BREAKING: U.S. Govt Shipping Children To Work in Midwest Factories

Breaking news today on Sekulow as the U.S. Government is shipping children to work in Midwest factories. Keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever, this is Sekulow. We want to hear from you. Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110.

And now your host, Jordan Sekulow. Today in Washington, D.C., there is a whistleblower testifying. This is after a pretty explosive New York Times report a couple of weeks ago talking about the number of children who are coming across the border illegally and then ending up in working in violation, of course, federal child labor laws and state child labor laws. And we're not talking about like at a farm. We're not talking about working with family members. We're talking about industrial settings.

Put it on the screen for everybody to see. This is what the Department of Labor actually found. This is a slaughterhouse, late-night cleanup crew. This is just one of the children they found.

They said that there are 13 slaughterhouses in eight states employing minors to do cleanup. And you see that they are full, full gear. If you're watching the broadcast, you can see this is not like...

It's active-ware. This isn't like out in a field. It's not like an off-book employee as, you know, Jaya Pell, the congresswoman, talks about, you know, we only need the... This kid clocked in.

Yes. I mean, that's what we're talking about here. And the numbers are extreme. So she's going to testify that, you know, she, as an HHS employee with the Inspector General's office, she thought we were going to help place children in loving homes, these unaccompanied minors that come across the border. The numbers are just staggering. Just so you know, in 2020, there were 33,000 unaccompanied minors. In 2021, I think Joe Biden made a difference in his bad policies, 146,000. In 2022, 152,000.

This year already, 70,000. So hundreds of thousands of children, Logan. We know that sex trafficking is a problem. The fact that these kids are working in factories not only makes us look like a third-world country, it's just absolutely repulsive as an American. I think we all thought, and it's horrible, like you said, we were talking about this in our meeting, there was criminal activity happening with a lot of these children. And that is horrendous.

It's something we have to take seriously. But that is happening under the radar. You have to catch a criminal. This is happening in a mainstream, what looks to be a factory in the Midwest or in Nebraska. That kid was working for the Packers Sanitation Services Company, known as PSSI. It employed 102 children at 13 slaughterhouses across eight states. This is just what the Department of Labor has been able to find. There are hundreds of thousands of these children that have come across in just the last few years. So whether it is sex trafficking or working at the factory, this is all criminal behavior that needs to be punished.

But on the front end, we don't need to let this happen. This is why when we say it's the right thing to do, humanitarianly, to close the border, that's why we say that, Logan, is because this is repulsive. I wouldn't say people's calls, 1-800-684-3110.

That's 1-800-684-3110. Because as we've heard from Democrats, all they say, you know, we need these people to work these jobs. Is that what they're talking about? Kids working in factories? Yeah, I'm looking at the website right now for that company, and what they are is a food safety protection company. So packaging, protection, sanitation, chemistry, pest solutions. They said, you perfect the food, we protect the food, is really what it says on their website. We know now who is doing this, and you can see pictures from inside the factory.

Guess what? It's that factory, or something very similar to it. Of course, they don't showcase that it's children in there. But we also know that our government is involved in this, and it's not something that's just happening under the radar. What we're hearing is that there's two ways that this is done. This is going to be testimony today from someone inside the administration, and the Inspector General's office, from HHS, Health and Human Services, because they actually are the ones that are supposed to take these children and get them to sponsors. She's saying there's two types of sponsors, basically. Transnational criminal organizations, and just sick individuals who want to use these kids as money makers. So as indentured servants, as slaves, basically. So you sign up to be a sponsor.

It sounds so disgusting that it's hard to believe human beings do this, and Americans do this, but when you know that child sex trafficking is a problem, then you have to understand this is serious as well. We can't let this happen. We need to fight to secure our border. We check out acljaction.org slash coverup.

We just launched that. We'll be right back. I want to kind of reset this for you, because it is just shocking.

Just saying these words out loud. I mean, it's bad enough because we know that child sex trafficking is a huge problem in our country, and the source of so much of it is these children who come across the border unaccompanied. Unaccompanied children. And they are supposed to be put into – the HHS, Department of Health and Human Services, is supposed to then take them and place them with sponsors. And in those sponsors, we are learning more and more that there are so – I'm sure there's many good actors in that world, but that there are a lot of bad actors. And some are major criminal organizations. We are going to hear testimony today from an HHS employee in the Inspector General's Office, Tara Lee Rodas.

I mean, she's come forward as a whistleblower to Congress to say we are a – this is her exact quote is what she will say today in her opening statement. Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the U.S. government has become the middleman in a large-scale, multibillion-dollar child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children. This is an employee from within the inside, Logan, who is just disgusted that the government, Mayorkas – and you go through the list – is unwilling to do anything to help – Becerra – to help prevent this from becoming what becomes, I guess, the norm in our country.

