Child Labor – 14-Year-Old Chicken Deboners and 12-Year-Old Roofers

A return to child labor exploitation by big industry continues to flourish in President Joe Biden’s open borders America, and the federal agencies tasked with cracking down on this modern-day barbarity make it clear that no serious punishment will ever be handed down to perpetrators.

Investigators with the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division “found that The Exclusive Poultry Inc. and related companies established by owner Tony Bran employed children as young as 14 years old to debone poultry using sharp knives and operate power-driven lifts to move pallets,” stated a Dec. 4 release by the agency. “The children also worked excessive hours in violation of federal child labor regulations. The company also retaliated against employees for cooperating with investigators by cutting their wages.”

Bran’s poultry operations are based in Southern California, a hotbed of illegal immigration.

Slap on the Wrist

Rest assured, Bran was subjected to a stern verbal scolding from Biden’s Labor officials.

“The Exclusive Poultry and owner Tony Bran willfully withheld workers’ hard-earned wages, endangered young workers and retaliated against employees to conceal their wrongdoing,” Wage and Hour Administrator Jessica Looman proclaimed.

Bran is accused of setting up “front companies” to employ workers at two poultry plants that he controlled. He will pay a fine and move on, agreeing to “pay nearly $3.8 million in back wages, damages and penalties,” the Labor release revealed.

Child Labor on the Rise

Evidence that financial penalties do not serve as a genuine deterrent to heartless cheap-labor abuses abounds in America today. As Liberty Nation noted in February, a meatpacking sanitation company with annual revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars paid a laughable fine of $1.5 million for employing more than 100 children in physically taxing jobs involving toxic chemicals and dangerous machinery.

A 2022 investigation found “at least four major” auto parts suppliers to car makers Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia in Alabama had utilized child labor in recent years. “At plants owned by Korean auto-parts maker Ajin Industrial Co, in the east Alabama town of Cusseta, a former production engineer told Reuters he worked with at least ten minors. And six other ex-employees of Ajin said they, too, worked alongside multiple underage laborers,” the newswire reported.

Progressive supporters of the “migrant” floodtide into America seem to refuse to acknowledge that illegal immigration is the spigot that allows these violations on childhood innocence to flow. Amazingly, the same big-box establishment media outlets that cheer on the migrant inundation have reported on the growing horror of child labor.

A Feb. 25 New York Times article sounds as if it came straight from a Donald Trump campaign rally:

“These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found.

“This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.”

This would be the same Times that ran a lengthy Nov. 11 feature article warning that former President Donald Trump is scheming to become an American dictator against illegal aliens should he recapture the White House in 2024. “Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 – including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled,” the paper wrote.

That is far from the only example of such paradoxical reporting. “In the last 10 months, federal regulators have found almost 4,500 children working in violation of federal child labor laws, an increase of 44% from a year earlier, the Labor Department said on [July 27]. Some of the children were operating dangerous machinery, such as deep fryers and meat-processing equipment, the agency noted,” CBS News reported last summer.

“Almost 400,000 children have entered the US alone since 2021, according to government data,” the network added. “The numbers have spiked in 2021, 2022 and 2023 compared with 2020, the data show.”

CBS is flat-out stating that an alarming rise in illegal immigration since Biden became president has directly led to an explosion in child labor outrages. Yet this is the same CBS that on Nov. 7 aired a “news” segment seeking to disprove the notion that illegal immigration leads to more crime. “Politicians use asylum seekers and undocumented migrants as a political tool, many linking migration to crime across the US, but the available data paint a different picture,” the video begins. What follows is a six-minute full-press push to convince viewers that the illegal aliens pouring into the nation today are completely harmless.

‘They Just Didn’t Want to Know’

Hannah Dreier authored the February New York Times child labor exposé. In April, she sat down for an interview with federally funded, Biden-supporting PBS to discuss the administration’s response to this growing plague.

“The White House denies, from what I understand, it was aware of these reports, but in at least one case, you have some evidence that one of the high officials on domestic policy within the Biden administration was aware of these reports, right?” PBS NewsHour’s Stephanie Sy asked Dreier.

“So this is Susan Rice. She is Biden's top adviser for immigration. Pretty much everything that comes up the chain then goes through her team,” Dreier replied. “What the White House has told us is, these basically were puzzle pieces that they didn't put together. And when I have gone back and asked the whistle-blowers at the agencies, well, why didn't they put them together, what these staffers say is, 'we think they just didn't want to know.'”

Rice stepped down from her role as director of the Domestic Policy Council shortly after the NYT report was published – but this willful blindness is hardly limited to one official. It’s not hard to avoid putting a puzzle together when you toss all the pieces under the couch and rug. In Joe Biden’s America, child labor abuse is not a jailable offense because his administration does not want to use the justice system against the illegal immigration shadow economy operating within this nation in any serious way.