An Alabama company has agreed to a $20 million settlement and admitted that workers it brought from India to rebuild oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina were deceptively recruited and then forcibly corralled in squalid, overcrowded camps, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The settlement covers several lawsuits brought against marine services company Signal International by 200 guest workers hired to perform pipefitting and other skilled work on damaged oil drilling infrastructure after the 2005 hurricane. The first of the lawsuits, coordinated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, resulted in a federal jury awarding $14 million in February to five former Signal employees.

Signal's recruiters in India told prospective workers that their jobs would come with green cards and the opportunity to settle permanently in the United States, then charged more than $10,000 apiece for placements, a practice explicitly banned by the guest worker visa program. The workers who signed up found a grim reality waiting on the Gulf Coast, according to the SPLC:

When the men arrived at Signal shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi, beginning in 2006, they discovered that they wouldn’t receive the green cards or permanent residency that had been promised. Signal also forced them each to pay $1,050 a month to live in isolated, guarded labor camps where as many as 24 men shared a space the size of a double-wide trailer. None of Signal’s non-Indian workers were required to live in the company housing. (...)