Another norm. It's like the Fentanyl desk. We're going to talk about that with Senator Haggerty later in the broadcast. Democrats don't want to do any legislation on that because where does the Fentanyl come from? The southern border. They will not close it down, no matter how gross, disgusting, if it's killing Americans. This is how your country falls apart because no country is going to succeed built on the backs of kids.

Yeah. Well, I know that, and specifically our country. We're not going to allow this. We can't. And that's what I've said. We've tried to come up with – and we're going to be developing ways that we can fight back against this specifically and what you guys can do.

Obviously, we can support our friends in the Senate and the Congress who are going after this, but there's also got to be some legal challenges that can be made or some FOIA requests, stuff that has to happen. Because when you see these images that are coming from 12, 13-year-olds who are working in, like you said, not working on a farm, working in a field, not working under nightfall and you don't know they're there. This is a kid in full protective gear, like you said, who – like I said, looks like he clocked in for the job, came in to do his gig, you know, working in this food protection company factory in Nebraska. He's cleaning up the slot. And it's also – these are late-night jobs. These are overnight jobs.

Yeah. So after the slaughtering is done, this is the cleanup. This is the cleanup crew coming in. And so Department of Labor probably did a raid because they got reports that there's probably from employees there that there's kids working here.

Hundred, hundred kids. And they found just at this one company that there were children being employed in 13 slaughterhouses in eight different states. So this is not that question about, you know, can a kid help their family's business, can a kid whose family has a farm help work on the farm.

This is not what we're talking about here. It's not Take Your Kid to Work Day or some of the other exceptions we might have. These are kids who someone is taking as a sponsor.

Think about how horrific this is for a child. You're pushed across the border, so you're taken away from whatever family you might have, out of the country you're from. Someone then buys you, basically, just like a slave. They then are your sponsor and they put you to work in a slaughterhouse at a job that you don't even start probably until eight or nine o'clock at night.

Are you ever going to school? Whatever happens to these kids when they grow up, other than just being very angry at the system that did this to them, which in this case would be the U.S. government. Because we allowed that first act to happen, their removal from their home country, without, of course, their choice.

I don't think these kids would decide, this is where I want to be, this is what I want to be doing. And we're not talking about the horrors of sex trafficking here. We're talking about child labor in 2023 in the United States of America. And when they're asked about it, Logan, even when it's the New York Times report, it's interesting, they love the New York Times until the New York Times does a report that doesn't fit their narrative. So Marsha Blackburn asked the head of HHS, what do you have to say about this?

Take a listen. The agency, the Times reported that under the Biden presidency, the agency cannot find 85,000 children and that the agency lost contact with a third of the migrant children that are coming into the country. So I'd like to know what you're doing to find the children and what you're doing to make certain that these children are not being trafficked. Senator, first, those statistics that you've mentioned, as I said previously in regards to another question by one of your colleagues is, those are unfamiliar to me. I have no idea where those statistics come from, if they're based in reality or not. And we do everything we can to make sure any child, before we allow them to be released to a sponsor, that that sponsor has been vetted.

The vast majority of these children end up with a family member, immediate family member, as a placement. So some of those statistics that are being thrown out there that don't seem to be based in fact, really would go contrary to what actually we've done. He needs to get familiar with it. He says he has no idea about this, so he doesn't know if it's based in reality or not. This is his job. If you get the report in the New York Times, wouldn't you as the secretary want to say, you know what, let's figure out if this is true.

If this is really happening on a large scale, that's not just like a one-off with this one company, we need to get to the bottom of it. You know, also when he talks about the vast majority, would you have, I'm putting the numbers together, what, 250,000 in the last couple of years come across? Let's say the majority, 51%, get to families. It's still a pretty big number of kids. It's a giant number. That means... Unaccounted for. That means under his definition, 125,000 could be working in these factories because that's not the majority. It still might be the minority, but we're talking about numbers that are so huge, that's 125,000 if he's right.

Yeah. I think the most shocking thing about this is, like you said, sadly, there's probably hundreds of thousands of these kids who are working illegally underground doing work. Like you said, there's sex trafficking. There's so much happening that's just absolutely horrendous in the organized crime criminal industry. The secret world. What needs to be illuminated is that this is what's happening...

Above ground. Exactly. In your own neighborhoods, in your own cities, there are children working these jobs. And again, with no say for themselves. We have to make sure it's clear, too, that these are undocumented children that usually made their way to some sort of what's essentially kind of like a foster family, right?

Or like a holding family is what we've kind of been able to understand. And then they are pushing them out to all of these companies to work. It is really a horrendous thing to see, and people need to be held accountable for it.

