Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized President Joe Biden on Sunday for his open borders policy amid what he called an immigration “crisis.”
Now that the New York Times's dramatic expose about the huge surge in migrant child labor at slaughterhouses, chemical factories, construction sites, and chicken processing plants is out, 60 Minutes has decided to do its own version of the story -- this time rewriting the damning report to exonerate Joe Biden and his open-borders policies that created it.
It's as slovenly a report as any of the worst they've ever done, and naturally, 60 Minutes Biden shill Scott Pelley hosted it, sounding all 60-Minutes-serious to try to make his report seem more important.
Actually, it's junk.
Here are a few pointers as to why:
Start with what the two New York Times reports revealed with rigorous, hard, fact-checked, verifiable reporting (here and here). (I blogged about those reports here and here).
Report one, which ran on Feb. 25, 2023, by Hannah Dreier, its findings were well summed up in its headline and subhead:
Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws — including in factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom.
Report two, which ran on April 17, 2023, also by Dreier, had these summaries:
As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings
The White House and federal agencies were repeatedly alerted to signs of children at risk. The warnings were ignored or missed.
These are both Pulitzer-worthy reports that ought to get that prize as something that would restore the credibility of both the Times and the Pulitzer board, which up until now has seen scandals like these.
It's all very easy to explain: Biden has opened the border to "unaccompanied children" which has incentivized child exploitation rackets to send Central American children to the states to work in as heavy labor for unscrupulous employers. The administration has even become a middleman for the cartel rackets who exploit kids, taking in the children, and then releasing the children to child slavers who are pretty obvious about who they are, as their "guardians." When some government officials complained and sent warnings up the chain of command that the kids were being sent to the exploiters, the officials were punished, fired, reassigned, sanctioned. The Biden administration then promptly "lost" at least 85,000 children, who disappeared into the factories and construction sites as child labor, forced to pay their "debts" to the sleazy cartels that smuggled them in in the first place. It should be noted that Biden reaped big political hay for a few hundred who went missing under the Trump administration. Now the exploitation has reached epic proportions, clearly linked to Biden's policy of never sending unaccompanied children back to their homes in their home countries.
But 60 Minutes had an agenda to promote, so they tried to rewrite the report to Biden's benefit.
First, they barely mentioned that the kids were immigrants coming in from Joe's open borders. Pelley's written report (and it's pretty close to the actual transcript) mentioned immigration just twice in a 13-minute segment:
The jobs are grim and dangerous--and so they are often filled by immigrants who are desperate for work. Some immigrants use false papers to routinely beat the federal identification system that is known as E-Verify.
Did he find any who weren't migrants? That would be a story.
Then, Pelley tried to sneakily pin the blame on President Trump's administration as well as Joe Biden's as a means of claiming 'they all do it,' as a means of erasing Biden's responsibility:
Scott Pelley: Did any of the children tell you how long they had been working at the plant?
Shannon Rebolledo: Yes.
Scott Pelley: And how long was that?
Shannon Rebolledo: We looked back at a three-year period. So, we can confirm that they had minors working there as early as 2019.
No numbers offered and no questions from Pelley about what those 2019 numbers might be compared to the 2023 numbers. 2019 was a year when President Trump was in office, so see? Everybody does it. They may have found one or two cases. But child labor expanded greatly under Joe Biden and his open borders policies, with Joe insisting he'd never send back a child traveling alone. That's at least 85,000 and who knows how many they don't know about.
Then, Pelley tried to pin the blame on bad companies that exploit child labor, not bad government policies that allow them to do so with impunity:
Last November, the Department of Labor filed suit against PSSI. The company responded with this: "PSSI has an absolute company-wide prohibition" against hiring minors. It added, "we will defend ourselves vigorously against these claims."
The statement said PSSI checks eligibility of employees, including this girl, on a federal database. But that database is well known to be abused in an industry that can struggle to find workers.
