The abject cruelty of the human trafficking of illegal aliens for cheap labor is on full display once again via a series of criminal indictments in Virginia. The case provides another real-world example of US business owners recreating the barbaric days of indentured servitude in an average American town.
On Jan. 31, Magnolia Cleaning Services co-owner George William Evans, 68, of Midlothian, a western suburb of Richmond, pleaded guilty to federal fraud and human trafficking charges. Three co-defendants pleaded not guilty in December.
“At the direction of Evans and his coconspirators, Magnolia Cleaning Services exploited undocumented noncitizens to work long hours in poor working conditions. In some cases, employees were threatened with deportation, physical harm, and harm to their families if they refused to work as directed,” a release from the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia states.
The entire operation for this one local company was startlingly elaborate, hinting at a thriving underworld able to connect business owners with smugglers and the assorted “services” they provide. “Between the first quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2022, the business’s wage records reflect approximately 121 employees with alleged invalid or mismatched Social Security Numbers and wage payments of more than $1.2 million to these employees,” the Attorney’s Office continued.
Real People Hurting Other Real People
Williams was “shift supervisor” at Magnolia while his co-owner and co-defendant Jeffrey Dean Vaughan, 64, of Williamsburg served as “managing director,” McClatchy News Service reports. Williams’ title implies he played a hands-on role in the labor abuses. In other words, this American business owner got a close-up look at the human beings he was maltreating solely in the name of individual greed.
(Photo by Nik Wheeler/Corbis via Getty Images)
Ana Patricia Landaverde, 47, a “manager” at the company, is accused of doing just that. Other “migrant” (a tiresome euphemism in this new world of modern slavery) workers say Landaverde personally threatened and abused a 13-year-old girl who was unlawfully employed at the company.
The girl, “who was brought to the U.S. as a migrant, was forced to work at a Virginia laundry facility every night while going to school during the day, federal prosecutors say,” McClatchy relates. “The facility’s manager, who she lived with, threatened to have her deported if she refused to work – and promised she would be killed upon returning to El Salvador, court documents show. The girl had to pay debts to the manager, $325 in monthly rent, as well as up to $300 each month for food. She was one of many migrants forced to work at the business for years, prosecutors say.”
This child was literally treated as equipment by this American business, along with the washers and dryers in the laundry facility.
“Those in charge of the business, including [Landaverde]... banned the 13-year-old from having friends or contacting anyone besides Magnolia Cleaning Services, according to court documents,” McClatchy details.
Hiring Illegal Aliens Destroys Worker Integrity
Magnolia was clearly plugged into a shadow sub-culture in America today that feeds off the commercial exploitation of illegal aliens. “A fourth defendant, who has several aliases including ‘Rodrigo Sis Reyes,’ is alleged to have acted as an illegal supplier of fraudulent identification documents for the [illegal aliens], such as permanent resident cards and social security cards,” WTKR-TV in Hampton Roads reports.
Such a thriving network is the inevitable end result of the simpler days of local employers driving their pickup trucks into the parking lot of a 7-11 circa 1997 and rounding up a herd of “day laborers.” Do those people today understand the grave harm they have done?
On Nov. 14, Liberty Nation documented the case of Packers Sanitation Services, a meatpacking facility cleaning company accused of employing dozens of children in life-threateningly dangerous jobs. On Dec. 21, Liberty Nation spotlighted an investigation into Hyundai and Kia. Several Alabama plants that supply parts to the two major-brand car makers are suspected of employing child laborers. Remarkably, progressive sources frequently best reveal the nightmare, all while supporting the factors responsible for it being possible in the first place.
Ann Lopez, an activist for “migrant workers” in her role as executive director of the Center for Farmworker Families in California, on Nov. 29 related the routine sexual violence endured by female illegal alien farm workers. She specifically stressed that their status as illegal aliens and their desperation to keep their jobs made these women and young girls especially vulnerable.
Lopez, writing at Lookout Santa Cruz, a local community news site, also noted that these illegal workers “are also regularly exposed to environmental toxins in the form of pesticides – which our community’s agricultural giants regularly use on crops, particularly strawberries, blackberries and raspberries.”
“One family I know with a 7-year-old daughter with leukemia makes trips to Stanford every month for treatment,” Lopez wrote. “The child takes powerful daily cancer drugs. The disease is stealing her childhood and adding untold pain to her family’s already hardscrabble life."
“Another family has a teen boy whose left ear never developed. One single mother who worked during the pregnancies of her two youngest sons now has two ADHD boys who are often literally out of control. She works in the field all day and comes home to chaos regularly.”
All this human suffering, yet the political left still has staked a claim to the moral high ground on the issue of illegal immigration that is demonstrably ludicrous on its face. The questions that remain to be asked: How much more misery, pain, and death must there be before the new sweatshops are dismantled? How many more children’s still-developing bodies and souls must be crushed before the bitter fruits of massive unchecked illegal immigration are honestly acknowledged?
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