Absolutely. You know, Logan, we launched at aclj.org, aclj.org slash coverup about, again, these same departments. It's a similar situation in one sense because if it doesn't fit their narrative, they want to hide it from the American people. So in this case, it was a FOIA we did, and we walk you through that at aclj.org slash coverup, when Customs and Border Patrol put up that they had arrested two known terrorists. They were on the terror watch list and the no-fly list from Yemen, about a few days apart. And they put up a press release like you would have any arrests with the images of the people arrested. And then the FBI freaked out and somehow was able to, which is in a different department entirely. So DOJ oversees FBI, but Customs and Border Patrol is overseeing my homeland security. And yet still, when the FBI said we don't like this, guess what they did? Removed it from their website like it never happened, Logan, because that narrative of just like children working in factories, and Becerra goes, well, the majority aren't.

Right. Like, but there's, the numbers are so big that you might, that might be correct, the 51% might not be, and you're still talking about hundreds of thousands. Yeah, and you've got to think about this. And one of the comments actually just said, this is at a meat factory. Think of the other businesses and even the ones you go to, like restaurants and what, you don't know what's going on behind the scenes. And I think that's what should be the illuminating moment here is we don't know what's going on behind the scenes in a lot of these things.

I'm sure we've all used products that have come from these companies. Look, there's a lot of pushback. We have iPhones and we know that that's a problem in China. Yeah, but we push back at least at that. We at least know, as much as we use our iPhones, in the back of our minds, we all know where this is coming from.

We all know where. If it's happening in the United States of America, this is what the Chinese say, you're no better than us. Right. Don't try to lecture us on this.

Exactly. And the Russians, they'll say that. Iranians will say that. They say, you guys try to have this moral high ground. And again, we're never going to be perfect.

There's always going to be bad criminal actors. But if you know that a problem is widespread, that is your fault for not handling it and trying to tackle it and trying to solve it and trying to put it into it. It doesn't mean that we're going to be a perfect country, but we're supposed to aspire to these higher values. But if we don't, we will fall as the leading power in the world. We're already on that path right now.

I think we can correct, but we've got to correct right now. We want you to support the work of the ACLJ. We're already working on ways to get more information here. Like ACLJ.org slash cover up with that for you. Department of Labor found these kids in these factories.

So I'm thinking about going to the Department of Labor and saying, how many more? You know, I know their first response would be, we can't talk about minors. But they've put a report out with images. So we want the statistics, not their names, the statistics.

So that the American people know how widespread this may be. Support the work of the ACLJ. We have a matching challenge this month at ACLJ.org. You can double the impact of your donation.

That's ACLJ.org. Donate today. We come back. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. There's another testimony going on today. The head of the teacher's union on Capitol Hill.

Welcome back to Secio. There is more testimony going on Capitol Hill today. We are joined by our former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He's our Senior Counsel for Global Affairs and Secretary Pompeo.

You made news a few months ago. When you challenged Randi Weingarten, who is testifying today on Capitol Hill to a debate. And called her the most dangerous person in the country. We now have a new report that she was much more deeply involved with the CDC's decisions on school reopening. And even keeping schools closed than was previously known.

Just to kind of go back to that previous tweet, Secretary Pompeo. Just how much damage do you think the influence of Weingarten has had on the children of the United States? Well, Randi Weingarten is the singular most important person in keeping the teacher's unions in power. And the teacher's unions all across this country have been a horrible influence on our students. There's not a single kid in the Chicago school system at 20 of the schools at any age that can read or do math at grade levels.

Baltimore, big urban environments. Randi Weingarten has been at the center of driving kids away from their parents and driving teachers to care more about something other than educating the kids. And so we'll talk about Randi Weingarten being dangerous because you know this, Jordan, and your listeners and viewers know this.

There's little that's more important than passing down basic skills, American greatness and the central idea of America to the next generation. And she has walked us away from it. And during this pandemic, we thought, and now she's going to be asked about it today. She was working in cahoots with the Biden administration to keep our schools closed when they knew it was safe to reopen them. Paramedics, firefighters were all out working, but teachers were kept out of the schools because Randi Weingarten and the Biden administration chose to deny those kids two years of their education.

This report shows that she was coordinating with the American Teacher Federation that she oversees. Messaging, public releases, and press releases with the CDC. But it also is like, it's one thing for the CDC to deal with the union and you've got to reopen, but ultimately they're the scientists. They should just be able to make the decision. And it seems like there's people inside the CDC who need to answer for this as well.

Oh yes, no. The accountability must rest on those that were actually responsible. Your point is absolutely right. And the decision makers, the folks who own this decision, isn't Randi Weingarten. It just turns out, Jordan, that she is so inside that circle. She is so vital to the politics of this administration that they can't cross her. That she had more influence on the outcome of this decision than people that you and I are paying as American taxpayers.

