Buying Laborers and Storing Them, Very Progressive Behaviors That Trump's Mean Federal Immigration Cops Are Cruelly Trying to Stop
The prevailing narrative in mainstream media is that we’re currently experiencing a conflict between kindness and cruelty, the enlightened and progressive embrace of wonderful immigrants versus a xenophobic attack on a bunch of pointlessly persecuted brown people.
Mean Trump or kindness?
So spend a minute reading a remarkable indictment filed in federal court this week against the owners and managers of a chain of restaurants in Arizona and Alabama. Discussion below the PDF file, but as always, I encourage you to skip my own attempts at interpretation and explanation and instead just go look at the very thing itself:
Remember that an indictment is a set of government allegations that have to be tested in court, and all of this is just what prosecutors are claiming. All of the people who have been indicted may be completely innocent. (Court records so far show that only one defendant has a lawyer, and I’ve emailed that lawyer to ask for comment on the charges.) But the indictment alleges, on the basis of what the government says is a three-year investigation, that the owners of the restaurant decided to make more money by cutting their labor costs — after which they began buying some Mexicans and parking them in special housing for undocumented workers only, replacing American workers with trafficked labor:
The indictment alleges that undocumented workers could be forced to work long hours for sub-minimum wage pay, without overtime and without payroll taxes, through cash payments to a shell company that provided the workers:
In a separate document filed with the court, Homeland Security Investigations is asking to hold a bunch of undocumented workers in custody as material witnesses:
This affidavit names some of the apparent victims of the alleged human trafficking scheme:
So the mainstream narrative is that the mean Trump administration is being horribly cruel and bigoted to this group of people who were allegedly smuggled into the country to be forced to labor long hours for low pay under the control of human traffickers. So mean!
HSI is doing a bunch of this. Here’s another example. Note that this case also includes illegal immigrant employees who lived in housing owned by a restaurant owner. Human beings trafficked into the country to provide sub-minimum wage labor over long hours, living on the property of the person they work for: a wonderfully progressive vision. Why, mamma always said those undocumented employees sing at work all day. They’re so grateful to be cared for! These Republicans are forcing our happy laborers to leave Tara — I mean, Colt Grill — for no good reason! Governor Gavin “Pitchfork” Newsom ain’t gonna let ‘em take our laborers.
Human trafficking is kindness, and interrupting it is cruelty. At the risk of going out on a limb, our moral categories may have gotten scrambled up a bit.
Note also that local law enforcement worked on this investigation alongside federal agents, an act of cooperation discussed here:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-az/pr/owners-northern-arizona-businesses-arrested-employment-practices
In sanctuary jurisdictions like California and Los Angeles, local police and sheriff's department investigators wouldn't work on something like this, because we don't allow cooperation with federal immigration authorities. So we're so moral and progressive that we wouldn't oppose human trafficking.
To paraphrase a quip I saw on X, the current progressive view is that we should triple the minimum wage but have all the work done by illegals off the books for $5/hour.