In the pandemic, hundreds of Chinese migrants who lost their jobs moved to a remote city on the Navajo Nation Indian reservation in New Mexico, to do what they thought was legal agricultural work.
Unemployed in the pandemic and unable to send money back to her adult children in southern China, Xia had been living at one of the crowded boarding houses common in the large Asian immigrant enclave of LA’s San Gabriel Valley.
In early October, Xia and five other women made the 11-hour drive to the outskirts of Farmington, a small city nestled in the stunning but sparsely-populated high desert of northern New Mexico.
In a series of rooms on the first floor, Xia and her co-workers sat in chairs around heaps of plant material that were delivered by rental van in the night, trimming the “flowers” off the top.
A convivial middle-aged mother of two, she had worked many jobs since arriving in the US in 2015 – home carer, nanny, masseuse.
Xia assumed it was someone calling them to dinner, until she saw men in uniforms with badges.
With no translators to help communicate with law enforcement or her court-appointed lawyer, Xia says that for days she did little more than sit on her bunk and cry.
Meanwhile, her mugshot and those of her co-workers were all over the local news.
What Xia did not know was that over the summer, about 30 minutes up the highway from the bright pink motel, a massive marijuana farming operation had sprung up in the tiny town of Shiprock on the Navajo Nation reservation.
It was part of a recent, surprising expansion of Chinese-American investment into the US cannabis industry.
While hardly the only minority community interested in cannabis, in rural parts of the US, the Asian workforce stood out.
To the southwest is the cathedral-like Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or Shiprock pinnacle, a giant rock which rises over 7,000ft from the desert floor.
It astonished Redfeather that on a reservation where new development is tightly controlled by tribal bureaucracy, a large-scale farming operation was going up across the street without her even hearing about it.
Not long afterwards, Redfeather says that San Juan River Farm Board president Dineh Benally drove up, and came over to speak to her.
New Mexico legalised medical marijuana back in 2007, but state laws have no bearing in Indian country, which is governed by federal and tribal law.
Benally tried to convince the Navajo Nation leadership to do this so that the tribe could begin generating much-needed income from textiles and CBD oil products.
The same year the medical marijuana bill stalled, Benally ran unopposed for the San Juan Farm Board, an entity with limited powers over farming permits on the reservation.
“The Navajo – we have the land and the water.
His enthusiasm for Chinese investment in marijuana is tempered only by his wife, whom he says will not allow him to profit directly from the sale of marijuana.
Lin remembers Benally explaining that the Navajo Nation was a sovereign country, and that he could “control their decision”.
“Suddenly so many people go there.
Some farms that had previously grown traditional Navajo corn varieties now had hundreds of hoophouses, lined up in neat rows that stretched to the horizon.
Her videos show heavy machinery grading the fields, trailer homes arriving on the back of trucks, and septic tanks being dug into the ground – the kind of major redevelopment that would normally take years to get approved.
But according to Navajo Nation Police Chief Phillip Francisco, to shut him down, they had to prove that his crop’s THC levels were higher than 0.3%.
Meanwhile, because so many of the workers showing up in Shiprock were non-Native, the tribal police had no authority to charge them with anything.
When Navajo police responded to complaints, the workers told them they had permission from the landowners to farm there – it turned out that 33 Navajo farmers had signed agreements to sublease their land to people like Benally, and Chinese investors.
Using her new-found social media capital, Redfeather began organising protests against the hemp farms. They called themselves Kéyah – or land – Protectors.
The young man – 25-year-old Brandon Billie – didn’t particularly mind these confrontations.
As threats to the workers became more frequent, Billie moved into a mobile home alongside the Asian workers.
But the job was causing problems at home.
On the frigid morning of 9 November, Billie had just made a cup of coffee and was about to go back inside his trailer when he heard a loud thud.
The same dramatic scene was playing out on farms all over Shiprock.
Over the course of three days, “Operation Navajo Gold” tore through the farms and seized crops.
Billie and dozens of farm workers were transported to the gymnasium of Shiprock High School.
The labourers were met by several Mandarin translators from the FBI, and Lynn Sanchez, from the New Mexico Human Trafficking Task Force.
Sanchez says that the conditions she saw on the farms, with some sleeping outdoors or on wooden pallets, without access to proper sanitation or medical care, were clear signs of labour trafficking.