He even included a shot at e-Verify, which supposedly checks worker credentials for legality to work in the states, claiming it was useless:
Employers have known for nearly 30 years that E-Verify is useless if the applicant has bought, borrowed or stolen an actual ID --which is common. and in the case of the children, E-Verify was especially dubious.
Ah. Mise well get rid of it, then, since it can be fooled. Just what the open-borders lobby wants.
Pelley did move up the corporate chain of command and landed at Blackstone, which owns the slaughterhouse-cleaning company PSSI:
For all the years the investigation found child labor, PSSI has been owned by Wall Street's Blackstone--the largest private equity firm in the world. Blackstone told us "extensive pre-investment due diligence showed PSSI had industry-leading hiring compliance..." But it seems, that diligence failed to find what was obvious to investigators watching a shift change in a parking lot. Still, the investment giant says, "a claim of insufficient diligence or oversight is simply false." And yet 102 children labored at 13 slaughterhouses in eight states.
60 Minutes featured Blackstone as the ultimate exploiter of migrant child labor, calling them "billionaires" and then ran Blackstone's hard-to-believe official denials claiming it would never dream of exploiting child labor -- yet it never mentioned that Blackstone is primarily known as a Democrat donor and Biden ally.
Just corporate bad guys, see? All those dreadful billionaires, quick, let's expropriate.
Not one word about Joe Biden's open borders policies that have fueled this child-migrant labor surge.
Then, as if to counter the New York Times' damning report about government retaliation against whistleblowers inside the Department of Labor and other agencies, they trotted out a labor inspector named Sharon Rebollado to show us all how diligently she was doing her job locating child labor exploitation, which is what she gets paid to do.
Shannon Rebolledo is a 17-year Labor Department investigator who was skeptical. But she went to Grand Island, Nebraska, last summer, after a middle school told police about acid burns on the hand and knee of a 14-year-old girl. The student explained that she worked nights in this slaughterhouse on the edge of town.
Scott Pelley: What did the educators at Walnut Middle School tell you?
Shannon Rebolledo: It seemed to be known within the community that minors either are or were working overnight shifts. They told us about children that were falling asleep in class, um, that had burns, chemical burns. They were concerned for the safety of the kids. They were concerned that they weren't able to stay awake and do their job, which is learning in school.
Scott Pelley: Because they'd been up all night.
Shannon Rebolledo: Right.
Just a heroic Labor Department inspector doing her duty, right? Not one word about the Labor Department employees who were sanctioned and fired for doing their duty back when the kids were hauled in by the Border Patrol.
Rebollado put a stop to the practice in the companies cited, but painted a hideous candy-colored false-light picture about how she 'saved' those migrant kids and they lived happily ever after:
As for the child workers in Grand Island, privacy laws prevent officials from telling us much. But we do know one child is in foster care and others are with their parents.
Scott Pelley: You know, I wonder after speaking to these children, after exposing what was happening to them, what is your hope for them now?
Shannon Rebolledo: I hope that they're safe. I hope that they have an opportunity to be kids, to go to school and not be tired. And if they're working, I just, I hope that they're able to work in a safe environment.
Really? What about the cartels? What do cartels do when their payments from their exploited child laborers stops coming because the kids are off the jobs and in school? And tell us about the wisdom of releasing kids to "parents" (if they were parents) after putting their kids in these exploitation situations? Something about that doesn't smell right, either. 60 Minutes, which weaseled out of asking any questions on privacy concerns, never bothered to ask any of the obvious ones.
What we had here was a bid to lament child labor, blame companies exclusively, omit the connection of the companies to Joe Biden, and make the government the rescuing hero.
This is baloney. The Times story is out so we know what really happened. 60 Minutes just tried to hitch a ride on the story in order
to point the blame at everyone but the creator of this problem, Joe Biden himself.
Image: Screen shot from 60 Minutes video on Twitter.
Biden emerges as the 'Fagin' for exploited migrant children
By Monica Showalter
Not too long ago, Joe Biden held President Trump up to scorn for his immigration policies, calling them 'inhumane,' 'criminal,' and a 'stain.'