And that's what this current revelations have. We knew it was true. We watched her give speeches. We watched the Biden administration respond to her every beck and call. But now we can see the documents where they were working so closely together that she was in fact more important than the very government officials that were responsible for what happened. And those in office, those who are elected officials and those who are political appointees need to be held accountable for letting her to get away with that. And taking away this important educational opportunity for our kids. I mean, she was even involved into the reopening and when the reopening was halted in 2021, the full reopening.

I mean, there's phone calls going back that day, emails going back that day. I mean, it went to the last moment as if she, you know, everything had to get her green light. I want to play this, too, because I think it goes to the bigger issue here. It's the bigger battle. And we talked about parental rights a lot. And we've seen parents engage more than ever before. I think that's great. We've been preaching at the ACLJ since our founding that school boards are the place to start, always the place to start and very important.

And how they impact your culture and your whole country, really. But President Biden said this, you know, when he was at the National State Teacher of the Year celebration. And again, these words can seem nice and friendly.

But then when you know what they're really trying to do, let's play it for people so they can take a listen. Rebecca put a teacher's creed into words when she said, there's no such thing as someone else's child. No such thing as someone else's child. Our nation's children are all our children. You know, again, Secretary Pompeo, we know that unfortunately their bigger strategy here was not just nice words. It's that they're trying to say, and we've seen laws in Washington state that say if you don't agree with us, we're going to take your minder away from you.

Jordan, this is not about being kind and generous and knowing that we all have a responsibility to help others who need help when they talk about they're all our children. What they literally mean is, no, we the government are more important than families. And that that is a deep, deep schism and a deep break from American tradition.

And we've seen it. You point out Washington state. We've seen other places where they want minors to be able to get a gender change operations without the parents knowing. We've seen this in the pro-life movement where they wanted minors to be able to have abortions without letting their parents know even when their teachers knew. This is this is a reshaping of the family and substituting government for parents in a way that is inconsistent with America's Judeo-Christian heritage and really bad for kids and families, the most essential building block of our nation. And so when they say they're all our children, they don't just mean, hey, we should help where we can. They literally mean, no, you parents are disconnected from those kids and we the government will tell you what you can and can't do and how to raise your your children and keep your family together. Yeah, I mean, these terms, it seems just kind of benign, like we should protect children now are to I mean, there's two very different definitions of what that means in our country right now, what you know, what that might mean coming from me or Secretary Pompeo, what that means coming from Joe Biden.

Just the word, just saying that doesn't mean the same thing to to to the American people. And to me, I just I think culturally, you know, these are all issues we just have to face because they're important for our standing in the world. And I do want to ask you about something going on in the world outside the United States right now, but it affects Americans. We're seeing another tragic situation unfold this time in Sudan, where there was a hasty. The embassy was evacuated and, you know, we sent in the SEAL Team 6 and got our embassy out, employees out, but we left a lot of Americans behind. And you tweeted out that Susan and I, your wife, are praying for the American Sudan, especially our many pastors and missionaries and families serving there.

They need our full support. We've seen a second American has been killed already. Why is the administration I mean, the statement was Secretary Pompeo, well, some of these people, a lot of these people are dual citizens as if their American citizenship is somehow not the same as yours or mine. I've seen this before. When I served as Secretary of State, I would hear from some on my team.

Hey, sir, don't don't worry that much. They're really dual citizens. And I would remind them that one of those passports was blue.

It was an American passport. They were U.S. citizens. And we had as much responsibility for them as anyone else. But this in Sudan is tragic.

It is an unraveling in a complicated place. And the fact that the administration couldn't get in front of us just reminds us all of what happened in the summer of twenty one in Afghanistan. It demonstrates, again, this administration is not capable or thoughtful or prepared to lead in a way that could protect Americans to the maximum extent possible. We can't protect everyone everywhere around the world. There's no doubt about that. Even Americans who are traveling. But to have this fall apart in this way, they're so quick, so cataclysmic. So so disjunctive that we've got lots of Americans who do want to come back home is another sign that America's place in the world is diminished.

And that saddens me greatly. Secretary Pompeo, as always, we appreciate your insight. Our senior counsel for global affairs. Again, just to get that insight on what's happening in our own country, what's happening abroad. And these these consistent failures and just cultural failures. I mean, we don't want to be this country that treats kids this way.

We don't want to be the country that leaves our citizens behind and tries to run off as well. You know, they're doing this. Don't worry about that. Support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. We've launched ACLJ.org slash cover up. You're an ACLJ supporter. We want you to share that link with your friends and family. Go online to your social media accounts and share ACLJ.org slash cover up.

You can support the work of the ACLJ financially at ACLJ.org. Second half hour coming up. We'll take your phone calls.

And Senator Bill Hagerty also joining us. Keeping you informed and engaged now more than ever. This is Sekulow. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow.

