Feds expand probe into migrant child labor in slaughterhouses
Source: NBC News
The Department of Homeland Security has widened its investigation into migrant children found cleaning slaughterhouses and is now working with the Justice Department to examine whether a human smuggling scheme brought migrant children to work in multiple slaughterhouses for multiple companies across multiple states, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the investigation.
At the heart of the investigation is determining how Central American children, some as young as 13, wound up working dangerous jobs that are legal only for American adults by presenting identification stolen from U.S. citizens, the officials said. Last month, the Labor Department found that Packers Sanitation Services Inc., known as PSSI, employed 102 children at 13 slaughterhouses across eight states.
The children were cleaning blood and animal parts off the floor of meatpacking plants by night and going to school by day, the Labor Department investigators said. So far the investigation is focused on smugglers who may have provided the children with false identities and possibly led them to dangerous jobs. The companies themselves are not targets of the investigation, the officials said.
NBC News reported in January that DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) was investigating whether children ended up working for PSSI through a human trafficking scheme. The newly expanded probe by HSI and the Justice Department is examining whether those children and others were part of a scheme to smuggle minors from Central America into the United States to work for multiple companies in the meatpacking sector nationwide.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/feds-expand-probe-migrant-child-labor-slaughterhouses-rcna72930
= new reply since forum marked as read
(i.e., they are very explicit with respect to the max fines that an agency can levy when drafting their legislation)
In some cases you may have actual smugglers bringing immigrants in with promises of "jobs" and gratuitously providing misinformation about how to go about gaining employment, including providing "templates" for submission of job applications that turn out to be faked documents. The smugglers get paid by the companies/contractors who are looking for workers and who can probably claim plausible deniability for their "by any means necessary" unspoken rule.
In other cases immigrants who came here and are unfamiliar with the fact that U.S. law forbids what is not only considered "acceptable" but is often expected in other countries (including the ones they have fled).
So for example, the main countries that the southern border immigrants are fleeing are Central American ones that have main exports that often utilize child labor -
(snip)
Child labor
As Juan Forero notes in The New York Times,“he existence of child labor on plantations is a product of simple arithmetic. Workers receive so little in part because the wholesalers and retailers abroad reap most of the profits, particularly with the recent consolidation of huge retail outlets like Wal-Mart, Costco and Carrefour. The monthly minimum earn falls short of the $220 the government says a poor family of four needs to meet basic needs, so children go to work.”[8]
In the Philippines, child labor exploitation continues to worsen and has been documented on banana plantations,[12] and in a 2002 Human Rights Watch report on the banana industry, they found widespread child labor on plantations in Ecuador, the center of Dole’s production and trade.[14] Those Ecuadorian children who were interviewed worked 12-hour days, on average, and completed many dangerous and physically demanding tasks. These children, some as young as eight, wielded sharp tools, pulled loads of bananas from place to place on the plantation, and lacked adequate access to drinking water and bathrooms. Well below half were attending school, and yet all they earned for this sacrifice was a little more than half the legal minimum wage. Additionally, three young girls reported being sexually harassed. [14] According to a U.S. Department of Labor report from 2016, Ecuador remains one of the countries where child labor can be found on banana plantations.[26]
Child laborers are also regularly exposed to agrochemicals, usually without protective equipment—handling the pesticide-coated sheets of plastic that cover bananas still on the stalk, applying fungicides before shipping, or even working while pesticides are sprayed aerially over the plantation. Shortly after being exposed to these chemicals, they experienced a long list of negative reactions “including headaches, fever, dizziness, red eyes, stomach aches, nausea, vomiting, trembling and shaking, itching, burning nostrils, fatigue, and aching bones.”[14] It can be presumed that these working conditions have long-term, unfavorable health effects.
(snip)
https://foodispower.org/our-food-choices/bananas/
Since the entire immigration system here is not only overwhelmed, but the NGO support infrastructure for immigrants from around the world is also burdened, it's conceivable that some who appear to be trying to "game the system" might be able, with the appropriate legal representation, to mitigate the consequences of their actions due to being lead astray by nefarious smugglers posing as members of immigration organizations. But that would obviously need to be on a case-by-case basis.
