A mother and daughter who ran an adult nursing home in Oregon are accused of forcing Haitian relatives to work for them

Maxine Bernstein / oregonlive.com (TNS)

A mother and daughter are accused of luring two adults and a teenager from Haiti to Tigard, Oregon, and forcing them to work long days for $2 an hour at their adult nursing home.

Marie Gertrude Jean Valmont, 66, and her daughter Yolandita Marie Andre, 30, made the three sleep on the floor of the house and threatened deportation if they complained to anyone, prosecutors said.

Valmont and Andre pleaded not guilty in their initial appearances Friday in federal court in Portland to a seven-count indictment charging them, respectively, with conspiracy to commit forced labor, committing forced labor and facilitating forced labor .

To silence the Haitian immigrants, 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 sponsored the three to travel to the United States, but the relatives of a younger generation then demanded money and a car without working, the defense said.

The three tried to “arm” Valmont into giving them money, said Oregon federal public defender Fidel Cassino-DuCloux, who is representing Valmont.

The Oregon Department of Human Services had licensed Velida's nursing home in Tigard and paid the mother and daughter's owners and operators $191,506.97 for residents' care in 2023. Valmont and Andre, a registered nurse, were paid nearly $13,000 a month for being just two residents of the home, Rodriguez wrote in a post-it note.

According to its website, the establishment opened in spring 2022. 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 nursing home’s “low staff-to-resident ratio.” said the website.

The state has suspended the home's nursing license due to the recent arrests of Valmont and Andre.

According to the indictment, the alleged forced labor took place over a period of ten months from September 8, 2023 to July 24, 2024.

The investigation began when a 16-year-old girl had surgery last year and reported the symptoms to her pediatrician while hospitalized, the arrest note said. State child welfare officials were alerted and forwarded 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 with the promise of helping them obtain U.S. citizenship.

Valmont is accused of promising to sponsor the three as part of what she called the “Uncle Biden Plan,” her term for temporary protected status that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was seeking, according to the prosecutor's memo had imported Haitian citizens.

But when the three arrived in Oregon, Valmont and Andre felt 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 nursing home and ordered to turn over their immigration papers to Valmont and Andre, prosecutors said.

They were immediately put to work 17 hours a day or more, starting at 6 a.m., Rodriguez wrote in the memo. According to Rodriguez, they were initially allowed to sleep in an unoccupied room in the home, but then had to sleep on the living room floor when a foster parent moved in.

According to Rodriguez, they were paid $2 a day or $500 bimonthly.

They were forbidden from leaving the house and had to hide when state regulators visited, the arrest note said. When state regulators visited the home, they did not encounter the three alleged victims and sometimes had to call police to gain access to the home, the arrest memo said.

When Valmont was unhappy with the immigrants' work, she would yell at them or throw objects at them and threaten to send them back to Haiti, where someone would have them “found and killed,” Rodriguez wrote in the memo.

According to Rodriguez, Valmont claimed “she was or knew a Vodou priestess” who would curse and kill her.

According to its records, the state Department of Social Services had received complaints about the home since September 2023, around the time the alleged victims arrived. During this time, state officials made unannounced visits but never saw the three alleged victims in the home. State officials told investigators that it was often difficult for them to gain entry to the home and that they sometimes had to call police to gain entry. The arrest memo states that once inside, state regulators were not granted access to the entire home.

The prosecutor asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Armistead to keep the two women in custody pending trial, saying they continued to pose a threat to the alleged victims and witnesses in the case.

The three immigrants believe that Valmont has Vodou powers. “In their culture and in the minds of my victims, this is a very real threat to them,” Rodriguez said.

When the alleged victims went to the Tigard Police Department to inform officers of the conditions inside the home, they said Valmont drove into the police department parking lot, prompting them to hide at a nearby fire station until an officer, Rodriguez, who was available to take her statements, said. According to prosecutors, Andre also visited the teenage victim's school over the past two weeks to find out what she may have told authorities.

In a letter to the judge, the now 17-year-old wrote that Valmont told her that she was not allowed to talk to anyone outside the house “about anything that happens 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 attorney, Ernest Warren Jr., said his client's visit to the teen's school merely helped “obtain information to share with the government.”

Warren and Cassino-DuCloux urged the judge to release their clients.

Defense attorneys said Andre, from the Dominican Republic, and Valmont, from Haiti, are both U.S. citizens, have lived in the U.S. for more than a decade and have longstanding ties to the community.

They rejected prosecutors' suggestion that either man would flee to Haiti.

“Nobody in their right mind would try to swerve and fly to Haiti, a place that is unstable, a place that is corrupt, a place that is full of evil,” Warren said in court.

In July, the mother and daughter filed a restraining order in Washington County Circuit Court against two of the immigrants, claiming they came to their Tigard home and were physically aggressive toward them, Cassino-DuCloux told the judge.

He said Valmont was not a Vodou priestess.

Armistead granted the mother and daughter temporary release with several conditions. They have to hand over their passports and have no contact with the three immigrants or witnesses. He rejected a prosecutor's request to put his release on hold pending a district judge's review.

“Thank you very much.” “Thank you very much,” Valmont told the judge as she sat next to her lawyer in court, listening through headphones to the proceedings in Creole and through an interpreter.

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