Welcome back to Sekulow. We are taking your phone calls to one eight hundred six eight four thirty one till we talk about this. These reports started with the New York Times a couple weeks ago saying that there's two hundred fifty thousand unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border.

Children and that are working illegally in violation of labor laws in the United States of America. And that they're finding this. It started out the Department of Labor did some of this work in 13 slaughterhouses in eight different states. We put the image up.

We can put it up again. This is from a Department of Labor investigator. I'm finding that again this is a this is in violation of child labor law. Overnight shifts. Working in slaughterhouses.

And just one example. We know that there are eighty five thousand children right now who crossed our border that HHS cannot figure out where they are. They don't know what sponsor they were. They've lost total contact.

Total tracking. They're not supposed to do that by the way. Even when they are find a sponsor for these children. They are supposed to keep track of them as until they are no longer minors.

Till they are adults. And what we've seen from this administration is just a kind of a shrugging of the shoulders. And this is the same administration would say oh you're keeping kids in cages you're dividing families. There is a whistleblower coming to Capitol Hill today from HHS from the IG's office. Who is telling Congress because they have to tell you you know before as your whistleblower you have to proffer what you were going to why you need the whistleblower protections. And she is going to testify that the United States government has become the middleman this exact words in a large scale multi-billion dollar child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children.

She goes on to say that there's two types. There's the big transnational criminal organizations. And I think that's what you think of when you think of like sex traffickers and the underground criminal world. And then there's people who just sign up to be sponsors and then use these kids as slaves.

They take the you know they go send them out to work for them and then take their money. This slogan is not a theory. We have the images. This is a reality. This is going on in factories that we drive by in the United States of America every day. That was a shocking thing. We actually seen this photo a couple weeks ago. I think all of us saw it on TV and thought that this was not happening in our country. Like we sort of we had overlooked it being oh look at that.

Yeah we had a one off for the fact that there's hundreds of these kids. We know at least for sure in these factories it should be eye opening to a lot of people that this is sort of the injustice the stuff that's happening in our own country in our own private businesses. What's going on with our government. This isn't just an underground criminal organized crime thing that's happening.

And we have to make sure that it's rooted out and that we stand up against it. Like you said they're going to ignore it. They're going to pretend it doesn't happen.

That's what happened. You saw the Biden campaign ads. They pretend that there's not a lot of a lot of troubles happening to this country. It's all look at all the bad things conservatives do. Look at all the good things we do. There's no coming together that says you know the fact that someone can run on we have to end child labor and beyond child labor illegal child labor happening in our country.

That's going to be crazy that you can run on that as a campaign promise in 2024. Yeah. I want to go to the phones Yvonne in New York online.

Hey Yvonne. Okay. Yes.

I'm calling about the first issue where you needed to clean up the factory intake. That's proof that there's a decrease. I mean there's a decrease in our children's population American children population because of abortion. And people need to open up their eyes I think and see that okay if we don't have the labor force and we bring in labor force and then we're okay deprogramming the children in school probably for the same thing. I think we need to think about it.

Yeah. Listen we know that we've got a population issue at a workforce issue. We also have lots of people who are trying to legally immigrate here that are waiting in line. If it's gotten so bad that we need kids to work in a factory there are plenty of people waiting to come the United States legally that would take that job.

Yeah absolutely. But you know what they're not kids and they're not free. It's probably what's happening right now. And it's very hard to get them through when the illegal immigrants are coming in at numbers like 200,000 and 300,000 a year. Then you can't let the people who are waiting. Roy wrote in on rumble a lot of good-natured immigrants are already in line waiting for decades even to be naturalized and then illegal immigrants are given the priority. I mean if we're going to use child labor you know cheaper child labor then those people are never going to get to come in.

The people who follow the rules and would likely take jobs that were the tougher jobs in the United States to get Americans who are already here people who are already here to take. But if you allow unfortunately corporations to run without any rules and bad actors within them to say you know what we could cut a little cost here. So what are we going to say oh we're going to blame sale well no one else would take the job so we had to use a kid to do it.

That's not acceptable in the United States of America. Let's go to the phones 1-800-684-3110 D in New Hampshire online 2 hey D. Thanks so much for keeping me informed my question is did the whistleblower file a police report with her local agency that the business is located in or did the agent who did the report file a police report. We know when it comes to this slaughterhouse that we're showing this image from the Department of Labor is involved so they are going to go through their process and that becomes a legal process not just penalties but then you can bring in criminal issues as well. We know from this administration though even if that's ongoing they're not going to highlight it.