Biden denounced Trump's separation of families policies intended to disincentivize family migration rackets, given that the law required detention for adults caught crossing the U.S. border illegally, but not children. The policy had been started under President Obama, so it was hardly his idea. Biden made such an issue of it he even sought out separated families and tried to make them millionaires through torts payouts, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, based on all the supposed 'harm' of the separation following their thousand mile journeys to el norte in the tender hands of the cartels. Biden insisted on never sending back unaccompanied minors, pleasing the open borders lobby mightily.
Now the results of his own supposedly "humane" immigration policies are in, and they are even more inhumane than anything he ever accused Trump of doing.
According to the New York Times, child exploitation has become a massive crisis in this country, affecting tens of thousands of foreign children brought in through Joe's open borders.
Worse still, Biden administration officials knew about the huge child-slavery rackets emerging and ignored every single warning -- almost as if they wanted it to be happening.
In the spring of 2021, Linda Brandmiller was working at an arena in San Antonio that had been converted into an emergency shelter for migrant children. Thousands of boys were sleeping on cots as the Biden administration grappled with a record number of minors crossing into the United States without their parents.
Ms. Brandmiller’s job was to help vet sponsors, and she had been trained to look for possible trafficking. In her first week, two cases jumped out: One man told her he was sponsoring three boys to employ them at his construction company. Another, who lived in Florida, was trying to sponsor two children who would have to work off the cost of bringing them north.
She immediately contacted supervisors working with the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency responsible for these children. “This is urgent,” she wrote in an email reviewed by The New York Times.
But within days, she noticed that one of the children was set to be released to the man in Florida. She wrote another email, this time asking for a supervisor’s “immediate attention” and adding that the government had already sent a 14-year-old boy to the same sponsor.
This being the Biden administration, they even retaliated against whistleblowers inside the U.S. government agencies who tried to warn about the child slavery they saw before their eyes, fostered and enabled by the Bidenite policies.
Ms. Brandmiller also emailed the shelter’s manager. A few days later, her building access was revoked during her lunch break. She said she was never told why she had been fired.
...and...
At least five Health and Human Services staff members filed complaints and said they were pushed out after raising concerns about child safety.
Jallyn Sualog was the most senior career member of the H.H.S. division responsible for unaccompanied migrant children when Mr. Biden took office. She had helped build the program after the passage of the 2008 law and, as a lifelong Democrat, had celebrated Mr. Biden’s win.
But soon, she said, she began to hear reports that children were being released to adults who had lied about their identities, or who planned to exploit them.
She warned her bosses in a 2021 email, “If nothing continues to be done, there will be a catastrophic event.” She continued to email about situations she described as “critical” and “putting children at risk.”
When her warnings fell on deaf ears, she complained through official channels, and they demoted her, moving her to a lousier position.
This sounds like something out of Dickens. Weren't there evil characters such as Bill Sikes and Fagin, who exploited street-urchin children in Oliver Twist? I looked up such examples on ChatGPT, which is kind of good for such questions and got:
1.
Bill Sikes from the novel "Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens (also various movie adaptations) - Bill Sikes is a brutal and violent criminal who exploits Oliver Twist, a young orphan, by using him in his criminal activities and treating him with cruelty and abuse.
2.
3.
Fagin from the novel "Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens (also various movie adaptations) - Fagin is a criminal who exploits and manipulates young boys, including Oliver Twist, into a life of pickpocketing and crime. He preys on their vulnerability and uses them for his own gain.
4.
We can add Joe Biden to that list, given his horrific activity ensuring that the child labor rackets go on, and small children are handed over to evil exploiters for their labor whether they like it or not. Biden not only has a funny connection to child sex exploitation rackets, he also seems to have one to child labor rackets. Andrea Widburg wrote about that here. This is very strange stuff for a president of the United States.
The Times also noted that White House domestic advisor, Susan Rice, understood very well that Biden administration policies of keeping unaccompanied minors inside the U.S. was what was driving the migrant surge.
