On August 2, 1995, a multi-agency task force led by the California Department of Industrial Relations raided a fenced seven-unit apartment complex in El Monte, California, a small community near Los Angeles. What they found was one of the most horrendous U.S. sweatshops in modern times.

Law enforcement officers arrested eight operators of a Chinese-Thai, family-owned garment sweatshop and freed 72 illegal Thai immigrants. The workers, most of them women, had been held in virtual slavery behind fences tipped with razor wire and forced to sew garments in conditions significantly worse than those found in most sweatshops.