We're going to have to like dig to even see if that's happening. We know that it's been uncovered so Department of Labor knows it's happening. The person testifying today is not local. She is the in the US Health and Human Services Inspector General's office and she is disgusted that there's not enough being done. And she's actually accusing the US government of now being the middleman for child trafficking in the United States. And I think Logan what it gets down to is that if we don't take these problems seriously which means putting a having a border and having a secure border. If we don't take these problems seriously we are going to rot from the inside. Yeah exactly this is the spiritual rot that happens to society and we just all of a sudden can ignore. We can put things aside not look at what's happening. We understand there are certain things that are out of our control. We even said that organized crime somewhat out of our control.

What's going on outside of our country out of our control. We can pray for them. We can work for them. We can work with charities. We can do amazing work.

We can do amazing work all over the world. But when this stuff is happening not only I mean you want to say like in your own backyard it's happening in your living room essentially where there are children. Likely a lot of you listening have children or grandchildren in this age demographic. We're not talking about 17-year-olds, 18-year-olds. We're talking about 12-year-olds, 11-year-olds, 10-year-olds who are there to like you said work overnight jobs in factories cleaning up the guts of cows from a slaughterhouse.

Because they're going there to be packaged to be sent to our grocery stores where all of us can go and casually happily shop and try to blindly pretend that none of this stuff is happening. It's time for that kind of thinking to end. Tara Lee Rhodes who is the whistleblower from HHS. She's testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity. Guess who's on that subcommittee by the way?

I just checked. Congresswoman Jayapal. She is also the head of the Progressive Caucus. You would think that they would really care about child labor laws, right? I mean this is where the hardcore progressives or the whole labor union movement all that, right?

I thought they were. Take a listen to what she said last week. This country needs immigrants to survive. Immigrants pick the food we eat, rebuild our communities after climate disasters, help construct our infrastructure, power our small business economy, clean our homes and look after the most precious in our families, our children and our elders. If she's talking about legal immigrants, she's not there. Legal immigrants do oftentimes start from the bottom and work their way up. They do work those jobs and there's nothing wrong with those jobs. When you're trying to make a better life for yourself and you've come to a country legally and that's the job that's available to you that you're qualified to do. Maybe it's a language barrier and issues like that. So the next generation gets to grow up in America with a different life.

They're moving up the ladder. But she's talking about why we need an open border. Why we should allow illegal immigrants in. And we know those are off-book employees.

They don't get all the benefits she's talking that you would think liberals would want them to get and it's how you end up with child labor going on in 2023 in the United States of America on a wide scale. Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of you want to call in.

I want to hear from you. 1-800-684-3110. That's at 1-800-684-3110. We'll take some calls in this segment because next segment we have on Senator Hagerty. So I want to make sure we get through some of those calls right now. Let's go to Mary who's calling in California on line three. You're on the air.

Hello. Thanks for letting me in. I work in an area where we have a lot of leftover DACA people that are registered and have been registered for 20 years. Some of them came in as infants and now they're 30 years old. Why are we not working from that list of I think it's 200 to 300,000 people that are primarily adults that is available and using them for these jobs? Well, people get to choose what job they want to get, forcing anybody to take a job. This is a private industry. So they're going to say that people have been here 20 or 30 years, probably don't want to take this job.

That's the truth. A lot of it's overnight work in a slaughterhouse. So it usually is jobs that people who are new immigrants to the country are willing to take because they want to come here for a better life. I'm talking about people coming here legally. And by the way, those jobs come with protections and benefits and ways to better yourself.

You're working for a major company at that point. Major companies are right now employing children, as Logan said, to clean up slaughterhouses. So again, I do think it does cause lots of other labor issues because for every one of those kids that took that job, that's some new immigrant who can't take that job.

Some adult who is trying to put food on their table when inflation is up and may need to work another shift. And they're not getting it because it's cheaper. I mean, the risk that they're taking, they've calculated that this Biden administration is so disinterested in tracking these kids that it's worth risking employing children in the United States, which you would think if you were this company, this would end you as a company and your executives would all be in prison. Yeah, you'd think so.

But, you know, well, hopefully this country actually we hold up to those standards. Now they may say, hey, we use a subcontracting company. Well, then that company, whoever needs to handle it. Well, I think we already know this is a subcontractor.

This is the contractor who brings it to do the cleanup. Yeah. Which I mean, I think we all probably need to take a look at what's happening here and just make sure that that's happening everywhere, that everyone knows who's coming in and out of your building. That's how they found out in the first place was somebody is working there to say this is someone stopped by late and there's children in what looks almost like hazmat suits. You know, that kind of style suit.

I mean, they're getting full on protective gear. So. All right. Let's take another call. Let's go to Lou. Anyone go to Lou? Yeah, we have time.

Lou, you're on the air. Hi. Thanks for all you're doing to bring up this important issue. I also wanted to say that the Department of Education and our schools are complicit in something very similar. They have students coming here under legal visas to be with a sponsor, especially aunts and uncles, quote unquote, from Asia. The students are from Asia, but they're not relatives.