In 2021, as images of children sleeping under foil blankets in overflow centers dominated the news, Susan E. Rice, the White House’s head of domestic policy, told staff members she was frustrated with the situation, according to five people who worked with her. Ms. Rice vented in a note she scribbled on a memo detailing the position of advocates, who believed a pandemic-era border closure was compelling parents to send unaccompanied children, sometimes called U.C.s.
“This is BS,” Ms. Rice wrote, according to a copy of the memo reviewed by The Times. “What is leading to ‘voluntary’ separation is our generosity to UCs!”
It's a damning follow-on report from their earlier expose on February 27, and well worth reading the whole thing because it's one outrage after another -- stories of NGOs trying to warn the government they were releasing kids into the hands of child labor rackets straight out of Upton Sinclair's 1903 bestseller, The Jungle, and going ignored if not penalized, while children were being used for cheap labor in factories, slaughterhouses, assembly lines and other places kids shouldn't be working at under any circumstances. Yeet they were and still are, often at graveyard hours, and of course, at very low wages, sometimes absent wages because the children have "debts" to pay to human traffickers. I wrote about the extent of that problem after the first NYT expose, here. This subsequent report pretty well shows that the matter is even worse.
As a coda, it's worth noting that there is a flap going on now about NBC News pulling a story about child migrant labor, which seems to be seeping into the mainstream press now that the Times has given a coast-is-clear signal to the other press. The broadcasting outlet featured a migrant named "Pedro" who claimed to be a child but wasn't a child, and he was the featured poster boy for the story about child labor exploitation. It was a lousy error, and they should have used a last name for their source, or found one who would give one, as the Times did, and the error does make the story an embarrassment. AT contributor Rajan Laad looked at that issue today here.
But it's important to note that the broad substance of the report is correct -- there are tens of thousands of children being released into the U.S. for child labor purposes by Biden administration officials, who are trying to repress any criticism of their behavior. Might that have been part of the reason NBC pulled the story instead of just left it up, errors and all, the way most news outlets normally do, especially if it involves President Trump? It's worth consideration to think that the news honchos didn't like this story at all as it cast a finger at the Bidenites, and wanted it out of there anyway. Funny how that happens to an inconvenient story like this.
Image: Screen shot from MSNBC video, via YouTube
If Marjorie Taylor Greene is accurate, what she says about Biden is mind-blowing
By Andrea Widburg
Hunter Biden’s hard drive, which he’s now conceded is legitimate, proved that Hunter was an exceptionally debauched character. Drugs and prostitutes dominated his life for a long time, and his own family didn’t trust him around teenage girls. That’s why it’s easy to believe Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s as-yet unsubstantiated claim that the Biden family was benefitting from human trafficking both in the U.S. and Eastern Europe—including Russia and Ukraine. Just because she says it doesn’t mean it’s true, so the real shock is that we live in a world in which it seems possible, even likely.
It took a strong stomach to watch the videos and view the photographs on Hunter’s hard drive. They revealed a compulsively exhibitionistic man who couldn’t stop recording himself smoking crack, sniffing cocaine, and cavorting with prostitutes, some of whom looked as if they fell into the statutory rape category. Moreover, the laptop revealed that, when Hunter requested money from his Dad (the current Oval Office occupant) to fund this debauchery, Dad paid up.
What the laptop also revealed, despite Biden’s strenuous denials, is that Joe was involved in Hunter’s many business dealings. We know this because Hunter’s staffers, business partners, and prospects were all welcomed into Joe’s vice-presidential office.
Image: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Twitter screen grab.
Now, thanks to Republican control over the House of Representatives, we’re getting an insight into the fact that all members of the Biden family may have received money from Hunter’s many business deals, including those with Ukraine and China. In March, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) reported that, in addition to the money Hunter and James Biden were pocketing through the family influence-peddling business, Hallie Biden (widow of Beau Biden and drug-addicted girlfriend of Hunter Biden) was also getting a cut.
Then, on Monday, Rep. Comer revealed that even more Bidens were on the take:
Six more members of the Biden clan may have benefitted from the family’s various business schemes, bringing the total number of kin implicated up to nine, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer revealed Monday.
