The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America

In late 2006, Saket Soni, an Indian-born community organizer, received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker in Mississippi. He was one of five hundred men trapped in squalid Gulf Coast “man camps,” surrounded by barbed wire, watched by guards, crammed into cold trailers, and watched by guards. The men had scraped up $20,000 each for this “opportunity” to rebuild hurricane-wrecked oil rigs in return for promised green cards. Soni and the workers devised a bold plan:The Great Escape traces the workers’ extraordinary escape, their march on foot to Washington, DC, and their twenty-three-day hunger strike to bring attention to their cause. 

Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of twenty-first-century forced labor, Soni takes us into the lives of the immigrant workers the United States increasingly relies on to rebuild after climate disasters. The Great Escape is the gripping story of one of the largest human trafficking cases in modern American history—and the workers’ heroic journey for justice.

Saket Soni is labor organizer and the author of The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America. He is the founder and director of Resilience Force, a national nonprofit that advocates for the rising workforce that rebuilds after climate disasters. He was profiled as an "architect of the next labor movement" in USA Today and named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business for 2022. His work was the subject of a major New Yorker feature story  He has testified before Congress and at the United Nations. Originally from New Delhi, Saket lives in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter @saket_soni