A former ICE official under Donald Trump is calling the Biden administration guilty of fueling illegal child labor through the border crisis.
Former Trump U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief of staff and current Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) director of investigations Jon Feere wrote an August 15 opinion piece for the New York Post. He argued that the “Biden administration is responsible for launching the largest explosion of illegal child labor in American history through lawless immigration policies” and urged Congress to take action.
”In just the past two years, investigators have found shocking instances of young children working at slaughterhouses in Nebraska and Hyundai suppliers in Alabama,” Feere wrote. “All because President Biden would rather see children working than actually enforce our immigration laws.” Feere has a solution, though — Congress can require ICE to step up its worksite investigations every month and file quarterly reports.
While ICE investigations often end “child labor, exploitation, identity theft, tax evasion and a host of other crimes,” Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “gutted this effort the first year of the Biden administration,” Feere explained. Mayorkas issued a memo telling ICE to stop “cease mass worksite operations” and investigations into employers if it were likely that such investigations would lead to arrests of many illegal aliens. It’s insane what the Biden administration does to facilitate law-breaking.
On pace for 181,000 arrests this month. More than 70% being released. This doesn’t include thousands of others who evade arrest.
Biden, Harris, Mayorkas and their minions are LYING to you. It’s all propaganda. The border remains a massive, deadly, out-of-control crime scene.
— Border Patrol Union – NBPC (@BPUnion) August 15, 2023
Feere noted that Mayorkas’s “lawless memo” does not restrict Congress from funding more worksite investigations, however. “Congress could also require the Department of Labor to work with ICE and ensure that illegal immigrants identified during a DOL investigation aren’t allowed to move to a different employer,” he added. Democrats “quietly encourage” this problem, he insisted.
There is a practice of DOL effectively blocking ICE investigators from visiting problematic worksites until DOL wraps up its own investigations, which can go on for years.
By the time ICE shows up, the unlawful labor is gone and evidence of the employer’s crimes may be unavailable.
Congress can also choose to block a provision included in previous DHS funding bills that prohibits ICE from arresting most sponsors of illegal-alien children arriving at our borders.
These are the children being exploited at worksites across the country, but in 2019, language written by then-Sen. Kamala Harris stopped ICE’s efforts to vet and arrest most sponsors, potential sponsors and anyone living in the house of these sponsors.
Health and Human Services reports on abuse and trafficking more than doubled within a three-month timeframe after Harris’s problematic idea became law, Feere wrote.
Feere ended with the sobering statement that the Biden administration’s “zeal” to bring in illegal aliens and to overlook those hiring illegals has “dramatically expanded child labor” in America.
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