You know, and an uncle is an honorific term just used for an older adult. And these kids are going to school doing their homework to keep legal visas, but they are working as prostitutes in restaurants and all kinds of jobs at night. So I just hope a lot of exploration is done about this by what's happening knowingly with our government and our our schools as well. We're going to work on the FOIA side, too, to see is New York Times accurate? Is it as widespread as we say?

Because if it is, it should actually be pretty easy to tackle because it's right in our face. Yeah, exactly. You're right, Lou, because we know that the testimony today from the HHS whistleblower, she's saying exactly that. There are the really bad criminal transnational criminal organizations. But there's also a real problem with these individual bad actor sponsors who aren't necessarily tied to some massive, you know, conspiracy of organized crime, but who are just seizing on, hey, I can get kids to take this job.

I can cheaply then I'll take the money from them. And so exactly what you just said, Lou, and you say you see in your community there, they are testifying to that they know about it and aren't doing anything about it. Yeah, that's right. Hey, coming up in the next segment, you'll be joined by Senator Bill Hagerty. So let's make sure you stay tuned for that. Got a minute and a half. Let's very quickly take Mildred from Texas. That'll probably be our last call. Mildred, you're on the air.

Thank you for taking my call. As a business owner, when I pay hourly wage to a person, then they have to pay Medicare and Social Security taxes. And then I have to match that same amount of Medicare and Social Security taxes that's all paid in.

I hold the money, I pay it into the federal government on the day it's supposed to be. So it's these children that are being worked, are these companies reporting the amount of money they're making and paying Medicare and Social Security taxes? And then are they matching their Medicare and Social Security taxes? They're likely not. I would imagine they aren't or that they are utilizing their sponsor as the person who is getting it.

You know what I'm saying? So the sponsor might be signed up as the actual employee. I mean, there's so many different ways you could look at how they're trying to get this on their books, what you're really talking about, Mildred, and somehow hide the fact from the top executives that this is actually going on. By saying, wow, I mean, because these are individuals that are, literally, they have no legal documentation.

They are, in some ways, easy to keep off the books, unfortunately. When we come back with Senator Hagerty, we're still talking border. It's the fentanyl crisis that the Democrats are continuing to ignore.

Welcome back to SECIO. It's great to be joined by a great friend of the ACLJs, the United States, U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, who has been leading the charge to fight the fentanyl crisis in the United States of America, a crisis which I know, folks, when I'm talking to you, it doesn't matter your income level.

It doesn't matter where you live in this country. I guarantee you, as I can speak for it, it has affected a family member, a loved one, a coworker, someone that you know has lost their life because of the deadly fentanyl coming across our border. And, Senator Hagerty, you have legislation specifically. The legislation is called the Stop Fentanyl Border Crossings Act.

Tell people what that would do. Jordan, what it does is it takes advantage of the great void that's about to be created by the Biden administration when Title 42 comes down in just a couple of weeks. Title 42, just to remind our listeners, is the last tool that Border Patrol has left to actually turn away people at our southern border who they suspect may be bringing, it's a health emergency that they may suspect would be bringing across illnesses like the pandemic. The pandemic is over.

I agree with that. The Biden administration finally is waking up and declaring that in a couple of weeks in May. But when it goes away, the Border Patrol tell me that they have literally no tools left to turn people back and they're expecting then a tsunami, a tidal wave of humanity coming across that border that will get their agents all tied up and then that allows the cartels to just have free reign to shove this fentanyl across the border, whether it's through the people, with the people that they're smuggling, the human trafficking that they're doing, or whether it's the networks and the ability to just move the fentanyl and other parts of the border that aren't being observed and aren't being policed because they're so overwhelmed with the number of people coming across the border. The net effect of all of this is more deaths to young people in America and the Biden administration has refused to even talk about it. I brought this to the floor of the Senate three times last year. Each time the Democrats rejected the legislation and blocked it.

I brought it back again. Let's see if they're going to stand up and block it now because they're going to lose any tool that they have left. They allow Title 42 to expire without modifying it, without updating it in this way, using the concern of illicit drug traffic as the rationale to impose Title 42 and turn people away. We know it's happening. We know it's happening in a large measure.

And if the Biden administration wants to live outside of reality, they're going to see more and more deaths of Americans here. Folks, you need to support the Stop Fentanyl Border Crossings Act. It's almost remarkable how quickly fentanyl has become, as you've reported, and you've said it when you were talking about this legislation, is the number one killer, leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45. A pretty wide demographic group right there, too. The number one leading cause of death in the United States of America is fentanyl, which is a fairly new drug in the sense of its use on the streets and how quickly and how fast it has become just a deadly scourge. And it's hit every community. I mean, it doesn't matter if you live in the most expensive zip codes or the toughest zip codes in the country. People are dying.

