The New York Times has expanded on their initial report regarding the child labor crisis created by the Biden Administration and it keeps getting uglier. The latest report shines a brighter light on the lies, obfuscations, and buck-passing of the assorted Federal agencies who were interested in protecting their own butts over the health and welfare of the children they trafficked. Health and Human Services (HHS) says it is the Department of Labor (DOL) that is to blame. DOL says HHS has the primary responsibility for the children they are passing out like candy to strangers. White House officials pulled their heads out of the sand long enough to throw their hands up and claim no one told them anything was wrong. Unfortunately for all the Biden appointees, the Times has receipts. Secretary Becerra, Susan Rice, and others were all warned that their policies were endangering children. Instead of protecting the kids, they fired the people who tried to stop them.
One whistleblower, Linda Brandmiller, emailed shelters and the higher-ups at HHS concerning children being sent to sponsors who were openly taking the children to put them to work. She was obviously concerned that these sponsors were not concerned for the well-being of the children, but rather saw them as a profit booster. As a thank you, she was fired.
She was not the only person ignored:
“Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk. The Labor Department put out news releases noting an increase in child labor. Senior White House aides were shown evidence of exploitation, such as clusters of migrant children who had been found working with industrial equipment or caustic chemicals.”
This explains why the White House and government agencies stone-walled a Florida Grand Jury seeking explanations for the rampant abuse of unaccompanied alien children they found during their own investigation. This is child abuse and child labor trafficking by a Federal government that knew what they were doing.
At least in this instance, the cover-up is not worse than the actual crime. Here is a story of one of the child victims:
“Antonio is living in Florida City, Fla., far from his family in Guatemala. In an interview last summer, he sat on the mildewed porch of a house crowded with other migrant children. He said he was working long shifts in a refrigerated warehouse, packing vegetables for distribution around the country, and had not seen his sponsor in months.
He missed his grandmother and sometimes went days without talking to anyone. He wanted to go to school, but felt trapped because he needed to earn money to repay his debts, support himself and help his siblings.”
In light of children being cast into indentured servitude, the Biden officials decided the real problem was the government employees who wanted to stop it:
“Jallyn Sualog was the most senior career member of the H.H.S. division responsible for unaccompanied migrant children when Mr. Biden took office. She had helped build the program after the passage of the 2008 law and, as a lifelong Democrat, had celebrated Mr. Biden’s win.
…
Concerned that no one was listening, Ms. Sualog filed a complaint in the fall of 2021 with the H.H.S. Office of Inspector General, the agency’s internal watchdog, and requested whistle-blower protection. She also took the unusual step of speaking with congressional staffers about her worries.
‘I feel like short of protesting in the streets, I did everything I could to warn them,’ Ms. Sualog said of the administration. ‘They just didn’t want to hear it.’”
Needless to say, Sualog was pushed out of her job for the crime of trying to do it. The Biden Administration has made it clear they are not interested in actually enforcing the law. Their campaign of intimidation against their own employees has not deterred them. Admirably, even this past January, another memo was sent to the Biden Admin:
“Even as veteran employees left, others kept sounding alarms. In January, shortly before the Times investigation was published, a group of workers sent another memo to their H.H.S. bosses saying the system had resulted in unsafe discharges. ‘We are pulling humanity out of “Health and Human Services,”’ they wrote.”
This is the end result of seeing every policy issue solely through the lens of political optics. The Biden Administration looks at immigration policy and does not see children, but rather they only see their own political demagoguery over ‘kids in cages’ ricocheting back at them. You see, the Biden Administration had backed themselves into a corner by campaigning on the idea that enforcement of immigration law was fundamentally immoral. Now that the lack of enforcement is leading to child labor and abuse, what can they do? The decent thing would be to reverse course and prioritize child safety over their own political chicanery. They decided to go another way and double down.
At least one aspect of the Biden Administration’s cover-up excuses does ring true, however. The White House, DOL, and HHS all complained about not having enough staff to reasonably regulate the mass numbers of migrants flowing into the United States. This is happening across the immigration landscape. Far more illegal and legal immigrants are being admitted to the country than the Federal government can possibly oversee. The only problem is that the government refuses to actually do anything to reduce the numbers. In fact, many in Congress, the Biden Administration, and the media are calling for even higher numbers.
Somehow, the position of supporting mass immigration has been considered the position of compassion. As forced labor, indentured servitude, child labor, discrimination, and wage theft are growing across the country, we need to dispense with this naive notion. No matter the intentions, we are seeing what the Wild West of Mass Migration leads to in the real world. Even if the Biden Administration had been committed to protecting children, instead of political virtue signaling, they would have been faced with an impossible task given the border numbers. Without sensible immigration enforcement that deters the astronomical numbers we are seeing at the border, children will be left unprotected and vulnerable to cartels and unscrupulous sponsors and employers. The Biden Administration faces a time for choosing: They can pick the safety of migrants, or their mass migration politics. They cannot have both.
JARED CULVER is a Legal Analyst for NumbersUSA