The findings come after the Kentucky GOP congressman and other lawmakers on the panel examined suspicious activity reports sent by banks to the Treasury Department alerting of potential criminal activity in transactions involving President Biden’s family.
“Thousands of pages of financial records related to the Biden family, their companies, and associates’ business schemes were made available to members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, which confirm the importance of this investigation,” Comer said in a statement.
“The Biden family enterprise is centered on Joe Biden’s political career and connections, and it has generated an exorbitant amount of money for the Biden family. We’ve identified six additional members of Joe Biden’s family who may have benefited from the Biden family’s businesses that we are investigating, bringing the total number of those involved or benefiting to nine,” he said.
In a way, that’s kind of ho-hum stuff. Peter Schweizer long ago detailed the Biden family grift, all of which revolved around Biden’s political positions in the Senate and the Vice President’s office.
Yesterday, though, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (D-GA) added something unexpected to the businesses from which the Bidens profited. According to her, in addition to money coming to the Bidens from various foreign countries,
I just saw evidence of human trafficking. This involved prostitutes not only from here in the United States, but foreign countries like Russia and Ukraine. This is unbelievable that a President and a former Vice President, not only his son Hunter Biden, but many more family members extending past Hunter Biden and his immediate family.
As I noted, there is no way to know whether Greene is correctly interpreting the information the House committee is reviewing. The sad state in which America finds itself, though, is that everyone who hears this claim asks some variation of this rhetorical question: “Would that be a surprise?”
The answer, of course, is no. Given the Biden family’s rapacity, Joe’s penchant for sniffing and fondling little girls, an
d Hunter’s well-known and self-documented debauchery, it’s only too easy to believe that America’s president has enriched himself and his family through human trafficking.
Bush, Obama, Clinton Team Up with American Express to Fly Migrants into American Communities
775
LUIS ACOSTA/AFP/Rick Kern/Getty Images for Ford Motor Company
JOHN BINDER
20 Apr 2023981
3:14
A non-governmental organization (NGO) founded by former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama and backed by a litany of multinational corporations is teaming up with American Express to fly migrants into the United States.
The NGO, called Welcome.US, was initially launched to work with President Joe Biden’s administration in resettling some 85,000 Afghans across the U.S. in 2021 and 2022, as Breitbart News reported extensively at the time.
For its Afghan operation, the NGO helped fly close to 20,000 Afghans to American communities funded by millions raised from donations and supported by corporate backers like Walmart, Airbnb, the New York Times, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Starbucks, the Washington Post, Goldman Sachs, Goodwill Industries, Microsoft, and Chobani.
The NGO also has ties to billionaire George Soros, as members of his Open Society Foundation sit on the group’s “National Welcome Council.”
Now, the NGO is teaming up with the open borders group Miles4Migrants as well as American Express Global Business Travel to fund flights to American communities for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Ukraine, and Nicaragua.
“Donations are needed to fund the flights for newcomers to travel to the United States,” the initiative’s webpage states:
Those forced to flee often leave behind all but what they can carry, and the costs of international travel can be prohibitive. Welcome Connect Travel removes the cost of travel as a barrier for both sponsors in the United States and the displaced families they are supporting through humanitarian sponsorship. [Emphasis added]
With the average cost of a single flight at $1,600, public donations through our partner Miles4Migrants will help provide a lifeline to newcomers, giving them the opportunity to safely travel to their new communities. Donate below to help newcomers access safe travel. [Emphasis added]
The NGO’s flights for migrants are meant to complement a program created by President Joe Biden’s administration this year where 360,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua will be admitted to the United States annually via an expansive parole pipeline which has already helped release about a million migrants into American communities from 2021 to 2022.
During a Senate committee hearing this week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) estimated that the Biden administration has welcomed close to five million border crossers and illegal aliens to the United States since taking office in early 2021. This figure includes those released into the U.S. interior, known got-aways, and unknown got-aways.
