There are illegal migrant children working in dangerous jobs across America. The porous southern border has resulted in more than 200,000 unaccompanied minors crossing the border. Federal immigration law allows them to stay in the United States instead of being returned to their home country and their families. Now the Department of Homeland Security is investigating migrant child labor exploitation, specifically at slaughterhouses.

Earlier this week I wrote about the Biden administration launching a crackdown on the labor exploitation of illegal migrant children. The investigations will include companies benefiting from their work. The Department of Homeland Security has widened its investigation into migrant children found working in multiple slaughterhouses in multiple states for multiple companies. DHS is working with the Justice Department to determine if human smuggling schemes are involved.

How else would children from Central America, some as young as 13 years old, end up working in dangerous jobs that are legal only for American adults? The illegal migrant children use identification stolen from U.S. citizens when they are hired.

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.

Wait. The companies are not targets of the investigation? How is that possible? The reason is probably that the companies hiring migrant children to work in these places are doing so through staffing agencies that do not verify their Social Security numbers. The companies put the blame on the staffing agencies to avoid taking responsibility. Smugglers provide the children with identification and lead them to jobs.

Are migrant children working for PSSI through a human trafficking scheme? That is the question DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is investigating. The investigation has been expanded by HSI and DOJ to examine if Central American children and others are part of a scheme to smuggle minors into the United States to work in the meatpacking sector nationwide. The investigation is ongoing and stretches across multiple law enforcement field offices.

ICE refuses to comment on the ongoing investigation and HSI is not commenting, either. DOJ declines to comment. Gina Swenson, a spokesperson for PSSI denies the company has been contacted by law enforcement and has “no knowledge of any such investigation.”

“We have always taken rigorous steps to comply with the law, including use of the government’s E-verify system for new hires, extensive training for all hiring managers, multiple audits, and use of biometrics,” Swenson added.

A former PSSI manager said it is common in the meatpacking industry to look the other way when an applicant presents identification that looks false.

“In this industry you have a lot of people who are undocumented workers. A lot of times it’s because they’re not going to pay well enough to hire people in America who want to do it,” said the former manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“You can look at the ID and tell the person on the ID is not even close to the person standing in front of you,” the manager said.

Swenson denies the former manager’s claims.

“This is categorically false — period,” she said. “We have been crystal clear that we do not want a single person under the age of 18 working for the company. We have trained and retrained our hiring employees on how to actively spot identity theft — as part of our extensive efforts to enforce this absolute prohibition against employing anyone under the age of 18.”

All of this is entirely predictable. Biden’s border crisis is creating a humanitarian crisis of an epic level. Human smuggling and drug trafficking are thriving businesses along the border. Human exploitation is rampant. Children are sent here and are expected to pay human smugglers thousands of dollars. Sometimes the sponsors in the United States that accept responsibility for migrant children demand money from them. Obviously, they are being put to work to make that money, as well as juggling going to school with work. The crisis at the border has been going on for almost three years. The Biden administration is slow to move on any crisis, especially the one at the southern border. Meanwhile, we have 13-year-old children working in slaughterhouses. It’s straight out of a Dickens novel. It’s Biden’s America.