A barbecue chain with locations in Alabama and Arizona was raided July 15 by multiple federal and local agencies for massive illegal immigration hiring violations. But here’s the rub: The dirty, not-so-little open secret is that this is commonplace in the restaurant industry. The saga of Colt Grill BBQ and Spirits and its husband-and-wife owners should prove an interesting test case on whether the United States is finally willing to seriously crack down on everyday exploitation of the illegal alien crisis that has so damaged this nation by unscrupulous employers seeking personal gain.
The raid came as law enforcement officials carried out search warrants on the restaurants after criminal indictments were handed down on May 27. Owners Robert and Brenda Clouston, who live in Arizona, and Luis Pedro Rogel-Jaimes and Iris Romero-Molina, Mexican illegal aliens who also reside in the Grand Canyon State, are charged with “conspiracy to transport illegal aliens, conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens, conspiracy to encourage and induce an alien to unlawfully enter the United States, and pattern and practice of knowingly employing unauthorized aliens,” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement.
In other words, this is alleged to be a systematic effort to funnel illegal aliens into America so they could be hired to work for lower wages than would be given to US citizens. It’s not the stuff of criminal masterminds. The proliferation of illegals inside the US and the porous southern border throughout four full years of the Biden administration made stringing together such an operation a simple task.
Underpaying ‘Pedro’s People’
“In September 2022, the Cloustons, along with Rogel-Jaimes and Romero-Molina, made a plan that Romero-Molina would create a cleaning company, R&R AZ Cleaning, that would operate as a staffing company for the Colt Grill restaurants,” the ICE release details. “Rogel-Jaimes and Romero-Molina would then find undocumented workers to work at the restaurants, paying them through R&R AZ Cleaning with funds from Colt Grill.”
This gave the barbecue chain an instant flow of low-cost labor.
“The undocumented workers were paid below minimum wage and were not compensated for overtime. The Cloustons, Rogel-Jaimes, and Romero-Molina benefited financially from the plan and did not pay proper employment taxes for the workers,” ICE continued.
If proven in a court of law, it means two American entrepreneurs were willing to put the communities that supported their business ventures in grave harm via the increased crime, strain on social services, overcrowding, and other negative aspects that come with massive illegal immigration. But, hey, money was to be made, and isn’t that the American way?
The indictment states the Cloustons’ actions were deliberate and calculating.
“From at least as of November 2021, Defendant Robert Clouston was aware that Arizona state law required that the Colt Grill employees needed to be paid time and a half for any work over 40 hours per week,” a copy of the indictment posted on the Justice Department’s website reads. Clouston “told a manager not to be concerned with receiving required paperwork to properly calculate pay, taxes and worker's compensation from some newly hired employees stating those were ‘Pedro's people.’”
Clouston is even charged with paying to house his illegal alien workforce and provide transportation to their jobs at his various restaurants.
“If convicted, they face up to 10 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine for each of the conspiracy charges. They also face up to six months in prison and a $3,000 fine for each unauthorized employee for the pattern and practice charge, federal prosecutors said,” The Arizona Republic reports.
But do they really face hard time behind bars?
The Cloustons certainly appear to be shockingly brazen in their machinations, but the sad truth is they are not an outlier in the restaurant industry. They are, in fact, the logical end result of business practices that have been taken for granted for decades.
Illegal Alien Workers Took Him All the Way to the US Senate
Can “everybody else is doing it” work as a valid legal argument when a sitting US senator is one of the ones being cited as an example? While he may not have constructed such a formal illegal alien hiring network, Democrat Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) made his fortune in the restaurant business while he regularly hired “undocumented” workers.
The damage to the community at large was devastating. One of his illegal alien employees shot and killed a Denver police detective and wounded a second officer. The murderer was not just a “bad apple” who somehow managed to slip through a stout employment background hiring process.
“The Denver Post reported in 2005 that Hickenlooper’s Wynkoop restaurant group had in the previous year employed 107 people who did not have matching Social Security numbers,” Liberty Nation News documented in a 2019 article. “Wynkoop chief executive Lee Driscoll admitted to the paper that the company had had its ‘head in the sand’ on checking the legal status of its workers until the onslaught of negative publicity following the killing had forced its hand.”
Hickenlooper easily survived the brief outrage that erupted at the time, moving from Denver mayor to Colorado governor to his current powerful and influential senatorial seat. Heck, he even mounted an unsuccessful run for the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination.
We all know there are untold thousands of US citizens making hefty profits from employing illegal aliens. And it’s not just the big farms, food processing factories, and other industrial-scale operations. Local landscapers, restaurants, auto repair shops, and various other retailers have long done it with a shrug of the shoulders.
Robert and Brenda Clouston are properly facing prosecution for their alleged crimes. But it can’t end there. The American people are clamoring for the Trump administration’s massive deportation operation to go further. Only by bringing the same force of law to bear against the employers of illegal alien labor that is now being applied to so-called “criminal” illegals can a deeply corrosive 40-year-plus economic construct that has shamefully been accepted as a societal norm for far too long finally be dismantled.
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