since 2017, the overall approval rate is over 90 percent. The State Department's standard was tougher - it gave the green light to about 80 percent of R-1 applications for all religions in the period under review, according to its data.

What counts as religious activity is not a simple matter, complicated by the broad latitude the First Amendment gives religious institutions to determine their beliefs and practices. State Department Foreign Affairs guidelines provide that religious visas can be issued not only to people with certain occupations, such as priests or cantors, but also to those who have devoted their lives to a religious vocation, such as monks and nuns. It states that their work may be "any activity within their religious calling"; the guide goes on to say that the emphasis in issuing visas is on the individual's status in the organization, not on the content of their job.

“No immigration application or lawyer will ever allow permission to do any work,” Wilds says. — A religious worker visa is for exactly this: for religious activities. Nothing else is allowed. This would be a violation of immigration laws." Spaulding says that while religion determines its own practices, that doesn't mean the State Department is required to issue visas to anyone who claims to be engaged in religious activities. They both said that people who may not be able to consent to religious practice, such as children, people who do not understand what they are signing up for, or those who joined under duress, also may not be cleared by the State Department.

Russia, where Scientology-related groups have been declared "undesirable" by the government, seems to have been a particularly fertile recruiting ground. “Whenever someone says, ‘I am an oppressed category in Russia,’ we approve without even blinking. It doesn’t even occur to us that this could be a problem,” says David Spaulding, a former federal immigration officer. Church officials filed up to 660 Russian-related R-1 visa applications during the 2009–2017 period. It's unclear how many the State Department then approved, but the total number of R-1 visas it issued to Russians is strikingly close: 649.

Data for the period after 2017 is not publicly available, but around that time, Scientology interest in R-1 visas only seemed to increase. In 2016, the San Diego branch of the church asked the U.S. government for permission to sponsor visa work, as the Clearwater headquarters had done. The former Scientologist, working in training supervision at the time, says her job was dependent on foreign labor. “Recruiting local Scientologists was a headache,” she says. “It was much easier to attract people from Eastern Europe, Mexico, South America.”

Immigration officials scheduled an R-1 sponsorship check in San Diego at the end of 2016 and later granted permission.

The San Diego executive then sent out a memorandum to other locations detailing how to successfully prepare for government inspectors.

There is not much case law on religious worker visa fraud, but one recent controversy has parallels with some of the allegations made by former Scientologists. Last year, a group of Indian workers filed a class-action lawsuit against a Hindu organization in New Jersey, alleging that it was smuggling people into the US on R-1 visas under the guise of religious activity, when in fact they were helping to build temples. According to the complaint, the sect — Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, or BAPS — instructed workers to inform immigration officials that they would be doing decorative painting and carving, when in fact they were doing construction and masonry. The plaintiffs also alleged that their passports were confiscated. BAPS said in court documents that it did nothing wrong. On the day the lawsuit was filed, the FBI raided the temple and the judge suspended the case while the Justice Department investigates.

For decades, scrutiny of Scientology has tended to focus on the weird and glamorous, overlooking how the church has aggressively exploited an obscure visa program and created a network of exploited workers numbering in the thousands. This blind spot even extends to law enforcement. In 2018, Serge Gil met with FBI and Homeland Security investigators in Los Angeles to discuss human trafficking. He hasn't heard anything since. That same year, Mike Rinder said he met with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Tampa Bay to voice similar concerns. He also does not know if the investigators reacted to his information.

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For decades, the R-1 visa has been the entry point for thousands of people who come to the United States in search of a better life or a new spiritual beginning, before spending years doing back-breaking work for Scientology.

Even those who managed to leave the church had to deal with trauma: suicide attempts, depression, forced separation from family, a feeling of being pushed out of the world. "When people think of Scientology, they think of Hollywood, they think of funny, they think of aliens, they think it's a big joke," says Hayley Keldani, a Canadian who claims she was raped and injured while doing heavy lifting. work. “I've spent the last 19 years pretending this never happened to try to fit in and be normal. This must be stopped. People need to know this exists,” she said.

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