Jordan, that's absolutely right. Think about who benefits from all of this. Well, it's the manufacturer of the precursor chemicals that are shipping this to their partners in Mexico and then bringing it across the borders to kill us, and that's the Chinese Communist Party. This illicit drug is being manufactured.

The component chemicals are manufactured in China. They're being shipped over here. The cartels are their partners. And again, these cartels are multibillion-dollar organizations, and they have networks that extend all the way into Tennessee and other parts of the United States, and they are killing people on a daily basis here. This is, again, plus to the column of China, they're killing the cohort that fill out our military. You think about it, the ages of 18 to 45, they're gutting that age cohort here in America.

China benefits, the cartels benefit, and America is losing big time, and the Democrats will not step up and help me address this. That's a great but also scary point. I mean, it's the workforce. It's the backbone of our military. That age category is the key category in every kind of statistic when you're judging a country and kind of where the workforce is, your military. And yet again, we see whether it's the pandemic that emanates from China or this epidemic emanating from China, it's having these same causes. It is the serious amount of American lives being lost.

You talk to your Democrat colleagues. What is their concern here with, is it just because they don't want CBP to have removal power? They literally want the ages to have no authority to quickly remove people who have illegally crossed the border?

I think that's exactly right. I mean, you've heard people like AOC call for the abolishment of ICE, for the abolishment of Customs and Border Patrol. They want to have completely open borders, and they said it when Joe Biden was running for office.

They want to transform America. Let's go through the math on this. If you think about the transformation that they're talking about, we've had now, under Joe Biden's leadership, five and a half to six million people that we believe are here illegally just in the past two plus years.

And when we lose the last to a left, that's Title 42, what we're going to see is perhaps a doubling. That's the estimate by Customs and Border Patrol. We could be at plus 15 million people by the end of Biden's term here.

That is a transformational number. If you add that to the number of people that are already here illegally before Biden took office, we're talking about more than four times the size of our home state of Tennessee here illegally. Where do these people go? They come across the border.

Think about it. Disproportionately, they're going to find their way to these sanctuary cities. Where are the sanctuary cities located? In blue states, commandeered by blue state legislatures. And what those blue states gain when they get these people are an advantage in the United States census. They get more people there and you may recall that in the last administration, our Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross tried to insert a question on the census about citizenship. The liberals went wild.

They actually blocked it. We can't ask if a person is a citizen. So now what we do is we the census takes a poll of how many people are in a given state. Then we allocate congressional districts based on how many people are in that state. And then based on the number of congressional districts, that's how we allocate electoral votes. This is all about power at the end of the day, Jordan.

It's all about power. And at some point, I'm sure the Democrats are going to argue for what they call comprehensive immigration reform. So let me decode that for our listeners. Comprehensive immigration reform is their terminology for a pathway to amnesty and citizenship. I mean, right there, just to take in what Senator Hagerty just walked through, I mean, right before you were on the air, you talked about to the trafficking side of this. The fact is that they know there's an HHS whistleblower testifying in the House today that they know that the US government knows that they are basically like a middleman right now for human trafficking and child labor is now becoming a huge problem in the United States again. I mean, and yet the party that acts like they're so progressive has no concern for these people.

I mean, that's the other part of this. They have no concern for the people being trafficked over, not only the Americans dying from fentanyl, but the humans being trafficked. Yeah, the human trafficking is terrible, Jordan. I was down with a group of Tennessee sheriffs and mayors last year at the border.

We spent three days down there. And we could see the, again, masses of humanity coming across the border. A lot of these are young girls. You could tell that they've been through a very treacherous journey and bad things have happened. When I talked to some of them, they'd been walking for a month and a half, some of them two and a half months, from deep in South America, a dangerous journey.

Who's minding the store? The coyotes and the cartels, the ones that are responsible for them. Bad things are happening to these people. They're being used in a human traffic ring. What we're doing is basically facilitating human slavery here on American soil, because what these people do is the cartels push these folks across the border illegally. Then they enslave them and force them into labor pools that are, you know, they're not getting paid. They're living under terrible squalor conditions. And this is part of their payment for being smuggled in the United States is that they're going to be trapped in this manner.

They're going to be used for some very bad things. And I don't think any American who believes in humanity could ever support this. Senator Haggerty, thank you for continuing this fight. I mean, I know the Democrats are going to push back, but we have to keep fighting for the right thing. The legislation is the Stop Fentanyl Border Crossings Act. We thank Senator Haggerty for his time, for joining us on the broadcast. This, again, you see the whole issue is about what's going on in our southern border and securing that border. Support the work of the ACLJ, ACLJ.org, and check out ACLJ.org slash coverup.