Sanchez and her organisation were also told by a public defender that the 17 workers from the Travel Inn motel were still somewhere in Farmington.
By that point, however, the county prosecutor had been convinced that the women had not knowingly been part of a drug cartel.
She heard from her friends that some workers had gone directly from the Shiprock farms to ones in Oklahoma – the latest frontier in the marijuana gold rush.
Oklahoma City’s Asia District is a roughly 10-block stretch of Chinese grocery stores, bubble tea shops and restaurants, dotted on either side of a busy four-lane thoroughfare.
In a room decorated with Chinese and American flags, men play mahjong at two tables as others stand around watching.
Dressed in T-shirts, jeans and sneakers, the men range in age from their 30s to 60s.
Some of the luckier investors were at the Fujianese Association, but none would speak about their experiences in New Mexico.
Eventually, a sophisticated-looking man in a long wool coat – a single AirPod hanging from one ear – arrives at the club.
Later, in a conversation over the phone, Michael explains that the investors involved in Shiprock are embarrassed for having unknowingly broken the laws and suffered financial losses.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Michael, who’s in his 50s, saw the economic fallout coming and sold his three acupuncture businesses on the east coast.
Since legalising medical marijuana in 2018, this socially conservative state has rapidly become the country’s hottest weed market due to its hands-off regulatory approach.
As a result, it’s in the midst of a “green gold rush”, says Matt Stacy, an Oklahoma City attorney who helps clients secure cultivation licenses.
Though the cost of entry is low in Oklahoma, the cannabis business is by nature extremely capital and labour intensive.
Recruitment is often done through word of mouth, cannabis groups on Chinese messaging app WeChat or sometimes through hometown associations like the Fujianese social club.
Last August, when a group of Chinese men purchased an 80-acre plot and built a huge farming compound across the street from their home, the couple was surprised.
The couple – who grow three shipping containers of “craft cannabis” with names like 66 Cookies, OK Boomer, Spicy Berry – are concerned that these new, large-scale growers will flood the market with product or begin shipping it illegally across state lines to sell.
Chinese American cannabis farm owner “Aaron” does not want his real name used, but happily opens his gates to visitors.
For a man who just months earlier had zero experience growing marijuana, the fledgling operation is astonishing in its scale.
Aaron’s employees stay in a house just down the road, a couple of rambunctious puppies in the yard.
Aaron, too, hails from Fujian.
He still vividly remembers the despair he felt, when he arrived at strange new cities with all his belongings in a backpack and no clue where he was.
He learned English on the street, eventually obtained a green card, and went on to make his first pot of gold in the restaurant industry in Florida.
Aaron now employs workers with similar backgrounds to Xia’s, who are relatively new to America and willing to take labour-intensive jobs to survive.
Under federal and state laws, law enforcement officers can seize cash based only on the suspicion it was earned from or used to commit a crime.
In late April, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics raided a cannabis farm, which has a legal medical marijuana license but allegedly sold large quantities of its product on the black market.
Inside abandoned mobile homes and barely insulated plywood shacks, the contents of every cupboard, drawer and closet are strewn across the floors, likely the work of law enforcement searching for evidence.
She is sticking by her campaign promise to strip the 33 Navajo landowners of their farming permits, and trying to figure out how to start the huge cleanup.
Seventeen of those farmers have banded together to form a new, pro-hemp farmers’ association, claiming they “were unaware of hemp operator principal Dineh Benally’s intentions to grow illegal crops”.
Because a federal investigation by the DEA and FBI is still open, it’s not clear how many migrant workers were in Shiprock, or whether charges for any of the farmers or investors are being considered.
During the day, he sleeps in the back of his battered SUV in the parking lot.
Gone, too, are the dreams of travelling to China.
The flower trimming work never materialised, and she wound up working as a masseuse again.
The murderer targeted massage businesses similar to the ones Xia has worked in for years, and the victims included Korean and Chinese immigrants who, like her, travelled all over the country searching for work.
As a result, Xia no longer wants to work in spas, further narrowing her already scant job prospects.
After everything she’d been through, Xia says she’s still happiest among the fan-leafed plants of the cannabis farms. A few months after her return to California, she finds work at an outdoor grow where the hours are long and the sun beats down on her back.