A pattern is emerging as the cleanup of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast morphs into its multibillion-dollar reconstruction: Come payday, untold numbers of Hispanic immigrant laborers are being stiffed. Sometimes, the boss simply vanishes. Other workers wait on promises that soon, someone in a complex hierarchy of contractors will provide the funds to pay them.

Nonpayment of wages is a violation of federal labor law, but these workers — thousands of them, channeled into teams that corral debris, swaddle punctured roofs in blue tarps and gut rain-ravaged homes — are especially vulnerable because many are here illegally.

After Katrina hit, Armando Ojeda paid $1,200 to be smuggled across the desert border from Mexico, a walk that took several nights. Talk of $10 an hour — more in a day than he made each week at a computer factory back home — led him to pay another $1,200 to be crammed in van with a dozen other immigrants and driven 1,600 miles, from a safe house in Arizona to Mississippi.

The passengers were not fed — Ojeda recalls his mouth watering when he smelled tacos the driver ate — and were discharged near the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport, where Ojeda sleepwalked though his first day clearing hurricane-strewn junk.

The job was supposed to pay $7 an hour. But six weeks later, Ojeda still hasn’t been paid the $600-plus he said he is owed for eight days of dawn-to-dusk labor.

Karen Tovar, the subcontractor on the job, acknowledged she hasn’t been able to pay dozens of workers a total of about $130,000. She insisted she was not at fault, blaming the way payments can be stalled along a long chain of subcontractors often led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

At one point, Tovar had 83 workers cleaning the Navy base under a broader, $12 million contract held by KBR, a firm owned by Vice President     Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton.

After several weeks without pay, many workers grew frustrated and left.

“I’ve told them, ‘When I get paid, you will receive your funds.’ And they say, ‘When?'” she said. “I’m very sure it’s going to be shortly.”

An Army Corps spokesman said he wasn’t aware of any problems with payments. A KBR spokeswoman wouldn’t provide details about the base cleanup, referring inquiries to the Navy, which referred questions about subcontractors back to KBR.

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