Press Releases

Today, at a House Ed & Workforce hearing, Congressman Jim Banks grilled the Acting Secretary of the U.S. Labor Department Julie Su on the connection between the recent explosion of child labor violations, the Biden administration’s open border policies and Acting Secretary Su’s history of flouting federal immigration law enforcement.

Key quote from Rep. Banks: “The policies of this administration of opening the wide border has resulted in hundreds of thousands of migrant children entering the workforce in America to work in unsafe conditions…why didn’t you do anything about it?”

The full exchange can be seen here.

Rep. Banks asked the Acting Secretary why the Labor Department chose not to take action following a report that thousands of unaccompanied minors recently allowed into the United States were working in hazardous factories and workplace.

Rep. Banks pressed her to produce evidence of action the department has since taken taking to rectify the problem. When she cited none, he contrasted the successful immigration and border policies of the Trump administration with those of the Biden administration, under which there has been a  nearly 70 percent increase in child labor violations.

Citing the statistic that over 250,000 unaccompanied minors have been allowed into the U.S. the past two years, Rep. Banks asked Acting Secretary Su whether she agreed with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas’s statement that the illegal migrant labor crisis was primarily DOL’s responsibility to address, and, if not, whether she would commit to working with ICE to combat child labor abuses despite her obstructing ICE agents when she served as California’s State Labor Commissioner in 2017.